L’Agamennone nell’interpretazione di Humboldt: per un’ermeneutica del traducibile e dell’intraducibile,

With the Oresteia, the only remaining trilogy of the Greek theater, Aeschylus shows that the tragedy does not revolve around the deeds of an individual character, but on the destiny looming over an entire lineage, unwrapping over many generations: the drama, therefore, doesn’t have a man as its focus, but an entire people. Discussing the German translation of the first tragedy of the Oresteia, the Agamemnon, Humboldt found stylistic elements showing that Aeschylus is the most theatrical among the Greek tragedians, among other reasons, because of the non verbal elements left on stage as a warning and metaphor. While meditating on the meaning of the idea of people, within a nearly-20th-century framework of meanings, he showed that a translation (of a text, of an historical account, or of a fiction) is not just a linguistic problem – which is in this context the excuse for a philosophical investigation –, but it is an eminently hermeneutic problem, which Humboldt appears to solve with a contemporary theoretical action.