when desire first wounded me i considered how best to bear it. i began with silence and secrecy - there’s no trusting the tongue, it loved to punish others and draw disaster in itself.

desire in grief is such an interesting concept and i love how unpleasant euripides is

I really did enjoy this collection. Anne Carson has a real talent when it comes to translating in a way so as to keep the original emotion and integrity of the text which I deeply appreciate. At its core, these plays really are lessons in grief, where it comes from, how one might lose control of it, how it can lead to anger and resentment. At multiple points while reading, I felt chills as I related to the characters and their dialogue. Read carefully, some of these lines are truly so beautiful, there were multiple moments when I found myself unable to stop reading.

anne carson does it again ! am feeling a little Strung-Out by too much tragedy, and less frantically, manically excited abt these plays than i am abt the oresteia, but wld recommend this for her prefatory bits & framing essays alone; her Mind !

Translations (into a fairly loose and readable modern English, although curiously cries of woe and such are kept in Greek) of four of Euripedes' more obscure tragedies.

"Hekabe" has long been a favourite of mine, for reasons that I'm not entirely clear on. It's just a Very Bad Day Indeed for her; her city, Troy, has just fallen, and most of her children have died, and look, now two more are dead. And so Hekabe has her revenge, and it is brutal and hardly feels like a happy ending.

"Herakles" is quite boring for much of it, but then suddenly becomes very interesting indeed once most of the characters have been killed off; suddenly and unexpected it becomes a play about the nature of true friendship (and the price of knowing true friendship).

"Hippolytos" never quite gets interesting, alas. "Alkestis", on the other hand, has some very nice moral calculus going on in the midst of an ethically complicated situation.

I think hippolytes was my favourite.

.... Still prefer sophocles

"Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief."
My review about "Herakles" and "Hekabe": https://khnebulishvili.wixsite.com/my...
My review about "Hippolytos" and "Alkestis": https://khnebulishvili.wixsite.com/my...

(Not my favorite works, however…)

MEGARA. Wait for worse? You love the light so much?
AMPHITRYON. I do, I love its hopes.

Definitely will need to/want to reread this and annotate. Anne Carson does well to show the depth of Euripides as more than just the most tragic of tragedians. Euripides dissects some of the basest human emotions the grief and pain that comes tangled along with them. Makes you feel a little less alone in it all knowing that 2500 years ago people felt the same way.

There are four plays here: Heracles, Hecuba, Hippolytus, Alcestis. Why these four? 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). Before you read any of these fresh and altogether brilliant translations, a word of advice: forget Aristotle’s Poetics, and forget what the critics say who continually fault Euripides for failing to meet their hidebound notions of what shape a classical drama is supposed to take.

Heracles I actually saw performed in NYC a few years ago and it was riveting. I had a front row seat and —spoiler alert — when a bare chested and blood soaked Heracles fell to his knees after recognizing that he had slaughtered (in a state of divinely induced madness) his wife and three children, the stomach grinding agony of his despair made for a thrilling theatrical experience. It is a play which, like others E. has written (including, in this edition, Alcestis and Hecuba) critics have faulted because E. didn’t have Aristotle around to tell him how to write a play — or because they were relying on certain dramaturgical assumptions which, again, were not the same rules that were guiding the work of Euripides, a brilliant innovator and modernist.

Hecuba is one of several by E. that deal with the Trojan War from the point of view of the women who were burned by it. These plays include The Trojan Women, Andromache, Helen, Hecuba, Iphigenia in Aulis and Iphigenia In Tauris. Add to this list Medea, Alcestis and Electra and you will find that nearly half of E’s corpus focuses on women. We are not even sure whether women, who were famously cloistered in their homes and played no political role in Athens, were permitted in the theater of Dionysus when the great tragedies and comedies were performed there.

Greek tragedy is not difficult to translate literally, although literal translations are often laughable. See A. E. Housman's "Fragment of A Greek Tragedy," a hilarious parody of a brutally literal translation of a segment of a hypothetical Greek tragedy.

Anne Carson is a superbly gifted translator. She takes Euripides' verses and turns them into English that is highly readable while remaining faithful to the spirit of the original Greek. To cite a random example, here are two lines from the opening of Alcestis' speech to her husband at vv. 280-81. First, my literal translation (as close to the Greek as possible):

"Admetus, since you see how my situation is,
I wish to say to you some things I want (to say) before I die."

Here is Paul Roche Ten Plays by Euripides:

"Admetus, you see how matters stand with me,
so let me tell you my last wish before I die."

Here's Carson's version:

"Admetus, you see my condition.
Now listen to my dying wish."

This is the approach she employs everywhere with Euripides. She takes the art of translation into a new dimension. Some might accuse her of taking gross liberties with the text, yet what she sacrifices in word for word renderings she more than makes up for by capturing the pacing, substance, and tone of the original. She makes Euripides a joy to read in English, and this is by no means an easy task.

Reread this for fun cuz I was also reading Eros the Bittersweet. Carson is a masterful translator and these 4 plays come with very short essays that give you some thoughts to ponder as you read. And theres a historical fiction-y essay in the back about Euripides in that way only Carson can write.

What about the plays? I've always liked Herakles because it inverts the normal chronology of the labors and makes an interesting point out of it. The Alcestis is weird, uniquely weird and comic. The Hekabe gives Hecuba her day like Medea, while-as usual-putting a finer point to notions of glory and honor. And Hippolytus...Ive read and taught it so many times, I don't think I have anything new to say about it, but its an old friend and like the Hekabe features great social commentary.

Every time I read Euripides, it's harder and harder to say Sophocles is my favorite tragedian

I struggle to define grief into words, I struggle to define it in visual art. But I cannot deny that it is there. Maybe it’s the way the brushstroke reflects the light, or the way a character in a play remains silent. I think Euripides knew this in his own way too which is how he reflects grief so tragically and comedically yet effectively. Grief as many have said before me is not linear. It’s hilarious, it’s heartbreaking, devastating, nostalgic, strange…I could go on.
Carson yet again brings tears into my eyes at her artful translations of these plays. The simplest lines are, in my opinion, the strongest because they seem raw. Carson is a rare talent.

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. 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. Alkestis herself stands out as bad-ass but by the end I was just rooting for her to ascend to the throne of heaven and smite everyone, most of all her husband, the biggest prat in all of classics. The book hit its zenith right in the last three pages, I could read Anne Carson wax poetic as Euripides for days.