Murder at Jagged Rock: A Tragedy by Sophocles

About Keyne Cheshire

Keyne Cheshire is Associate Professor and Chair of Classics at Davidson College, N.C., and translator of Ancient Greek poetry and prose. Cheshire is also the author of Alexander the Great (Cambridge University Press), a translation of select ancient source material for the student. He has received Harvard’s Loeb Classical Library Foundation grant and the Hunter-Hamilton Love of Teaching Award. Currently, Cheshire is translating Aristophanes’ Birds and Homer’s Iliad.

Praise for Murder at Jagged Rock: A Tragedy by Sophocles

I was first shocked, then moved and delighted by Keyne Cheshire’s translation of Sophocles’ Trachinian Women into an American vernacular and Wild West setting. Its clear, simple, yet poetic and rhythmical speeches propel the reader forward and deeper into Sophocles’ tragedy, while the choral odes give voice to lastingly powerful feelings of hope and fear, spiritual exultation and earth-bound sadness and pain. A beautiful and very disturbing play, whether in Athens or America, it is well re-created here as a modern-day script just begging to be performed.
—Kenneth J. Reckford, Kenan Professor of Classics, Emeritus, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

That the Greeks and their gods were the cowboys of their era seems wholly right in this marvelous new translation by Keyne Cheshire, a righteous blend of learning, literature, and frontier justice. Behold, Hercules, thus exposed—the details of his downfall stomped in the dust and sung about. As Sophocles teaches us, and Cheshire gets right, “Ain’t no use to try and hide the facts,” because the facts will out, and with them our hubris.
—Alan Michael Parker, Douglas Houchens Professor of English, Davidson College

Cheshire has set Women of Trachis deep in the territory of American myth—the Wild West. With its harsh landscapes and larger-than-life heroes, it is a world both familiar and distant, a world that still resonates within the American psyche. Some say poetry in translation can’t ever capture the music and rhyme scheme of the original, much less its meaning. But Cheshire’s transposition shows us what can be found. Imagine Sophocles as an American storyteller using the stylized cowboy lingo of that realm to convey elemental feelings of love and loss. For all of us who love a good yarn, the grandeur and the grit of the Wild West are sure to strike close to the bone.
—Barbara Goldberg, International Editions Series Editor, From the Introduction