This totally makes sense given the translator's intention in compiling these together, but as a new reader to Euripides, it would have been nice to have more context. But books can seem like anachronisms to us, too, in the age of e-readers and smartphones, when information is immediate and ethereal and pleasure so often lacks a body of any kind. Together, Iris and Lyssa drive Herakles mad, prompting him to kill the family he has just protected. hekabe was my favourite because i think carson is at her strongest when translating female rage and vengeance, she excels when tasked with putting into words emotions that are simply too big, too messy to be easily translated. Death arrives in many more forms in this version of the myth—not only fire and swords but also melting glaciers and nuclear catastrophes.

Two interesting characters that also make an appearance in the play and whose presence lends to the mystery of its interpretation are the seer Tiresias and Pentheus’s grandfather, Kadmos. So I-left in the house here to care for the children, along with their mother, when my son went underground- I've set us up at the altar of Zeus Savior, built by my son to mark his victory over the Minyans. But he also wears overalls because the present and the past intermingle freely here; the ancient hero steals a Corvette, misquotes Percy Bysshe Shelley, and uses a G. While the Greek word theos is commonly used to describe the appearance of a god in person, in this play it is fitting that Euripides often refers to Dionysus as a daimon, a much more nebulous word to define or translate. I am come, the son of Zeus, to this Theban land, Dionysos, to whom the daughter of Kadmos once gave birth, Semele, midwived by lightning-borne fire.

S. Eliot Prize, Plainwater: Essays and Poetry, and Glass, Irony and God, shortlisted for the Forward Prize. I used to own Thebes, where dragons' teeth sprang out of the earth like ears of corn and lived as men. And while Hippolytos himself is flawed given his obsessive abstinence, it would be hard not to see Phaidra as the heroine, who struggles between what she knows is best for everyone, and what she wants most of all. The drama presents the god Dionysos arriving in Thebes disguised as a mortal to establish his cult in that city and exact a brutal punishment on his cousin, King Pentheus, who denies the existence of the god. 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.

Carson (with background in classical languages, comparative literature, anthropology, history, and commercial art) blends ideas and themes from many fields in her writing. And in for the most part, Herakles really is guilty of nothing and did not ask to be born a demigod with powerful enemies. Such is the story of war and genocide throughout history, and in Carson and Bruno’s expert hands, it strikes as powerfully contemporary. His divinity is draped over him protectively but not entirely, a provocation reminding us that the problem of Herakles is the same as the central problem of Christology: Is he fully man, fully divine, or fully both? This collection has four of his tragedies, all of which are pretty fantastic, though maybe not as great as Medea.and how even back then that weirdness was felt, and so you would just play in strange clashing ways with certain details of this huge megatext—compare what Euripides is doing with Heracles in Heracles and in Alcestis—but whatever. E. Housman's "Fragment of A Greek Tragedy," a hilarious parody of a brutally literal translation of a segment of a hypothetical Greek tragedy. Carson’s style and language seems more suited to sustaining the attention of a 21 st century audience—her version was staged at the Almeida Theatre in London in 2015 to great praise—trying to quickly grasp the background of this myth.

Phaedra, daughter to Pasiphae, is in love with the impossible and impossibly ashamed; Theseus, son of Aegeus, takes on his stubbornness. is nothing less than brilliant--unfalteringly sharp in diction, audacious and judicious in taking liberties. 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.Admetos loves his wife and yet is okay to watch her die for him: either way, however, he gets her back. In art and literature he is sometimes depicted as an effeminate young man, but he is more commonly portrayed like the other male Olympian gods, with a beard, and only stands out because he is holding his thyrsos—a stalk of fennel with a pinecone on the end. Her books include Antigonick, Nox, Decreation, The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos, winner of the T. For we have lost our greatest friend” becomes, on an otherwise blank page, as if the entire myth had vanished, “We go in grief. 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.