Written in the fifth century B.C., Sophocles' tragedy concerns the shame and death of Ajax, a Greek who had won fame for his prodigious strength in the Trojan War. A brutal farewell to the valor and values of the heroic world, the play moves through a series of reversals: old allies become enemies, honor becomes disgrace, and divine power becomes temporal authority. Formally terse, this translation conveys the force and urgency of Sophocles' Greek. Indeed, as John Tipton suggests in his afterword, the tragedy has renewed relevance for our times: " Ajax demands our attention, not only for its clear-eyed account of the bitter aftermath of victory but also for its treatment of unscrupulous politics." ". . . everywhere in this translation there is the sense that Tipton, surely, in part, because of the unique formal constraints he has placed upon himself, has looked closely into rather than simply at Sophocles' Greek, has locked eyebrows with the old Aegean dramatist."―Stanley Lombardo, from the foreword "Tipton's language is spare yet dense, colloquial yet somehow foreign . . . At his best, Tipton is able to break down the Greek text and rewrite it as if from scratch―digging up and reconstructing the force behind abstractions and alien idioms . . . Tipton's version has a chilling power that derives partly from its infidelity to Sophocles. His Odysseus creates a strange, alienating distance between the observer (not himself, but that impersonal 'you') and the observed―shadowy human life."―Emily Wilson, The Nation "Tipton's Ajax revels in this slaughter without offering the recompenses of Sophocles' poetry or humanity. As brutal as Sophocles' world was, Tipton's is one step more hastily ferocious . . . If Tipton's world has a touch of the post-apocalyptic, it is perhaps because it combines the most terrifying elements of the mythical and modern. There are not only vengeful gods and naysaying prophets in Tipton's Ajax but also loaded guns and atomic bombs."―Sarah Nooter, University of Chicago, Bryn Mawr Classical Review "Tipton takes the colloquial directness of Robert Fagles and the blunt eroticism of Anne Carson to the breaking point in this experimental translation of one the stranger and more unyielding works by one of Western civilization's founding dramatists. Tipton's opening dialogue between Athena and Odysseus astonishes, and his treatment of the chorus ventures into the territory of the Ontological-Hysteric Theatre . . ."― Publishers Weekly Formally terse, this translation conveys the force and urgency of Sophocles' Greek. Indeed, as Tipton suggests in his afterword, the tragedy has renewed relevance for our times: "Ajax demands our attention, not only for its clear-eyed account of the bitter aftermath of victory but also for its treatment of unscrupulous politics." "...everywhere in this translation there is the sense that Tipton, surely, in part, because of the unique formal constraints he has placed upon himself, has looked closely into rather than simply at Sophocles' Greek, has locked eyebrows with the old Aegean dramatist." - Stanley Lombardo, from the Foreword "...everywhere in this translation there is the sense that Tipton, surely, in part, because of the unique formal constraints he has placed upon himself, has looked closely into rather than simply at Sophocles' Greek, has locked eyebrows with the old Aegean dramatist." - Stanley Lombardo, from the Foreword John Tipton was born in 1964 in Alton, Illinois. After an itinerant childhood―mostly in Indiana―and a stint in the army, he attended the University of Chicago, where he earned a degree in philosophy. He is the author of two poetry collections published by Flood Editions, Surfaces (2004) and Paramnesia (2016), as well as two translations of Greek tragedies: Sophocles' Ajax (2008) and Aeschylus's Seven against Thebes (2015), also published by Flood. He is the publisher of Verge Books, a small literary press he runs with Peter O'Leary. Since 1990 he has called Chicago home. Used Book in Good Condition