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

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It's really interesting that the male character, Hippolytos, is the one taking on this role of being in love with chastity. No modern interpreter has better understood Herakles’ role in his culture, or has offered a more striking rendition of the enduring problem of fame.

These plays spit in the eye of anyone who claims, "It all worked out for the best," or "There's a reason for everything. What’s it like to wear an eternal Olympian overall” appears on the verso side; “held up by the burning straps of” on the recto side; then, on the next set of pages, a handwritten question—“mortal shortfall? Some might accuse her of taking gross liberties with the text, yet what she sacrifices in word for word renderings she more than makes up for by capturing the pacing, substance, and tone of the original.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.

lots of people claim to ‘love the translation’ of a text of which they don't speak the original language and I'm always feeling stupid and wondering, like, if you don’t speak the original how can you judge the translation?His plays were shockers: he unmasked heroes, revealing them as foolish and savage, and he wrote about the powerless—women and children, slaves and barbarians—for whom tragedy was not so much exceptional as unending. Whereas Seaford’s version is typical of what we have to come expect from a translation of an ancient text into English, Carson’s rendition with her succinct, colloquial, flippant sentences are what readers have come to expect from her translations and poetry. One can see from the titles here that Carson is committed to more accurate English transliterations of Greek names rather than the usual Latinized ones. These plays were the rock concerts of their era, staged not by candlelight inside small rooms but in grand theatres in the bright light of day before some ten thousand people.

A fun tidbit from my Greek Tragedy teacher, who is in love with Greek double meanings: Hippolytus derives from 'horses' and the verb λυω or 'luo', which can mean either 'to release' or 'to destroy'; it is also ambiguous whether 'hippos' is the subject or the object. A facsimile of Carson’s own personal playbook, “H of H” is a performance of thought, one that speaks not only to the heroic past but to the tragic present. 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 I think the primary theme between these two plays is that clarity in grief exists for everyone, be it through friends, or through drastic changes brought on by oneself. But it is also because her work is unfailingly emotionally astute, the references, like those overalls, resonant rather than arbitrary.

Plays like “Herakles” allow you to exercise rage without having to kill and to experience grief without losing those you love; such performances “may cleanse you of your darkness,” Carson argues. Here is a new comic-book version of Euripides’s classic The Trojan Women, which follows the fates of Hekabe, Andromache, and Kassandra after Troy has been sacked and all its men killed. lastly, the cry of alkestis’ son as he watches his mother die before him: look at me, look at my eyes, at my hands reaching out! Hekabe is another fantastic play where a character who is guilty of nothing (at least completely innocent, up until the end of the play) is brought low by forces beyond their control.