Who's the best translator of the Greek tragedies? Is Lattimore

Lattimore didn't translate all the tragedies in his U of Chicago project, in fact, he only translated a few plays with Grene, while including other modern translations for the rest; he served as a chief editor with Grene on all of them during it's commission.

They're pretty great and is the best corpus translation out there in English. There's a bunch of older translations of some plays which are more elegiac in style though. Keep in-mind UoC probably made him keep the style more simplistic, as the whole concept of translating all of the plays was pretty new at it's time seeing some (like of them weren't considered interesting enough to bother translating, and that the whole goal of it was to do a modern / updated translation for then- classical and drama students and other readers to relate to while being published and consistently editted by the same team to make for easy commercial access.

>Not reading them in greek
Come on dude

I'm afraid there is no Rodney Merrill or Richard Lattimore of Greek tragedy. Lattimore's translations are pretty good, but no as good as his Homer, and I really, really wish Rodney Merrill would do some tragedy translations.

They're still worth reading, very fine literature, but if you compare them to the original Greek, all translations of tragedy fall very short. The same goes for the Greek poets. Some philosophers also just don't have translations nearly as good as the originals, such as Heraclitus and Paremenides. I think top notch translation could be done for all these, they just haven't been done yet.