Wagner and the Greeks? Yes! Like so many of his era, Wagner admired the Greeks, their myths, and their dramas. Lee, who first pointed this out in a lecture to the Wagner Society in Toronto in 1984, used that lecture as a basis for the book which he expanded to create a verbal picture about the subject. Like all his books about Wagner, and about opera, he produced in Athena Sings an eminently readable, and very informative book.

To Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher, Wagner was "Aeschylus come alive again." Like the first of the great ancient Greek writers, Wagner was an innovator. Aeschylus (525-456 B.C.) presented his plays in trilogies followed by a satyr drama (a low comedy). . . .

Avid readers often read novels by authors whose native tongue is not English. Their books are translated. How well they are translated is something that will make or break a book in its foreign sales. Readers, who frequent this site, may have noted my dismay with the translation of Nobel Prize winner, Günter Grass' book, Too Far Afield. Even the title failed to capture the meaning of the original German, Ein weites Feld (A broad subject). It continued to fail throughout to capture the story in its true essence, perhaps in part because the translator admitted that certain idioms in the German language were unfamiliar and so had to be ferried out from a German source (which in itself is a mistake, as far as I am concern).

Novelist and Professor of Semiotics, University of Bologna, Umberto Eco presented three lectures on the subject of translation at the University of Toronto in 1998. These have now been issued in a small volume by the University of Toronto Press called Experiences in Translation. It gives insight into the process of translation, and the various routes that translators can take in tackling their difficult project. . . .

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