Grief Lessons: Four Plays: Four Plays By Euripi (New York Review Books (Paperback))

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In that regard, Carson does a fantastic job with these plays and has cemented herself in my opinion as the finest translator since Robert Fagles.

Laid low the wild mountain centaurs 360 with arrows of blood, arrows like wings-those monsters known to the long barren fields, to the river, to the farms, to the grasslands where they filled their hands with pine branches and rode Thessaly down. They are Herakles, in which the hero swaggers home to destroy his own family; Hekabe, set after the Trojan War, in which Hektor’s widow takes vengeance on her Greek captors; Hippolytos, about love and the horror of love; and the strange tragic-comedy fable Alkestis, which tells of a husband who arranges for his wife to die in his place.

read two of the plays over thanksgiving, just read the last two on the flight home for winter break.

Euripides, the last of the three great tragedians of ancient Athens, reached the height of his renown during the disastrous Peloponnesian War, when democratic Athens was brought down by its own outsized ambitions.i keep on thinking about how weird it is, what an accident of history, that these works are foundational to the western tradition but also only some of them, really. The drama presents the god Dionysos arriving in Thebes disguised as a mortal to establish his cult in that city and exact a brutal punishment on his cousin, King Pentheus, who denies the existence of the god. Go to where the centaurs live, ask them- those monsters on four legs-ask what man they judge the bravest: they'll say my son! So I-left in the house here to care for the children, along with their mother, when my son went underground- I've set us up at the altar of Zeus Savior, built by my son to mark his victory over the Minyans. Families live or die depending on the whims of far-off figures who press buttons or pass laws or give refuge or don’t; our wars, however distant, follow us home, in the form of madness or redress or revenge.

Euripides' plays rarely won first prize in the great democratic competitions of ancient Athens, but their combustible mixture of realism and extremism fascinated audiences throughout the Greek world. Whatever “H of H” might mean—it isn’t clear—the book is really “H of C,” “Herakles of Carson,” a version that only this one bizarre and brilliant brain could produce. I would honestly never seek out and spend a good few hours reading greek plays, but Anne Carson does such a wonderful job with translating the works, that it felt like I was reading modern poetry (also so many lines I saw on Pinterest). Violence occurs; through violence we are intimate with some characters onstage in an exorbitant way for a brief time; that’s all it is. There is a theory that watching unbearable stories about other people lost in grief and rage is good for you--may cleanse you of your darkness.A piece Carson wrote for the Cahier series entitled Nay Rather helps to explain her choice not to translate daimon. Then Iris, a messenger of the gods, and Lyssa, the goddess of madness, appear, supposedly at the behest of Hera, Zeus’ wife, who is still sore at her husband over the affair that produced Herakles.

Carson and Bruno eschew realism for the imaginative world-building and flexible visual articulation of comics: Hekabe, the queen of Troy, is an ‘old sled dog’; the Chorus comprises cows and dogs; and Athene is a pair of overalls. the divided house ultimately comes together again, heracles can carouse for only so long, heracles must end up doing what he does best, being a hero of some kind, whatever the cost, being heracles. Carson argues in this essay that a type of “metaphysical silence” occurs when it is impossible to translate a word directly from one language to another: “Metaphysical silence happens inside words themselves. I see here by the house the home of my thunderbolt-struck mother and the ruins of the house smouldering with the still-living flame of Zeus, Hera’s immortal outrage against my mother.But the one who aims a bow- world's best weapon-can shoot a thousand arrows 190 and still have some to save his life. So it’s a joy to come across a mistress of the art taking rumbustious pleasure in revisiting the matter of poetry itself. That engineer, Faisal bin Ali Jaber, lost a nephew and a brother-in-law to a drone strike, and Carson unleashes an avalanche of grief and anger that suffocates any attempt at moral evasion. When Theseus finally arrives, he sounds alternately like Harold Bloom and Andy Warhol, quoting Melville on the sperm whale and then trying to convince Herakles that his penance can take the form of a lion-print T-shirt: “You wear it, you shoot yourself, I sell it, say Sotheby’s, bullet hole and all.