I fell in love with Euripides a couple years ago when I read Medea and Other Plays because Medea is such a bad-ass and frightening character. He convinced me of her craziness, and that's half the battle right there. Would I get up and let Medea have my seat on the bus if I saw her coming down the aisle? Hell, yes.

This collection has four of his tragedies, all of which are pretty fantastic, though maybe not as great as Medea. Or maybe I'm just blinded by love for Medea. In any case, the four characters who got their fifteen minutes of fame in this college are Herakles, Hekabe, Hippolytos, and Alkestis. Like Medea there is some infanticide, but really - what do you expect from Euripides?

What surprised me more with this collection, especially in the Alkestis, is just how funny a dude Euripides could be. Some of the dialogue in this play made me think of much more contemporary geniuses. In the scene where Herakles discovers that he's shown up during the middle of a funeral he tries to get out of it, but the deceased's husband, Ademtos, isn't hearing of it.

HERAKLES
I'll go to someone else's house.

ADMETOS
Impossible, dear man. I wouldn't consider it.

HERAKLES
A guest is a burden when people are grieving.

ADMETOS
The dead are dead. Please come into my house.

HERAKLES
It's not right to have guests mixed up with a funeral.

ADMETOS
But the guest rooms are quite separate.

The accessibility of these plays was impressive. They read quickly and I was entertained throughout - as much as one reading about infanticide and suicide can be entertained, of course. I think Euripides would have been a hoot at dinner parties. I'd put him right next to Mel Brooks and Peter Sellers.

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Also included is a short essay by Euripides about why he wrote two plays about Phaidra. Again, I was surprised at how modern his voice, which may be attributed more to the translator, Anne Carson, but his humor again was evident.

"Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief."

didnt enjoy all of the four plays equally but theres something i appreciated abt each one of them and despite how short they are, the pain of the characters feels palpable in all of them

As Carson points out in her introduction to Hekabe — Euripides is "unpleasant." You can't really get around the fact his plays are difficult. But, maybe that's because he concerned himself with what it means to be alive, to be a human being "in a family, in a fantasy, in longing, in a mistake." Is it easy to read/watch? No. It wouldn't have been easy to watch thousands of years ago. It's still not easy today. And yet, don't we still feel rage — the rage that comes from grief? Don't we still not know what to do with it? And don't we still have the need to turn toward something — to "unbearable stories about other people lost in grief and rage," as a way to "cleanse [us] of [our] darkness" by watching others (stand ins for ourselves) act out our very human nature?

Carson's translation is, as always, excellent. She breathes new life into these ancient words — and gives them to a world that still really needs them.

These are elegant, beautiful translations of Euripides. The book includes four plays – like a tragic performance event in Athens in the classical period. The plays are Herakles, Hekabe, Hippolytos, and Alkestis. Carson has even engineered it so that the tetralogy here ends with one of Euripides' satyr plays: the Alkestis was originally performed in the fourth slot, the same one in which it is placed here, in place of the traditional satyr play.

One can see from the titles here that Carson is committed to more accurate English transliterations of Greek names rather than the usual Latinized ones. I love this about her. We get Hekabe instead of Hecuba, and Phaidra instead of Phaedra; Herakles instead of Hercules. What I love even more is her commitment to the transliteration of mournful cries that occur so frequently in these four plays. "AIAI!", cries Phaidra, and then, a few lines later, "PHEU PHEU TLEMON!". Later, in his grief, Theseus wails "IO IO TALAINA MELEON KAKON!" and "OMOI EGO!" and "AI AI!" and "OMOI MOI SETHEN MELEOS!" and "EA EA!". True to this book's title, Carson is actually exploring Grief Lessons here. The characters in Euripides' plays don't simply wail or cry; they mourn in different shades. Their grief is not only layered it changes, deepens. It literally sounds different. It's an odd thing to see in a Euripides translation, but to me it makes a great impact as I read.

These four Euripides plays are not even remotely the most popular of his works. Some of them are truly strange. The Herakles is a broken play - split in half by the grief it contains, and the Alkestis, too, is split in half, with its merriment on one side of the house and its mourning on the other. I think examining these texts helps us understand Euripides much, much better. This kind of splitting half, this emphasis on reversal and chance, is fundamental to his dramaturgy – and, I think to his philosophy. Not one of these plays wraps up neatly. Instead, Euripides leaves his characters, and us, with our grief, without resolution. 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. These grief lessons are not about how to put grief away but how better to carry it.

Anne Carson never misses.

