¿Es acaso Medea la segunda tragedia griega que leo y ya la considero mi favorita sin haber leído todo lo que me falta? Pues sí. Así es. ¿Es eso posible? A lo mejor no. Tal vez me estoy adelantando a los acontecimientos habiendo tantas tragedias todavía por leer pero no me importa porque Eurípides ha hecho una a la altura de lo que a mí me gusta encontrar en las letras: personajes femeninos que no están solo como decoración.

Me encantó multiplicado al mil como una mujer es capaz de llegar hasta lo más oscuro de su propia naturaleza para conseguir vengarse de la traición que ha recibido. Me recontrafascinó como hace uso de su inteligencia y el poder de manipulación para lograr su anhelado objetivo; que es bastante retorcido. Medea es una auténtica villana que no solo se rebela contra Jasón por haberla utilizado sino que lo hace también con la misma sociedad (a pesar de vivir oprimida) que lo único que espera de ella es que esta cumpla con ciertos roles que le han sido asignados por ser mujer.

Sencillamente estas son las lecturas que para su época me gusta siempre encontrar. ¡Una verdadera maravilla! Medea es inteligente hasta el punto de utilizar su "debilidad" (ser mujer) para lograr su maquiavélico fin; que es demasiado despiadado y a mí me parece el culmen de la venganza dentro de toda la literatura que he leído.

I haven't read any of the other translations or "versions" of Medea, but this was a magical place to start. The plot seems to be all there, but the language has been intensely stripped back (in contrast to Iphigenia at Aulis which I just read by an unknown, and which featured old-fashioned sounding speech). Here the language is not modern, exactly, it is just very minimalist.

And now I see my utter ruin!
Troubles come upon me like great waves
And my small ship has no hope of a harbour

Read in a couple of hours. Transformative.

Scrivere qualcosa su questa tragedia è molto difficile. Medea è la donna della passione, dell’Amore e della fedeltà sopra ogni cosa e a tutti i costi, anche quello di sacrificare i suoi figli. E’ la donna dell’odio feroce, del sentimento forte e senza mezze misure. E’ la donna ferita, sminuita, vilipesa e tradita per interesse. Giasone questo afferma: abbandona il letto di Medea per regalare ai suoi figli un futuro più roseo, più ricco sposando la figlia di Creonte, ma non si preoccupa della donna che abbandona. Nulla pensa di lei, viene scacciata come un cane rognoso e questo fomenta ancora più odio nel cuore della donna.
Medea è tutte le donne di oggi, estremizzata all’ennesima potenza. Una storia che da lontano ci riporta tragicamente all’attualità e che mai cambia. M Una denuncia sul ruolo della donna, che già Euripide affronta.

Medea isn't just about pre-feminist ideals, mental illness, revenge, or betrayal. It is a commentary on society, ostensibly Ancient Greek society, but also our global society today. Euripides does something so revolutionary and foreign that the Greek audiences used to tales of heroes or tragedies driven by men must have been flabbergasted and appalled. Medea is the first all-powerful female character. She makes Electra look like a whiny, helpless, pitiable woman. Medea shows that in ancient Greece, there were challenges to women, but also that there was a male playwright daring enough to focus his master work on a previously completely reviled and evil female character. I feel for Medea, but unlike most women in early literature and drama, she solves her own problems. And while her methods may be extreme, she is still in control. Medea is a master work of Greek drama.

I applaud the translator's modern approach and language. Updating a classic masterpiece is hard, and Robin Robertson does it admirably.

n  "No, per le tue ginocchia,
ti prego, t'invoco, ti supplico,
no, non uccidere i figli!
E dove di mano dominio
attinger potrai, dove d'animo,
che avventi la strage terribile
al cuor dei tuoi pargoli?
L'occhio volgendo su lor,
l'esterminio compier potrai senza lagrime?
Quando con supplici grida
dinanzi essi ti cadano,
tu non potrai con saldo animo
tinger la mano omicida."n

