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

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This collaboration between the visual artist Rosanna Bruno and the poet and classicist Anne Carson attempts to give a genuine representation of how human beings are affected by warfare. UPDATED COMMENTARY: I have actually been in a Greek Tragedy class now and read fifteen greek plays (a long review can be found here), so I feel more qualified to talk about this now. At the sight of him she is instantly incinerated and Zeus puts the fetus in his thigh to finish gestating, from which appendage of his father Dionysus is eventually born. Broke the mares of Diomedes, bridling their bloody jaws, their murder meals, their man-eating joy- their tables of evil.

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. Amphitryon’s sixty lines of woe are followed by another twenty-five or so from his daughter-in-law, Megara. From them came Kreon, ruler of this land and father of Megara- wedding songs rang out when Herakles led her to my home as his bride.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. 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. The old heroes killed monsters, but we use monsters to kill, like the drones in her prose poem “Fate, Federal Court, Moon,” which memorializes the murder of a Yemeni engineer’s family. I also loved that, although the plays were focused on misery and grief, there were always moments when someone was reaching out a hand.

The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. By abandoning Euripides’ original words and syntax, and indeed the task of literary translation itself, Carson lays bare the central emotion of the women in the play and forces us to feel in our very nerve endings what it is like to be abandoned. This event will be online only, live-streamed on the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama (APGRD) YouTube channel. Not sure but they are a nicely representative sampling of Euripides’ corpus of 19 plays (17 if you eliminate Cyclops and Rhesus, the authenticity of which many scholars have long doubted).Of course, I haven't read the original Greek versions, so I can't say this definitively, but I feel Carson's presence here, in the phrasings and elements of wordplay.