Nothing fucks me up like remembering that Euripides has over 90 plays but only 18 survived :(

Que boa surpresa(!).

Peguei esse livro para ler, pensando que seria uma coisa mas se surpreendi com as peças e com o desenrolar das mesmas. Adorei a abordagem de cada uma.

“What do we desire when we desire other people? Not them.”

There are technical translations and there are inspired translations. Carson remains artful in every one she sets her pen to. Her essays and introductions contemplate catharsis, myth, the ancient performance of drama, and the reasons why she herself is fascinated and drawn to Euripides' works.

Anne Carson got her fame along translators for bold, austere, modern versions of Greek tragedy. She is MADE for Euripides.

The most compelling thing about Anne Carson's version of these ancient characters is how much they sound like us. They whine, cry out, and snap at each other. Her forwards to each play offer a little tour into what makes each so tragic.

My favorite example, prior to Hekabe, "Iphigeneia and Antigone are sensationally significant victims: Iphigeneia's sacrifice is the lynchpin of all that happens to Agamemnon afterwards; Antigone's death is the transcendent culmination of Sophokles' play. The deaths change the stories in which they are set, transform the lives around them and force moral reasoning to an extreme confrontation with itself.
Polyxena's death is different. It is not placed at the beginning or the end of the play but muffled in the middle; does not constitute either cause or culmination of the action; it does not change the plot or other people in any substantial way, and it forces us to no moral conclusion at all except that such a sacrifice is irrelevant to the world in which it is staged.
Polyxena is a shooting star that wipes itself across the play and disappears. And Euripides wants us to notice this -- this irrelevance of Polyxena."

She thinks deeply not just about what these characters mean to each other, to us as readers, or to the original Greek audience, but how they are as full individuals. As a great lover of Euripides, I hate to admit, but I have gripes with Alcestis. Herakles' bashful embarrassment at being a bad guest is the impetus for the solution, Admetos is a giant hypocrite, and the ending is anti climactic. Carson doesn't necessarily change this, but she does invite us to think about who Alcestis is during the parts of the play where she speaks. She's less dying for her husband, but choosing not to live in the world without him, she'd RATHER die.
"I die -- I did not have to die -- for you. [...]
I did not want to stay alive without you"

I'll give some credence to her nay sayers. I don't think Carson is the perfect translator for the first time tragedy reader. You do lose some of the precise nuance in the crossfire of her more pithy style. But she's PERFECT for someone returning to these tragedies as old friends.

Above all else, I believe Anne Carson is the right person to convey the particular empathy Euripides gives to women. From Hekabe, "Don't sweep the whole female species together for condemnation because of your own catastrophe. We are many, some blameless, some not."

Can I just be the first to say, OIMOI!

This review specifically will focus on the deliberate style of Anne Carson's translations, which aesthetically possess a character, a teeth, an edge that breathes into the rusted old lungs of tragedies sometimes sparsely translated, a richness, a fullness, and a modern sensibility that captures in stunning fashion the catastrophes and humiliations of Euripedes' classics.

It's not to say that the vernacular utilized in this translation features ineffective mimicry of popular slang, or even outright modern jargon, but it's utility in it's translation is best summed up as a work of modernism, elevating the once fixed and sometimes dry classical translations into a work that truly displays it's multi-faceted brilliance without the necessary background study required to fully understand it.

At the same time, there is a rawness throughout, literal translations left in the work that provide a reminder to it's authenticity, it's directness, it's purity. Carson's assessments and critical thoughts between each play are vital to this collection, and offer a keen insight into the mind of the translator, representing not just the raw mechanics of the works, but questions that have lingered and perplexed academics for a long, long time. Questions that much like the grief within these plays are endless. This is a stunning work, a must read.

3 stars. I have a feeling that Anne Carson is on the way to becoming one of my favourite authors. Euripides however, I don’t care much for. I enjoyed reading Anne’s prefaces more than the plays themselves. she’s poetic, she’s insightful, she derives meaning from these plays that feels genuinely human, rather than just ‘analytical’.

anyways, here’s some of my favourite parts:

(Preface) Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.

(Preface) He was also concerned with people as people — with what it’s like to be a human being in a family, in a fantasy, in a longing, in a mistake. (UGH I love this one)

AMPHITYON: Be calm. Wipe their tears and soothe them with stories, a bit of make believe. Even catastrophes grow weary, no wind can keep blasting all the time.