In ogni parola di questa famosa tragedia di Euripide c'è la pesantezza di un atto che rimane carico di tragicità anche nel mondo di oggi. Quante volte sentiamo di madri o padri che uccidono i propri figli in preda a un attimo di follia? Non è esattamente la stessa cosa per Medea, ma il concetto è simile. Medea è tradita e si sente umiliata. E solo facendo soffrire chi l'ha fatta soffrire può vendicarsi e andarsene dal paese. Punirà il marito Giasone uccidendo chiunque gli sia stato caro. La nuova moglie, il re e figli. E quando l'eroe vede lo scempio che la moglie ha compiuto sulla sua stessa prole, capisce di avere, in un certo senso, perso. Medea ha vinto. L'ha fatto soffrire. La madre amava i propri figli, ma l'odio per il marito era tale che voleva a ogni costo vederlo struggersi di dolore. Un capolavoro di poesia e drammaticità.

I know infanticide is wrong but I’m still kinda with Medea on this one?? at least Jason is literally the most gaslighting bloke ever like ever line he spoke made me feel progressively more murderous
here’s to the most emotionally complex woman in the classical canon

|| 4.0 stars ||

This is the definition of female rage (gone wrong).

I was in a constant inner-battle with myself between hating Medea for every disgusting thing she’s done and rooting for her to take revenge on Jason. I kept coming back to the question whether my revulsion towards Medea rivaled the one I felt for Jason. I couldn’t quite make up my mind about what I was feeling, which made this all the more interesting.

If only Medea hadn’t taken her ire out on innocents…

Way back in the day, I was at a movie theatre watching a movie, and it was a really weird movie. I had no idea what was going on throughout the entire film. People were just getting up and walking out. At the end of the movie, someone explained it to me, and I thought, “Wow! That’s so interesting! But they really should have handed out a pamphlet before the beginning of the movie to explain it.”

That exactly describes my feelings about this play. It was written in 431 B.C. Before diving in, I read a bit of what this play is or else I would have been entirely lost.

Jason and Medea have an epic love story—Medea betrays her family and helps Jason capture The Golden Fleece. The two burn bridges, but they have each other. They wed, and Medea has two children, sons. However, the play begins as Jason has cast off Medea and his sons in favor of marrying the daughter of the ruler of Corinth. How will Medea handle this news?

This couple deserves each other; both of them are extremely selfish. They never accept ownership for their own actions but constantly bemoan how things would have been better if the other person had done something differently. This play is quite surprising. Medea is certainly not a meek, submissive woman who can be discarded carelessly. She is an impressive strategist.

Overall, this is a tragedy worthy of a read.

This book is one of James Mustich’s 1,000 Books to Read.

2024 Reading Schedulet
JantMiddlemarch
FebtThe Grapes of Wrath
MartOliver Twist
AprtMadame Bovary
MaytA Clockwork Orange
JuntPossession
JultThe Folk of the Faraway Tree Collection
AugtCrime and Punishment
SeptHeart of Darkness
OcttMoby-Dick
NovtFar From the Madding Crowd
DectA Tale of Two Cities

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Rachel Cusk was invited by London’s Almeida Theatre to write a new version of Euripides’s Medea. The new play is both thoroughly modern and bears the stamp of personality of this talented novelist and memoirist. That she fiercely loves her children, two boys, is apparent. She followed Euripides’s formula, creating a storyline which places the blame differently.

If you remember the story, Medea kills her sons when her unfaithful husband marries the young & well-tended daughter of Creon. Considering how difficult it would be for anyone to contemplate such an act, and considering Cusk was severely castigated by readers for her memoir about motherhood, A Life’s Work, Cusk manages to make her work, like Euripides's work, many things at the same time: strong, agonized, righteous, and tragic.

Commentaries on the original Greek play had different interpretations of Medea herself. One made her out to be a young lover who changed her view of her husband when she’d had children. The things that she liked about her husband when he was a young man annoy her when she’s older. When she learned he was unfaithful and was looking for something new, she poisoned his new wife and killed the husband and sons out of pique and revenge.

A more nuanced interpretation, suggests Medea pursued her ambitious middle-aged husband Jason hotly, helping him to secure the fleece of the Golden Ram and thus develop a reputation as one of the most daring heroes of Hellas. But Medea was an foreigner and when she returned to Jason's home with him, her combative and fiery alien nature grated on the conservative natives . She grew tiresome for Jason and he sought another, younger, wealthier alliance that would increase his standing. Then Medea sought revenge.

