Anne Carson's Grief Lessons

The next Euripides translations by Anne Carson I read were the four in Grief Lessons:

1. In Herakles, the hero returns home just in time to save his family from execution by the tyrant who has usurped the throne, only to be driven mad (by Hera) and made to murder his wife and children himself.
   
   This play is most notable, as pointed out by Carson, for the ending, in which his loyal friend Theseus arrives as he returns to his right mind and prevents Herakles from killing himself. They leave together to build a new future. But I was also fond of the role of Madness, who protests her awful task only to be told by Iris, "Hera didn't send you here to practice sanity."



2. In Hekabe, set after the Trojan War, the widowed Queen of Troy and mother of Hektor and Paris, now a slave being transported to Greece, is consumed by her grief and despair until the murder of her youngest son reignites her sense of purpose in a desire for vengeance on his murderer.
   
   Hekabe, for me, is fascinating because it's about the murders of two of her children, and while she is prostate with grief even before the first, her reactions to the two are so different. (This is about the aftermath of the Trojan War, so, obviously, discussion of child murder, war, slavery, and rape beneath the cut.)( Read more... )



3. In Hippolytos, the titular son of Theseus is a self-righteous woman-hater whose sex-repulsedness drives him to publicly deride the goddess Aphrodite, who engineers his downfall by making his stepmother Phaidra fall in love with him.
   
   The character interests me greatly because he seems to be a sex-repulsed asexual, dedicating himself to Artemis etc, at first. But ( Read more... )



4. Then there's the strange tragicomic Alkestis, which tells of a husband who arranges for his wife to die in his place.
   
   Mostly tragic, it ends with a surprise twist and superficially (but doubtfully) a happy one: Herakles wins her back from Death and presents her to her husband... but she seems stiff and can't speak (for three days, we're told). Did she come back wrong? Is she really back? Etc. (Tumblr should love that.) Wikipedia tells me tantalizingly that whether Admetus, her husband, is selfish is a hotly-contested subject of critical debate, without any further reference. ( Read more... )

There are short introductory essays by Carson to each of the plays, plus two framing essays: "Tragedy: A Curious Art Form" and "Why I Wrote Two Plays About Phaidra."

I wasn't as taken with these as with Bakkhai, Carson's celebrated translation of The Bacchae, which premiered in 2015 with the enchanting Ben Whishaw as Dionysos (Wax and I both remembered the publicity photos of this production from Tumblr). But having recently read Hippolytus and Alcestis in alternate translations from the U of Chicago volume, I can still say that I liked Carson's more, for the most part.