THESEUS: There is no cloud so black it could hide your misfortune. Why do you wave me off? You fear to pollute me? I don’t care about that. I’ll share your bad luck — I shared your good luck once, when you brought me from the dead world back to life. Hateful to me is a gratitude that grows old. A friend who enjoys your prosperity but refuses to sail with your grief.

THESEUS: Stop. Give me your hand. I am your friend.
HERAKLES: I fear to stain your clothes with blood.
THESEUS: Stain them, I don’t care.
(UGHHHHH THIS ONE KILLS ME IN EVERY GOOD WAY POSSIBLE)

HERAKLES: Whoever values wealth or strength more than friends is mad.

HEKABE: (talking about his wife) This one is my joy. This one is my forgetting of evils. She comforts my soul.

(Preface) I suppose his intention is to pray for a life of consistent purity from beginning to end. But what beginning, what end? Whose life can end as it began, as if it were a thing apart from time, as if flesh did not change.

PHAIDRA: What is this thing they call falling in love?
NURSE: Something absolutely sweet and absolutely bitter at the same time.

NURSE: Perfection is not for mortals.

Wow. I can’t speak to the accuracy of these translations but honestly I don’t really care about accuracy. These translations are beautiful, fluid, moving, and just plain fun to read. Well, as much fun as reading Euripides can be.

The preface of each play was not only beautifully written, but also a perfect introduction for each. Regardless of whether you’ve read these plays before or not, read Grief Lessons. This is just a beautiful book.

n  n    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. Do you want to go down to the pits of yourself all alone? Not much. What if an actor could do it for you? Isn’t that why they are called actors? They act for you. You sacrifice them to action. And this sacrifice is a mode of deepest intimacy of you with your own life.n  n

The Greek concept of catharsis is a fascinating one and one easy to misunderstand.
ORIGINAL COMMENTARY: I often struggle with tragedy, in its inevitable sad ending: to me, sadness with happiness at the end are often more cathartic. But the idea that seeing sadness at the end is the true point: that, to me, is fascinating.
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. As given by Aristotle, the definition of a tragedy is not actually in its sad ending: it is in experiencing human suffering. (Most of the extant plays, not by coincidence but by generations of selection, end negatively.) Catharsis, by his definition, is a type of cleaning: "we experience, then expurgate these emotions". Tragedy can attempt to make the worst experiences consumable. It is not the ending, but the process.

On Colloquial Translation

Anne Carson’s style of translation often focuses on colloquialism: making a text often translated in direct wording into something palatable for readers. This translation of this text feels… raw. Carson does not waste words: the sense of a line is conveyed, not perhaps the exact wording. (This review gives a good example of how, as does this post on the Oresteia.)

Having spent the last eight years in Latin class (I know), I have learned that to make a text as readable to modern eyes as it would have been to ancient ones is a very different skill than direct translation. To convey word for word and to convey the spirit are two different aims; to do both is difficult, nigh-impossible for some texts. Debates over the merit of certain translated works are rife in scholarly circles.

For those of you more interested in the politics of translation, here are some cool things I found while going down a rabbit hole on this topic last month:
→Cecily Fasham, on the politics of translating sappho
→a tumblr post on the politics of translation
→Emily Wilson, interview notes on The Odyssey

The Play Reviews

→Heracles ★★★★☆ Euripides← (421-416 BCE)
This was my personal least favorite of the plays I read for this collection, possibly because of how thoughtless it is: no decision is made by any character that caused this ill, simply a trickery of the gods. It feels deeply wrong and deeply unsatisfying. I believe is the point. Sometimes, the world is too evil to show mercy.

Notable Lines (Anne Carson translation):

n  n    HERAKLES: Come back! Even as a shadow, even as a dream.n  n

→Hekabe ★★★★★ Euripides← (424 BCE)
There is a sense of inevitable death that pervades this play: taking place during a mythical war, it serves on some level as a reflection of the destruction of society that Euripides himself would have feared during the Peloponnesian Wars. The ending of this play is deeply strange and off-putting: after a play full of tragedy in her life, Hekabe is told she will be turned into a dog. This fate is horrifying, but what I found most horrifying about it was its ambiguity: she has received a prophecy about her fate, but we shall never really see the truth of it. In her new life as a Greek slave, she will perhaps become a dog anyway.

Notable Lines (Anne Carson translation):

n  n    AGAMEMNON: O poor woman. There is no measure to your evils.
HEKABE: I do not exist. There is nothing else. Not even evils.n  n

n  n    CHORUS: Don’t sweep the whole female species together for condemnation
because of your own catastrophe.
We are many—some blameless,
some not.n  n

→Hippolytus ★★★★★ Euripides← (428 BCE)
In her introduction to this text, Carson says two things that stuck out to me:
→[Hippolytos] seems to want to place Artemis, and himself, in a special third gender—the translucent gender—unpolluted by flesh or change.
→If you asked to Hippolytos to name his system he would say “shame”. Oddly, if you asked Phaedra to name her system she would also say “shame”. They do not mean the same thing by this word. Or perhaps they do. Too bad they never talk.
The politics of shame lie at the heart of this text. What is it to love, what is it to be ashamed of that love? It's really interesting that the male character, Hippolytos, is the one taking on this role of being in love with chastity. It's also interesting that he, like Phaedra and like Theseus, is taking on the role of his Amazon mother. Phaedra, daughter to Pasiphae, is in love with the impossible and impossibly ashamed; Theseus, son of Aegeus, takes on his stubbornness. (The family tree helps.)

A fun tidbit from my Greek Tragedy teacher, who is in love with Greek double meanings: Hippolytus derives from 'horses' and the verb λυω or 'luo', which can mean either 'to release' or 'to destroy'; it is also ambiguous whether 'hippos' is the subject or the object. Hippolyta's name would have been 'he who sets horses free'; Hippolytos' name, though, means something more like 'he who the horses destroy'. As they do.

This was my favorite of these four plays.

Notable Lines (Anne Carson translation):

n  n    NURSE: Not much profit in desire then,
If everyone touched by it has to die.n  n

→Alcestis ★★★★☆ Euripides← (438 BCE)
This is a strange and comedic tragedy. Admetos loves his wife and yet is okay to watch her die for him: either way, however, he gets her back. It's a splitting of fate unexpected in this genre (Oedipus wishes).

Notable Lines (Anne Carson translation):

n  n    CHORUS: We all owe a debt to death, you know.n  n

n  n    ADMETOS: if I found another savior, if I look upon this daylight, it’s her I owe.
I hate the going on of doors!n  n

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

Worth reading just for Anne Carson's two essays and prefaces to the plays - the plays themselves are beautifully translated and contain many of Euripides' key devices and concerns.

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

I liked Anne Carson's translations a lot. Parts of each of these plays made me laugh out loud to myself a little bit. They just feel so much more accessible when put into layman's terms and made to be a little bit funny. They were profoundly depressing though. I deeply appreciated the prefaces of all of the plays, they put the necessary context in place before starting which I always like, especially when I have no idea what the plot of the play is beforehand, which I didn't have for all three of the plays aside from Herakles.

*

Myths are stories about people who become too big for their lives temporarily, so that they crash into other lives or brush against gods.

Who could pray to her? For the sake of another woman, for the sake of sex and jealousy, she has annihilated the best friend Greece ever had. And he was innocent.

Herakles: He had no shame, even before an old man?
Megara: Shame? Lykos? He stays clear of that.

Amphitryon: Who'll bury me?
Herakles: I will.
Amphitryon: When?
Herakles: When you die.

Herakles: Here, I will take your hands and lead you like a big ship towing little boats behind.
vs.
Herakles: So I, a man utterly wrecked and utterly shamed, shall follow Theseus like a little boat towed along.

"Or you will have to watch her fall forward at the tomb and spray red blood from a blackbright hole as it opens her throat wide."

She comforts my soul- she is my city, my walking stick, my way of the road.

Hekabe: It is not strange that a bad ground blessed with good weather will bring forth good crop, and good soil deprived of what it needs gives bad fruits, but with human beings a scoundrel produces a scoundrel every time, and a good man a good man.

You will lose your life to a hand that never fought a war.

Polymestor: Enjoy triumphing over me, don't you, you piece of work?

Hippolytos: Different men like different gods.

Phaidra: What is this thing they call falling in love?
Nurse: Something absolutely sweet and absolutely bitter at the same time.

Phiadra: Your expertise scares me.
Nurse: Everything scares you. Why worry?

"Yet if I had succeeded, you'd call me smart. Smartness is relative to winning, isn't it."

Chorus: Good. The oath was a nice touch.

Apollo: Relax, I'm not breaking any laws
Death: Why the bow, if you're breaking no laws?
Apollo: I always carry a bow, it's my trademark.

Admetos: Take me with you, for gods' sake, take me below.
Alkestis: Aren't there enough people dying for you.