Grief Lessons: Four Plays: Four Plays By Euripi (New York Review Books (Paperback))

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The rest of the play considers whether a man who sentences himself to death can be saved, and, if so, by whom. His plays were shockers: he unmasked heroes, revealing them as foolish and savage, and he wrote about the powerless women and children, slaves and barbarians for whom tragedy was not so much exceptional as unending.

What’s it like to wear an eternal Olympian overall” appears on the verso side; “held up by the burning straps of” on the recto side; then, on the next set of pages, a handwritten question—“mortal shortfall? For we have lost our greatest friend” becomes, on an otherwise blank page, as if the entire myth had vanished, “We go in grief. 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. In their new collaborative comic-book adaptation of Euripides’ The Trojan Women, poet and classicist Anne Carson and artist Rosanna Bruno lean into the irrationality, the volatility of translation. A sample from her translations of tragedian demonstrates how Carson makes their sentences conform to her own tendency towards candid, unambiguous and humorous language.Carson has even engineered it so that the tetralogy here ends with one of Euripides' satyr plays: the Alkestis was originally performed in the fourth slot, the same one in which it is placed here, in place of the traditional satyr play. As a theater-enthousiast with a slight obsession for tragic stories and beautiful words, this definitely made my heart beat faster.

even if medea had never talked to aegeus, had no assurance of a place to go after leaving corinth, what happens at the end of medea can pretty much still happen.I wouldn’t have believed these images would work if I hadn’t seen them interacting with Carson’s swift, bold communication of Euripides’s words and spirit. Hekabe is a woman driven to drastic ends, but for her, any action is drastic because she has truly lost everything by this point, and cannot lose much more (besides Kassandra, but she is essentially lost to Hekabe). Euripides,” the classicist Bernard Knox has written, —was born never to live in peace with himself and to prevent the rest of mankind from doing so. And now that my son is down in the basement of the world, glorious Lykos wants us dead-Herakles' children, Herakles' wife (to quench the seed) and me, the man of the family I guess, 40 though I'm useless and old.