Anne Carson's Grief Lessons

[cimorene]

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.)
   
   The Queen and all the women of Troy are prisoners on their way to lives of slavery in Greece - rape, abuse, and misery. Hekabe's despair is total; there is nothing but evil all around her. And yet right after the murder of her daughter prostrates her on the ground weeping, learning of her son's murder galvanizes her to action.
   
   Agamemnon, general of the army, rapist of her daughter Kassandra, who sacrificed his own daughter for a sailing wind before the war and sacrifices her other daughter (his favored concubine's sister!) at the beginning of the play for another, sympathizes with her in this case! Why? The murderer of her youngest son violated the Greek code of guest and host (Paris's crime as well - but Paris abused his host by stealing his wife, while King Polymestor of Thrace abused his guest by murdering him for the gold he brought with him), and deserves her revenge.
   
   The sacrifice of her daughter at the beginning was just too bad, because the ghost of Achilles demanded that his tomb be consecrated with the sacrifice of the most beautiful virgin slave instead of the usual sacrifices (bulls and other livestock), and the Greeks owed it to him for being so good at fighting; denying his request would be dishonorable. The enslavement of the entire female population of Troy is just war, honorable because it is justified by Paris's abuse of the Greek guest code.
   
   Meanwhile from my standpoint, every man who rapes slaves is garbage, and that's probably most of the upper class men of Greece and likely most of the "barbarian" lands (like Thrace and Troy). But these virgin sacrifices are even more horrifying, and Euripides tells us Odysseus is to blame, just in case anyone hated Agamemnon for the murder of Iphigenia but still liked crafty Odysseus:
   
   

   Waves of dissent broke over the army.
   Opinions ran through them--some said yes to the sacrifice, some said no.
   Agamemnon it was
   who urged your interests,
   loyal as he is to the prophetic girl--
   your daughter Kassandra--or at least to her bed.
   Then the sons of Theseus made two declarations:
   that the tomb of Achilles be crowned with fresh blood, that the spear of Achilles not rank second to Kassandras bed. Words were tight on both sides until the old dazzler got up--
   that crowdpleasing, honeytalking, wordchopping Odysseus.
   He convinced the army not to deny
   the best of all the Greeks
   for the sake of a slaves sacrifice,
   not to let a single dead soul down below
   claim that Greeks are ungrateful to Greeks
   who died on the plain of Troy.

   
   
   He argues with Hekabe about this issue in an even more harrowing scene later.
   
   Anyway, because Agamemnon agrees that this ONE murder was bad, he helps Hekabe get revenge. But don't worry: she doesn't kill the murderer of her son. Instead the Trojan women hold him down and make him watch while they murder his two children, then gouge out his eyes, and Agamemnon rules that this was just because he deserved to be punished! 🙃 "A child for a child leaves everybody without children, but oh well, he killed hers first so it's fine." - Agamemnon.



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 his fetishizing of sexual purity could equally be a weird kink. It's clearly not JUST a sex repulsion, because (a) he's dumb enough to publicly say insulting things about a very real and powerful goddess when he could easily have paid her the same respect the members of his society generally did pay to the other gods besides their blorbos, and (b) he later goes on a truly unhinged misogynistic rant about how women shouldn't, uh, exist at all. Funny, because he's the son of Hippolyta, the queen of the Amazons (the one who marries Theseus in A Midsummer Night's Dream). And you know. Amazons.



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.
   
   I admit that this occurred to me too. Before Herakles brings her back, there's a scene where Admetus's father appears to offer sympathy at the funeral, and Admetus berates him at length for not volunteering to die for him instead, calling him selfish and saying he wants to disown him. Which is unhinged behavior from someone who then went on to ask his wife to die for him instead lmao. His father retorts at length, calling him selfish and saying that he himself is the murderer and essentially, he's projecting. (Without making a visible impression on Admetus, but it's a good point.)
   
   However, here's the counter: Admetus is the King. If he died, what would happen to Alkestis and his minor children? Well, the above-mentioned events of Herakles suggest an answer, as do Penelope's trials in the Odyssey. Alkestis wouldn't be allowed to rule; she would be forced into a marriage with a new ruler, most likely, if she wasn't killed. And in either case her children would risk being killed to prevent their someday challenging the new ruler. And it's also fully possible that Admetus didn't have any way of preventing this: Apollo tricked this concession from the Fates for him! He might have found it very difficult, or dangerous, to refuse a gift from Apollo.

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.

Comments

[cathexys]

Have you seen her more recent translation/adaptation/transformation of Herakles: https://www.poetrynw.org/anne-carson-h-of-h-playbook/

I'm deciding whether to order it, but yeah, I just taught Orestes yet again, and my students adore Euripides' sardonic take after the much more steady and respectable Aeschylus and Sophocles :)

Loving your reviews btw!!!

[cimorene]

I saw that book listed but I didn't realize it was a different translation! So I bought Grief Lessons instead. I suppose I'll read it after the others. I have just bought Emily Wilson's other translations including ones by Seneca (I only have the vaguest idea who that even is because all my Greek mythology trivia is founded on when I became an Edith Hamilton fangirl at like age 12, up until I read Wilson's Iliad and Odyssey last year).