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

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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. 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). we are a populace with our heads up our asses with the vague notion that our government is at war, that our government is quite engaged in torture and thuggery and the indiscriminate raining down of bombs, etc. 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. 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.

read two of the plays over thanksgiving, just read the last two on the flight home for winter break. To convey word for word and to convey the spirit are two different aims; to do both is difficult, nigh-impossible for some texts. Many people thought that his labors were punishment for his crimes, feats of strength by which the fallen hero could propitiate the gods; others claimed the labors preceded the massacre, suggesting that violence always begets violence. Herakles is on point, Hekabe is perfectly drawn, Hippolytus stumbles a bit, and Alkestis (the only one I was unfamiliar with) was the strangest mix of comedy about tragedy I've ever encountered, in it, Euripides really lets it rip, making everybody, even Apollo, look like fools.Anne Carson and Euripides keep things moving at a brisk pace here through all four plays even when the plot is at its most absurd. Carson lived in Montreal for several years and taught at McGill University, the University of Michigan, and at Princeton University from 1980 to 1987. Herakles has left them alone, vulnerable to the whims of the new king of Thebes, Lykos, who has sentenced the hero’s family to death. She takes Euripides' verses and turns them into English that is highly readable while remaining faithful to the spirit of the original Greek.

Even the infamous Helen, a shape-shifter who appears as a silver fox and a mirror, must defend her life to her husband, the king Menelaos, after Hekabe wants her ‘sentenced to death out of her own mouth’ for her apparent complicity in the downfall of Troy…. I wouldn’t have believed these images would work if I hadn’t seen them interacting with Carson’s swift, bold communication of Euripides’s words and spirit. The Vielmetter gallery in Los Angeles is currently hosting a solo exhibition of paintings by Celia Paul, artist and author of the New York Review Books memoirs Self-Portrait and Letters to Gwen John. A family rescued only to be ruined, a hero resurrected only to threaten suicide: “Herakles” hinges on such reversals of fate. Rather than giving us solutions that resolve the plot or wrap things up toward happiness, Euripides gives us advice about how to bear our grief.The issue of such a union can take a reader's breath away because it just seems so right--a work that stands firmly on its own but is somehow contented to be the sum of its parts. 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. 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.