Euripides (MÖ. 480-MÖ. 406)

kişiler kimlerdir, rolleri nelerdir;

-Admetos, kendisi, başından olaylar geçen kişi, ölüme mahkum olmuş.

-Alkestis, Admetosun karısı, fedakar, yerine ölümü kabul etmiş.

-Pheres, babası, cenazede biraz tartışırlar. çünkü canını, oğlu yerine vermemiştir.

The goddesses agreed to let Admetus escape his designated day of death
if he could satisfy the gods below by sending in his place another corpse.

Admetus went to everyone who loved him: his father, and his old mother—who gave him life—
and asked them one by one if they would do it.

No one except his wife would die for him and see the light no more.

It made me tear up, Euripides never disappoints.

Really like the story and the commentary was very insightful!

what a weird little thing, uh. It's plot--and the themes therein--feel wholly too ambitious for its brief runtime, often resulting in long passages of text as a means of exploring those ideas in an efficient manner, not an engaging one. i think it works best when there is active conversation: the conversation between herakles and the servant, and the argument between admetos and his father were the two scenes that really worked for me. even then, it feels half-baked in its conclusion, but is still somewhat remarkable in how much ground it does manage to cover (love, grief, selfishness, mortality, class, gender) in its brevity.

Admet would rather anyone die but him and throws a tantrum at his parents for not wanting to perish in his place - they're old, they should go! -, but then mopes about losing his formidable wife, who volunteers to do so. The fact that he could at any phase have stopped his wife from dying instead of him falls on deaf ears, like it's not even a real possibility.
No matter. Having influential friends is all you need. Being a good host to Apollo will grant you trick death, since he'll get the Moirai drunk. Being a good host to Herakles will have him bring your wife back from the dead. In the end, respecting the rules of hospitality both started the imbroglio and fixed it. All's well that end's well. Except for the relationship with the parents, that's ruined. Oh, well.

Death:

I know.
I know what I'm up against.
You and your bright ideas, for one.
You will find the minds of human beings
With lunatic illusions,
A general anaesthesia,
A fuzzy euphoria,
A universal addiction
To the drug of their games,
Chasing a ball or power or money,
Or torturing each other,
Or cheating each other -
All that drama!
You know it.
But I cannot understand why you do it.
As far as I am concerned, their birth-cry
Is the first cry of the fatally injured.
The rest is you - and your morphine.
That is wht they call you the god of healing.
Life is your hospital and you call it a funfair.
Your silly sickroom screen of giggling faces,
Your quiverful of hypodermic syringes
That you call arrows of inspiration.

Thus Death to Apollo. The Gleaner has come for Alcestis who has offered her life in place of her husband's. This is a thoroughly modern translation as the extract above demonstrates. The whole reads beautifully, and I could imagine seeing the play staged. I had imagined Brian Blessed playing Death but later Heracles comes to visit, and in a drunken egofest proclaims the glory of his achievements:

The dung spilled like fermenting glaciers
Down the valleys.
The Aegean stables
Were a quiet volcano
Of slow, steaming excrement.
A solid, static, itching eruption of ordure.

The best things in life are chanced, like this wonderful play coming my way in a secondhand shop. Backwards to the Greeks, to tragedy, and a reminder to get my collected poems of Robinson Jeffers back.

so you’ll be shocked to hear euripides is good actually

This is a review of the play, not this translation. I read Paul Roche's translation, which (as usual) was clear but not smashingly elegant.

Bleak is the road...I am coming.

Alcestis, the earliest of his extant plays, shows Euripides doing what he does best: overturning the rocks of myth and poking at the worms underneath. The story: Admetus has been promised by his buddy Apollo that he can escape death if, when his time comes, he can convince someone else to die in his place. Sadly, no one wants to do this for Admetus except his loving wife, Alcestis, who faithfully dies for him. And if that sounds like "WTF dude" to you, well, folks did things differently back then - but actually it sounds pretty fucked up to Euripides too, so here we go.

The juicy part of the play comes when Admetus's dad Pheres shows up. Admetus is on his way to bury Alcestis, and he's understandably a bit raw, and he starts raging at his dad, who is after all super old and why couldn't he have died? And his dad is like

"I'm the coward, you say, you - you prince of cowards
Shown up by a woman who died for you!
...Keep your mouth shut, coward, and remember
If you love your life, so does everybody."

Lol, pwned. Once again, Euripides the trickster breaks the cocks off the Greek statues.

The play is confused by the intervention of Heracles, who kinda bails everyone out and gives us a sudden happy ending. Fuckin' Heracles, right? It's often, as my boy Ronald points out, difficult to classify Euripides' plays, and that holds true here. It mixes comic and tragic tones and leaves you unsure what you've got. But this is one of my favorites.

Update: with time, the deus ex Heracles has kinda gotten to me; I'm downgrading this to four stars because of the ending.

Timeless play, awesome translation. My review from 2003 (which is apparently too long for this site (4000 character limit? Wha?)) [http://users.livejournal.com/_quodlib...]

Some favorite bits:

DEATH
Don't you know how paltry and precarious
Life is? I am not a god.
I am the magnet of the cosmos.
What you call death
Is simply my natural power,
The pull of my gravity. And life
Is a brief weightlessness-an aberration
From the status quo-which is me.
...
Their lives are the briefest concession,
My concession, a nod of permission.
As if I dozed off and dreamed a little.

As far as I'm concerned, their birth-cry
Is the first cry of the fatally injured.

Man is deluded and his ludicrous gods
Are his delusion. Death is death is death.

----

CHORUS 2
How hideous
That we should be given the understanding
To know
Just how hideous it is.
Wouldn't it be better
To knot a rope round your neck
And hang yourself in the empty face of heaven?

ADMENTOS
We must sing
In defiance of this loathsome god
Who collects our bodies
With anger at our reluctance,
Like a debt collector.

CHORUS 3
If there were as much hope
As water clings to the point of a needle.

CHORUS 1
If there were as much hope
As a single spark whirling upwards into the night
From a pyre-

CHORUS 2
If there were hope.


---

CHORUS 2
The greatest, the most gifted, all perish
Under the earth.
They have only one regret:
The days they wasted multiplying laments
Over what could not be helped.

Research for the Silent Patient

This isn’t the translation I read— I read the translation by Rachel Kitzinger in The Greek Plays (2016) edited by Mary Lefkowitz and James Romm. My first Euripides play— the personal drama was intense— highlighting bitter conflicts with parents, grandparents, children, spouses, and all of it getting interrupted by an unexpected guest.
I was surprised by the ending, and I get Kitzinger’s description in the intro: “Some call it a tragedy, others a tragicomedy; still others highlight its strangeness a by calling it”pro-satyric” (“taking the place of a satyr play”) (439). Reminded me of Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing.