Medea's lament

Having read the Verducci last, I found myself moved by Medea's calling out for Jason's mercy and return.  The prose was so beautifully written and so seamlessly moved Medea from a scorned woman set on vengeance to a wounded and forlorn mate longing for another chance. 

 "Let her smile. Let my vices furnish her joy....no enemy to Medea lives unavenged...but if there is any hope that prayers can touch a heart of steel, listen now to what I say, to words far more than matched by what I can dare...I do not hesitate to cast myself at your feet." (170-187)

There is this kinetic energy that moves the final stanzas and moves us full circle back into Medea again enraged. "Rage is at pains to deliver its monstrous message. Where rage leads me, I shall go."(210) It is at the very end of this that I find the interesting distinction between the two translations.  The Verducci: "But leave that to the God who even now pilots my heart.

My mind labors, it is clear, toward some obscure enormity." (212)

The Showerman on the other hand is full of rage and fury. Medea's cries for her husband are impassioned, but they seem to stem from a place of anger, where Verducci's seem to stem from a place of sadness.  And the end, Showerman's final lines: Be that the concern of the god who embroils my heart! Something portentous surely, is working in my soul!" 

There is a reconciliation in Verducci's that's not present in Showerman's. And that variation in tone changes the very way that we view the character.  

Note: I'm not sure this post is indicative of anything in particular other than a reaction I had to the piece.