Do3 - The Burgess Œdipus

[french frank]

This Sunday, the day after the centenary of Anthony Burgess's birth, Radio 3 will broadcast what it claims ('claims' because some clever clogs will dispell it as a myth ) the first performance in this country of Burgess's version of Sophocles.

Christopher Eccleston as Œdipus and Fiona Shaw as Tiresias.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08g4cly

[aeolium]

I'm not really sure what to make of Burgess the translator & will be interested to hear this. I quite enjoyed his translation of Cyrano de Bergerac as used in the Depardieu film, though perhaps a purist would have hated it. Apparently he was something of a polymath of languages, being fluent in Malay and on record as having translated The Waste Land into Persian. I think his last manifestation on R3 was his play Napoleon Rising, which I thought was pretty disastrous.

One translation of Sophocles' Oedipus I would like to hear done on R3 is that by Yeats - it's always interesting to see the work of one extraordinary writer filtered through the mind of another.