After translating Sophocles' Electra, I was almost unconsciously led to translate the eponymous play by Euripides - and possibly the next step will be translating the thematic Oresteia of Aeschylus.

Regarding my overall thoughts on the translation of tragic texts, I have nothing to add to what I had written in the "Brief Prolegomena" of the translation of Sophocles' Electra (Smili 2022). I would only like to point out - in light of the fact that the myth of Euripides' Electra served as the thematic core for both Sophocles' eponymous Electra and Aeschylus' Choephori - that while today's audience may find this lack of "originality" strange, I would like to remind that the notion of originality in classical times is entirely incompatible with our own.

This – contrary to the reaction of the audience – is a joy for the translator to discover beneath the deceptive similarity of the surface how the personal stamp of the great poets radically differentiates a typically similar "story." As for the differences among the three thematically related tragedies, much has been written by very important scholars, and I have nothing new to add except to say that while translating the two Electras, I "experienced" line by line the great differences that arise from the different handling of the theme by their ingenious creators – differences that until then I had simply "read."

My gain increased when I included Aeschylus' Choephori in the frame, with which Euripides' Electra "converses" more than with Sophocles' eponymous tragedy. And all this without forgetting, on one hand, the painful loss of the pronunciation of 5th-century Athenians, which threatens to transform the living speech of the acting characters into a written text, and on the other hand, the additional loss of the melody of the choral odes, which threatens to transform the song meant for dancing into a poem for reading.