Will be a useful reference and likely yearly re-read.

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.

In that regard, Carson does a fantastic job with these plays and has cemented herself in my opinion as the finest translator since Robert Fagles. Her word choice is simple, but raw and powerful, especially in Herakles and Hekabe.

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.

As for what is contained, I am a little too lazy to fully articulate how I feel about them, but they are all well worth the read, and I'll leave reviews of those separately. The plays collected, in addition to the two mentioned above, are Hippolytos and Alkestis, all of which are great places to start when reading Euripides.

Herakles is a fantastic play that I think fully captures the tragedy of someone great brought low, and by no fault of their own. And in for the most part, Herakles really is guilty of nothing and did not ask to be born a demigod with powerful enemies. And yet, he cannot help but be the hero that he is, which perhaps indirectly leads to his demise. Perhaps here Euripides asks the viewer (or reader) to ask questions of their heroes, and to reconsider the narratives we already know about our idols. Moreover, Euripides forces the reader to consider what to do after grief and trauma, and argues that the only way out is to continue living. 9/10

Hekabe is another fantastic play where a character who is guilty of nothing (at least completely innocent, up until the end of the play) is brought low by forces beyond their control. Here, I think Euripides chooses a different route, and while he still argues that the only way to combat grief is to continue living, here he adds that to continue living is to spurn fate and destiny itself. Hekabe is a woman driven to drastic ends, but for her, any action is drastic because she has truly lost everything by this point, and cannot lose much more (besides Kassandra, but she is essentially lost to Hekabe). 10/10

I think the primary theme between these two plays is that clarity in grief exists for everyone, be it through friends, or through drastic changes brought on by oneself. Now, onto the other two.

Hippolytos is a play where the title figure is arguably not the protagonist, but rather Phaidra is. 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. 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. And while I think the ending falls a little flat, Phaidra really is the star of this play for me. 8/10

Finally, Alkestis, the odd one out of these plays due to being a tragicomedy. Another play where it's the gods who cause suffering, not other people, perhaps to illustrate the random misfortune of reality. Anyways, Alkestis is a fantastic character despite how little she speaks (literally, by the end), resembling Megara in Herakles. Admetos and his father Pheres are both unlikeable in this play, but Admetos is a little more forgivable due to his position being a unique one of unsure standing. Nevertheless, the tragedy and beauty of Alkestis's sacrifice despite not having to is fantastic and juxtaposed rather nicely with the dudebro attitude of Herakles. 8/10

Overall it's hard to score this, but I think I'll make it a 5/5 just because I'm feeling generous.

Amphitryon: "Daughter, I find it hard to rattle off advice like that. We're weak, let's play for time"
Megara: "Wait for worse? You love the light so much?"
A: "I do, I love its hopes"
M: "Well yes, but there's no use expecting the impossible, old man."
A: "To delay evils is a kind of cure."
M: "This waiting gnaws at me"

^^aside from the above being the Official Mood of 2017, I've been chewing on these tragedies for a year and a half, because I go between finding it extremely comforting and extremely terrible that they are so relatable. Carson's translations are beautiful, as usual.

copied out the uh Absolute Banger of an opening essay, "Tragedy: A Curious Art Form" way back in like second week, early october, in the co-op, to email out to the cast & crew of a production of medea that i dramaturged. lol that i dramaturg sometimes. so that production uh happened and incompetent dramaturg that i am, i realized later that the listhost i'd sent it to was the production-team only listhost, so the actors never received it. and they were who the essay was for, really. whatever, whatever. the point is that a few weeks later i bought the book at powell's because i have no self-control. read two of the plays over thanksgiving, just read the last two on the flight home for winter break. 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—). i keep on thinking about how weird it is, what an accident of history, that these works are foundational to the western tradition but also only some of them, really. lesser-known tragedies by famous tragedians are at this weird intersection between The Canon and the plays laid bare as they really are: work specific to the culture it was born from. literary works that are both The Story, The Essence of Story, and also just, like, story. this weird balance in classical literature is something i've been obsessed with lately but whatever. 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. also i am obsessed with Alcestis, what a weird weird play, so weird that even anne carson patron saint of classical weirdness barely knows what do with it!! she writes a noticeably shorter-than-usual preface, acknowledges it, says not much can be said about this play. wild. the weird production of a new allegorical figure/goddess for necessity that a fate can't do the work of. the guest-host relationship has never been used as strangely as it was here.

