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

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it is Well-Documented that alcestis is weird as hell because it was in the performance place of/was perhaps supposed to be but is very clearly not a satyr play (why? Violence occurs; through violence we are intimate with some characters onstage in an exorbitant way for a brief time; that’s all it is.

In her poem “Clive Song,” the underworld that is Guantánamo Bay seems to have its own pitiless Hades and bureaucratic Cerberus. 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. Therefore, all the characters take the form of animals (except Kassandra, whose mind is in another world). Instead of actors on a stage, we have Bruno’s dogs and cows (the captive Trojan women), a surging sea (Poseidon), a pair of overalls (Athena), a poplar and sapling (Hektor’s wife Andromache and their son Astyanax), Helen alternately as a silver fox and a hand mirror, and Menelaos as “some sort of gearbox clutch or coupling mechanism.But the humor doesn’t come through that forcefully in the original Greek for me and other translations don’t punch up the funny like she does. 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. One of the awkward parts of reviewing collections like this is that each play's quality is independent of the other, so I can really only judge this collection on what is actually contained, and the translation work done. Bruno’s monochromatic drawings depict characters as animals and everyday objects, accompanied by a weary chorus of dogs and cows. A sample from her translations of tragedian demonstrates how Carson makes their sentences conform to her own tendency towards candid, unambiguous and humorous language.

And in for the most part, Herakles really is guilty of nothing and did not ask to be born a demigod with powerful enemies. This collaborative, experimental adaptation of Euripides’ antiwar tragedy is the first graphic work from the venerable New Directions, which has long published the celebrated, idiosyncratic [Anne] Carson…. 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.

writing about the Trojan War (and dying civilizations) was probably pretty easy for euripides as, through the whole of his life, Greece was engaged in the Peloponnesian War.

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 Rather than regarding this silence as an obstacle, she uses it to her advantage in The Bakkhai; by leaving it untranslated, the furtive nature of a multifaceted god is heightened within her text.A piece Carson wrote for the Cahier series entitled Nay Rather helps to explain her choice not to translate daimon. They read quickly and I was entertained throughout - as much as one reading about infanticide and suicide can be entertained, of course. Hecuba’s children were killed and she was betrayed by her friend, but she was able to deliver fulfilling revenge on the man who betrayed her.

S. Eliot Prize for Poetry; Economy of the Unlost; Autobiography of Red, shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the T. We are not even sure whether women, who were famously cloistered in their homes and played no political role in Athens, were permitted in the theater of Dionysus when the great tragedies and comedies were performed there. But let's say you're determined to take over this country- then allow us to go into exile, 210 You should beware of violence you know, the wind may change. The fate of his family, the ones still alive, back in Yemen and the fate of the bridal couple, still alive, whose wedding was the target of the drone pilot (a mistake).Carson is writing not only about the persistence of violence but about the possibility of redemption, and in this respect “H of H” isn’t just a playbook for the past. Like Herakles, Theseus has both divine and mortal parentage, and he argues that just as the gods transgress against one another, so, too, do they transgress against humanity—but just as the gods are allowed to live despite those transgressions, so should demigods and humans be allowed to live even if they sin. Too often, modernizations like these can seem gimmicky—reflexive attempts to make old plays relevant to new audiences.