I want to be Anne Carson when I grow up

Phaidra is so real, having an unrequited crush (although it is on her step son

If Anne Carson took up a sole career as a translator of Greek tragedy, I would only be slightly mad.

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. (Not quite as strongly as Antigonick, but a presence nonetheless.) Loved this entire collection, though I was a bit bored by Herakles (even though she warned me that I would be in her introduction).

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

Anne Carson is, as always, incredibly generous with sharing her ideas in the prefaces to each tragedy. Those, to me, are priceless. They are, as always, interesting ideas, sometimes even peculiar. Not all of them have enough basis, and certainly not all resonate with me. And yet they are intriguing, they make you think, poke around, and dig deeper. Although I think it is a bit dangerous to imagine there is something beyond, for Greek tragedy is quite direct. At least I believe so. All these layers and interpretations that were given much later by people from all the different fields of studies made complicated something that is raw, out there, plain as the earth and the sun. Greek tragedy is not complex. That is its beauty.

Anne Carson is very particular, which is why I keep marveling at her popularity. How can someone so singular appeal to many? To so many without any classical background to note her choices, to peep at the original text to compare it to her translation? To question statements (although imaginary) like "Hippolytus Veiled was what I [Euripides] called my first attempt to write a play about Phaedra"*, to see that some words, actual words, not just exclamations (talas, tlemon, melos, kakon, tyche, sometimes even entire lines like ἰὼ ἰὼ τάλαινα μελέων κακῶν [888/811]) left by her as usual untranslated, only accompanied with little brackets with the word cry in them. To almost get angry at how easily she comes to her conclusions, how she just lets them be: a classicist cannot have that privilege. Or so it seems. But perhaps this is it: the less you try to be understandable, the more people will get you. She is undoubtedly herself. That is enough.

*Why question? Because it is very unlikely that tragedians, as writers today, gave their works titles and that there was any significance to them. Even if you argue that this essay is just a fantasy, which certainly it is, its entire premise comes from that, a title.

I've been reading the four Euripides plays in this gem of a collection over the last few weeks. In her brief introduction, poet Anne Carson writes, "Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief."

Herakles is about the Greek hero going mad an massacring his entire family. Hekabe shows the gross injustice done to the remaining survivors of Priam's family after the fall of Troy. In Hippolytos, the priggish Hippolytos is desired by his mother Phaidra, but Aphrodite wreaks a terrible vengeance on him for ignoring love. Finally, in Alkestis, the King of Thessaly, Admetos, is told he must die unless he can find someone to die for him. His young wife Alkestis is the only one to agree to do this. (This last one seems to have a happy ending, but you never know with Euripides!)

Anne Carson is not a well-known Greek scholar, but her translations are approachable and moving. To quote her once again, "Myths are stories about people who become too big for their lives temporarily, so that they crash into other lives or brush against gods. In crisis their souls are visible." The souls in Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides are not only visible, but raw. Carson translates this rawness into Greek exclamations like OIMOI, PHEU, EA, IO MOI TYCHAS, and others. Their strangeness, interspersed with the lines of the players.

This should be the gold standard for translation. Anne Carson is deftly lyrical and carries about a modern translation that makes all four of her plays accessible, brutal, and intimate.

It took me a bit to think through why Carson chose these four Euripides plays, and I think the answer lies in her title: each of the plays are about a different source of grief — whether that be oneself, others, the Gods, and fate (Fate). All four of these manifest in the title characters and manifests cruelly in sacrifice, revenge, and murder. There’s a powerful undercurrent theme that cuts through this selection of plays, and Carson’s introductions and voice bring it to light.

Exquisite!4.5. Lots of love for this - Carson takes plays that are quite possibly fairly tepid and extracts an extraordinary dynamism and an excruciating yet ætherial reverberation that somehow manages to read, beautifully.
All four plays are magnificently adapted though I play favourites for Hippolytos and Alkestis. The language of Hippolytos in particular delights me -

//I long for the secret sunwalked places,
and a god to take me up high...

-and predictably I love the way the sea comes about here and the mute heroico-tragical quality of Poseidon:

Then swelling and spattering foam and sea on every side
it went towards shore where the chariot was.
At the height of the surge
it put forth a bull - wild weird thing!
And the whole place was filled with voice-

Shivers in the voice. Wonderful and intriguingly familiar. It was nice to dip into Foucault's History of Sexuality (2) for that play as well. Fruitful! Dissemination! Polyvalence!
So Anne here has done me well thank you Anne thank you Kate (especially the annotations!!). I'm keen for AC's Antigone and beyond.