okay a day or two later i am ~still~ thinking about alcestis//some stuff i think i forgot to mention that i'd intended to, but another thing that makes alcestis so weird and cool is how integral the more comedic elements are to the plot, to the tragedy. 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? "no satyrs," as anne carson v succinctly puts it) but you can't quite call it a tragedy either. i'm thinking about how the end of the play is in a way entirely rooted in that intended-to-be-comedic, punny scene where admetos tells heracles that alcestis is both dead and alive. how could heracles have decided he was able to rescue alcestis from death if not because linguistically he originated his idea of her as a human who was inhabiting both spheres? because he doesn't quite rescue her from death untouched, she has to stay silent three days because she is already polluted by death. i'm pretty sure that's not normal! that the comedy in a tragedy wields considerable influence on the direction and action of the whole play, i mean. i could be wrong. i'm admittedly and shamefully ignorant about greek tragedy. but even just within euripides' oeuvre, i'm thinking of how, you know, that one comedic scene in medea, with aegeus—it has no real effect on what happens in the play. even if medea had never talked to aegeus, had no assurance of a place to go after leaving corinth, what happens at the end of medea can pretty much still happen. if you really wanted to, you could cut aegeus from your unrelentingly Dark And Edgy Cut-To-The-Quick version of medea, you know? it would be painful and unbearable—that play is already, even with the occasional comedy relief, painful and unbearable—but it would work. which makes sense, for a tragedy! but you couldn't do that with alcestis. that play cannot be sliced up, and the comedy and tragedy are inseparable. the divided house ultimately comes together again, heracles can carouse for only so long, heracles must end up doing what he does best, being a hero of some kind, whatever the cost, being heracles. (if i were less lazy i would read euripides' heracles in conversation with alcestis.) there's a lot of classic ancient greek screaming in alcestis but even more than euripides' other modern-feeling plays, a lot about alcestis doesn't feel ancient.

Wow literally why are you full of rage because you are filled with grief

From The Preface:

"Violence occurs; through violence we are intimate with some characters onstage in an exorbitant way for a brief time; that's all it is."

From Hippolytus"

PHAIDRA
I am a sad one! What have I done?
Where have I gone from my own good mind?
I went mad, a god hurt me, I fell.

“There is a theory that watching unbearable stories about other people lost in grief and rage is good for you —may cleanse you of your darkness”

Anne Carson starts off her book with this quote… and it’s true. I did really enjoy reading these four Greek plays. I’m not a classics enjoyer, really. 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). I could read Anne Carson’s opinion on Greek plays for hours…

Euripides was called the most tragic of the three tragedians, but I found that reading all four that there was a strong beam of hope in the sadness. Hercules killed his beloved children and wife, but was pulled from committing suicide by his beloved friend Theseus. 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. Hippolytus’ father turned on him, but Artemis honored him as her most loyal follower in death. Adementus’ wife was taken by death in exchange for his life, but Hercules manages to save her from the underworld. It’s all so very…tender.

Also, I love the parallels in the tragedies:

“Theseus: Stop. Give me your hand. I am your friend
Hercules: I fear to stain your clothes with blood
Theseus: Stain them. I don’t care.”

“Phaedra: Leave me to my sins, they are not for you
Nurse: No, I will not give up on you
Phaedra: What then—force me? Cling to my hand?
Nurse: Your knees too. I will not let go”

“Admentus: What will I do without you?
Alcestis: Time will soften this. The dead are nothing”

“Admentus: Life’s pleasure is gone.
Hercules: Time will soften this. Your pain is new”

Quite an enjoyable edition. I read the original versions many years ago, though that hardly matters now, as my knowledge of Greek has markedly diminished. Unfortunately, I'm also sadly unfamiliar with the poetry of Anne Carson; I hope to rectify this situation right away. Solid translation.

I’m not sure if I’m giving the 4* to Carson or Euripides. Greek tragedies are always perplexing. I couldn’t work out if Euripides was a misogynist or feminist, although clearly Carson is the latter. One is given a terrible view of the inhumanities within men: pride, momentary madness, hatred, revenge & intractability. It’s hard not think Euripides recognised the powerful significance of the feminine in the heart of tragedy, so clearly seen here, almost unbearably, in Hekabe, Hippolytus and Alkestis. Bleak and painful stuff. I’m toying with idea of reading the plays in Greek to see if there are any revelations lurking in the language I’m missing..

the essays and prefaces were 5 stars across the board and then weirdly the plays lost a lot of their bite for me? i think my ranking would be hekabe > alkestis > herakles > hipolytos. i have a hard time with euripides because i always want to like him more than i do and when i read his plays i end up reading past them, getting stuck imagining staging possibilities and forgetting about the text itself. 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.

lots of people claim to ‘love the translation’ of a text of which they don't speak the original language and I'm always feeling stupid and wondering, like, if you don’t speak the original how can you judge the translation? I mean, you can admit to digging the language but the translation? people must say this because it makes 'em sound literary, right? there’s not even an agreed upon standard of what a great translation means. is it the most accurate? (& does most accurate mean the most precise word-for-word translation? or does it mean most accurately conveying the spirit of the original? and if so, what kind of parameters are we talking about?) or the most appealing by contemporary standards?
whatever. i had to will myself through the stodgy penguin editions but these breezed by. they were riveting. and i’m in no way suggesting that easier is better – only that in this particular case, i found Anne Carson’s translation not only more readable, but with greater rhythm and fluidity and verve. who’s responsible? euripedes? carson? i don't know and i kinda don’t care. it’s great shit.

one play in particular, Hekabe, really destroyed me. euripides (who aristotle called 'the most tragic of them all' and who Carson compares to Beckett) depicts Troy after having fallen to the Greeks as a brutal and immoral civilization quickly slipping into total chaos. 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. this is, of course, impossible for most of my generation to imagine. It amuses me to hear my fellow countrymen state with misty-eyed pride that "we are at war" -- total farce. 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.
a semantical distinction, maybe, but an important one. 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. an appropriate fate.

very accessible translations. the jokes really come through.