Cusk’s Medea has less backstory, though from the voices of the chorus (a group of mothers meeting while their kids playdate, and who cross paths picking up their children at the school gates), we learn that Medea is not liked. She’s smart, but no one really likes her writing, if they read it at all. She’s opinionated, which doesn’t work if one wants a marriage to run smoothly ("she asked for it"). She’s a “snooty cow” because she doesn’t always recognize the women in different settings, her mind on other things. Cusk slips in a Holocaust joke: “She gone very Belsen,” referring to how Medea has stopped eating. “It’s called the divorce diet.”

Meanwhile, Medea turns to the audience and makes her case:

“A bad thing has happened to me
You’re scared that if I name it, it might happen to you, too.
…Sleep, woman, sleep.
You won’t even feel it when he creeps to your side
and slits your throat.
What’s that you say? What about love?
Yes, you’re loving souls aren’t you?
You love the whole world,
You love your little hearts out.
It’s all right, you can hate me.
Go ahead, feel free.
It’s so much easier than hating yourselves.

Medea has other voices speaking with her, ones more intimate: the Tutor and the Nurse and the Cleaner. The Cleaner is clear-eyed and clear-spoken and shares what she learned from her mother: the best revenge is to be happy. Pretend if you don’t feel it. Women are good at pretending.

The eventual playing out of the story is unique yet retains the pain of the original. We hear Creon slyly telling Medea “You know, you look completely different when you smile” while she is in the midst of her life’s most curdling trial. “There’s the sourness again. The problem with you is you don’t know how to love…an unloving woman is a freak.”

The audience undoubtedly feels stress levels rising as the characters have interleaved speaking parts—talking over one another. If you’ve ever been witness to a disagreement, this is one…after another…after another. Any uncomfortableness we feel when Jason and Medea are speaking is relieved by Nurse, Tutor, and Cleaner pointing to the absurdities of male expectations. But the best joke goes to Aegeus, who will become Medea’s second husband.

Aegeus, speaking to a Medea distraught about the money Jason expects from the marriage says he understands Jason is about to get his needs “assuaged” by a wealthy heiress. This word comes as a surprise in the midst of conversation and surely would elicit a burst of laughter in any theatre. The word joke may only work in English, but its excessive formality and sound-similarity to “massage” is a perfect bomb.

Cusk’s originality in portraying the oldest stories of all—love and infidelity—continues to entrance. I am even more impressed now with her fictional trilogy Outline than I was before I read whatever I could of her work. This author is special. In a book talk at Politics & Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C., Cusk says a criterion to use when creating is that a work should be “useful.” Exactly. That’s why her work, her honesty, her humor, her willingness ‘to go there’ is so exciting. What she does keeps us alive.

“Hate is a bottomless cup; I will pour and pour”

“Let no one think me mean-spirited and weak, nor of a gentle temper, but of a contrary disposition to my foes relentless, and to my friends kind: for the lives of such sort are more glorious.”

I love Greek tragedies. They take a human experience and play it out to an extreme, which casts it in such an interesting light.

Medea has made many sacrifices for her marriage to Jason. She killed her brother and has been banished from her home. So when Jason takes the King’s daughter as another wife (only to better the family's situation he’s quick to assure her), Medea is unforgiving.

Okay, so we probably wouldn’t go to the extent she did, killing a bunch of people just to exact the ultimate revenge on Jason, but we’d feel it, wouldn’t we. Sure we would. We might even imagine the gory details, “… the white foam bursting from her mouth, and her mistress rolling her eyeballs from their sockets …” Euripides really runs with these gory details by the way, including flesh dropping from bones and all kinds of nasty stuff.

It seems stories of humans committing wretched deeds have always been, and will go on forever.

“O thou abomination!”

