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

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This might explain why I'm filled with extra rage after watching a banal "we're okay, you're okay, la la la" American movie. 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.

The ancient Greek playwright and Athenian wrote Bakkhai in the last few years of his life in Macedonia, where he had fled after becoming disillusioned with his native city-state. 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.Another play where it's the gods who cause suffering, not other people, perhaps to illustrate the random misfortune of reality. Hope is not a solitary virtue, and the two of them head toward a new life as a pair, leaving the bodies of the dead behind for Amphitryon to bury, and leaving madness behind as well. 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. Therefore, all the characters take the form of animals (except Kassandra, whose mind is in another world).

the essays and prefaces were 5 stars across the board and then weirdly the plays lost a lot of their bite for me? 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. the plays are all weird and great and not just because of the anne carson translations, i think (also tbh i think her prefaces for each play might be better than the executions of the plays themselves—it's okay anne carson you are still the love of my life—). It lends the scene a dash of the unexpected element—appropriate for a play about a bewildering god; yet the extreme humor seems out of place for a play that ends with a horrible decapitation. It is that ability to act, however constrained and imperfect our actions may be, which makes us interesting and unpredictable.MEGARA Old man-you who once demolished the Taphians' city, you who commanded an army for Thebes- 60 nothing the gods do makes sense! Carson is also a classics scholar, the translator of If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, and the author of Eros the Bittersweet.

there is little sense of ‘the end’ in american life – our playwrights are not writing plays such as Hekabe and our artists are not painting george grosz’s eyeless, armless, legless men…* the fallen nation-state of Troy, on the other hand, has been suddenly transformed into a moral blackhole: meaning has been sucked from anything and everything; the family unit has been destroyed; kings and queens are now prisoners, slaves, or defiled corpses; the very definition of morality has been irrevocably altered or erased and at the end of Hekabe our ‘heroine’ leaves the play with the knowledge that she will soon be transformed into the form of a mangy dog. Seeing “the ground covered in corpses” and learning, from Amphitryon, that Herakles is responsible, he concludes, “This agony comes from Hera.The afterword is going to haunt me forever and ever, as Phaedra has since I first read her written by Racine.

Phaidra, who cannot help her attraction; Phaidra, who cannot help but feel shame; Phaidra, who cannot help but be who she is and try as she may, loses the most in this play. Person of the week in every Greek opinion poll,” Disney’s Motown-style muses sing, capturing the contemporary image of the mythical figure. The independent press New Directions published that beautiful volume and this new one; Knopf published “Float,” a collection of loose chapbooks drifting in an aquarium-like case. 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. What I love even more is her commitment to the transliteration of mournful cries that occur so frequently in these four plays.You and I will die, old man, and Herakles' little fledglings- 70 like a bird I cover them with my wings. This is partly because, unusually, the flow of time in her writing feels bidirectional; it is not clear if old heroes are being swept into the present, if current readers are being swept into the past, or if all of us are simply aswirl in time together. Carson's essay on tragedy, and Euripides's open letter on why he wrote two plays about Phaidra are both fine additions to these four plays, and help round out what is presented.