The art of Sophokles stands as one of the high points in the history of Western Civilization. Born at the start of the 5th century B.C., his life spans the whole of that amazing century known as the Golden Age of Athens, in which the arts of drama, poetry, sculpture, architecture and philosophy reached meteoric heights. Sophokles' contribution was to show human beings at the peak of their form as thinking, feeling, and sentient members of the race. His subject is always the mind, but the inner spark of divinity as well, the daimon that propels humans into heroic actions that beat at the gates of the gods.
Carl R. Mueller has since 1967 been professor in the Department of Theater at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he ahs taught theater history, criticism, dramatic literature, and playwriting, as well as having directed. He was educated at Northwestern University, where he received a B.S. in English. After work in graduate English at the University of California, Berkeley, he received his M.A. in playwriting at UCLA, where he also completed his Ph.D. in theater history and criticism. In addition, he was a Fulbright Scholar in Berlin in 1960-1961. A translator for more than forty years, he has translated and published works by Büchner, Brecht, Wedekind, Hauptmann, Hofmannsthal, and Hebbel, to name a few. His published translation of von Horváth's Tales from the Vienna Woods was given its London West End premiere in July 1999. For Smith and Kraus, he has translated volumes of plays by Schnitzler, Strindberg, Pirandello, Kleist, and Wedekind, as well as Goethe's Faust, Parts I and II. In addition to translating the complete plays of Euripides and Aeschylus for Smith and Kraus, he has also co-translated the plays of Sophokles. His translations have been performed in every English-speaking country and have appeared on BBC-TV.
Anna Krajewska-Wieczorek was born and educated in Poland where she received her M.A. in Classical Philology, and her Ph.D. in Theater History from the University of Warsaw. She taught at Jagiellonian University in Krakow and in the School of Performing Arts in Warsaw. She has published numerous essays and theater reviews in Poland, the United States, England, Greece and Spain, and worked as a dramaturg and translator of many Greek and European classics. Her research focus is on various aspects of the staging of Greek tragedy, with particular emphasis on the performance of the Greek Tragic Chorus. Her research papers have been presented at many international conferences on theater and drama, among them those at Delphi, Krakow, Salamanca, Montreal, and Istanbul. She also served as a juror for the International Theater Competition at the Alexander S. Onassis Foundation in Athens, Greece. She is currently as Associate Professor in the Department of Theater at UCLA, where she has taught Theater History, Theater Aesthetics, Dramaturgy, Polish and European Theater, and Shakespeare in Performance since 1988.