از سری ریویوهای غیبت صغری (خطر لو رفتن)
راسیتش با نگاه یه انسان مدرن نتونستم این اثر رو بخونم و زمانه‌ای که ازش دم می‌زد برام مهم‌تر بود تا فمنیستی که به کرات اشاره میشد.
وقتی دو نفر از دو جامعه‌ی گوناگون به هم می‌رسن و تفاوت‌ها رو در نظر نمی‌گیرن، به طغیان و عصیانگری می‌تونن چنگ بزنن و موجبات رو به زوال رفتن حتی انسانیت رو به ارمغان بیارن. چرا؟ چون عشقشون دیگه شعله‌ور نیست و تازه فهمیدن انتخابشون از چه قرار بوده. منطق وقتی حکم‌فرما میشه، تازه دوزاری عزیزان می‌افته که فقط عاشق گل روی بزرگوار شده بود و جوانب رو نسنجید. ازدواجی هم که کورکورانه و با کشت و کشتار شکل بگیره، سرانجام خوبی هم نخواهد داشت (البته طرف خیلی کور باشه میتونه همچنان ادامه بده). به همین خاطر، اعمال مده‌آ برای من خواننده زیاد جالب نبود. چون درک و پذیرش در عشق بین این دو نفر، انگار وجود خارجی نداشت و هیچ ایده‌ای از دنیای همدیگه نداشتن (که البته اوکیه و قرار هم نیست زوجین فهمیده و باشعور باشن).
وقتی یکی از پایه‌ای ترین مسائل روابط در این بین وجود نداشته باشه، تغییر (شاید اغراق‌آمیز) مده‌آ و عشقی که به نفرت تبدیل شد، چنین بلایایی هم در پیش می‌گیره. به همین خاطر، بال و پر دادن به احساسات و کمرنگ شدن منطق به قیمت هر چیز و کسی، از مده‌آ برای من شخصیت مقبولی نساخت (منطق سگی فقط رو من جواب میده و طغیان احساسات رو با این شدت نمیتونم نقطه‌ی قوت به حساب بیارم).
اگرچه دغدغه‌هایی که بیان می‌کرد و مقایسه‌ای که از جایگاه زن و مرد ارائه می‌داد، احترام من رو به خودش زیاد می‌کرد اما از طرفی هم رویه‌ای که در پیش گرفته بود برخلاف نگرش منه و انتظار داشتم زیرکانه عمل کنه، نه به بهای از دست دادن همه‌ی پل‌های پشت سرش (اون هم چه پل‌هایی!).
زن بربر و یونانی تفاوت‌های قابل توجهی دارن. اگه خواننده مطلع نباشه فکر میکنه که مده‌آ حرکت شگفت‌انگیزی زده و برخلاف زمانه و ساختارشکن رفتار کرده. اما خب اینطور نبوده و با بخشی از مقاله‌ی مربوطه، واضح‌تر منظورم رو میتونم انتقال بدم:

The concept of the transgressive female was important in the construction of the barbarian, both supernatural and human alike. The supremacy of the Athenian man over the Athenian woman was an integral part of the social fabric and was just as crucial in the process of construction of selfhood as supremacy over non-Greeks. The so-called female traits of insatiability (both sexual and materialistic), disorder, irrationality, and unpredictability were traits projected on Persians and centaurs alike. These traits were epitomized in the figure of the Amazon warrior, representative of the very antithesis of everything the Greeks (and especially the Athenians) stood for: a barbarian gynaecocracy.

خلاصه که انتخاب پارتنر هم‌تایپ خیلی مهمه. البته از اون مهم‌تر این هست که نگرش طرف مقابل و ابعاد زندگیش هم لحاظ کرد. با احساس نمیشه یه زندگی رو شروع کرد چون با همون احساس هم تموم میشه. به علاوه، شخصیت به شدت عاطفی‌ای که منطقش هم به گوز بند شده نمیتونه من رو درگیر کنه. منطق به جای خود و احساس هم به همین ترتیب. وقتی یکی غلبه کنه، زندگی جای قشنگی برای زیستن نمیشه. تعادل می‌تونه چنین چیزی رو به ارمغان بیاره.

از سارای بی‌بدیلم متشکرم که دوران عید رو به نمایشنامه‌خوانی اختصاص داد و تونستم تجارب خوبی رو با گروهی که برگزار کرد رقم بزنم.

پ.ن:واقفم که ریویو هیچ نظمی نداره و مثل ذهنم مشوش و ژولیده هست. فقط خواستم تا ته‌مونده‌های حافظه به باد نرفته ازش کمی بگم و کمال‌گرایی هم سر نوشتن کنار بذارم.