Ksenofoobsed hoiakud Euripidese “Medeias” ja nende vahendamine Baltimaade Medeiaretseptsioonis
Xenophobic attitudes in Euripides' “Medea” and their interpretation in Baltic Medea-plays

Summary/Abstract: The article examines the xenophobic attitudes voiced in one of Euripides' most famous tragedies “Medea”, revealing mainly through lexical analysis how fear or anger towards the “other” perceived as foreign, unknown or even dangerous is expressed both in Euripides's original play and its translations and interpretations. In order to study the mediation of xenophobic ideas in the Baltic reception of Euripides' “Medea”, we selected those Medea-themed plays conveyed into the Baltic national languages in the genre of tragedy, and which have either already been staged or are suitable for the stage in their form. The analyzed material includes the tragedies of Euripides, Seneca, Franz Grillparzer, Jean Anouilh, Christa Wolf and Lyudmila Razumovskaya. The research part of the article is divided into three chapters devoted to different versions of “Medea” in Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian. Research results show that in Medea tragedies in the Baltic cultural space, Euripides' ideological construction is almost never fully recreated: shifts in meaning occur both through lexical substitutions and as a result of omissions. However, the reasons for the changes are very different: behind them may be the need to make the piece more audience-friendly, to adapt the content to quantitative versification, and to fit the original theme into a modern context. The agency of these changes is different as well: transformations are made by interpreters, translators, editors and/or theater-makers.

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