Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides - Hardcover

Euripides

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1590171802 ISBN 13: 9781590171806

Publisher: NYRB Classics, 2006

Synopsis

Euripides, the last of the three great tragedians of ancient Athens, reached the height of his renown during the disastrous Peloponnesian War, when democratic Athens was brought down by its own outsized ambitions. “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.” 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. Euripides’ plays rarely won first prize in the great democratic competitions of ancient Athens, but their combustible mixture of realism and extremism fascinated audiences throughout the Greek world. In the last days of the Peloponnesian War, Athenian prisoners held captive in far-off Sicily were said to have won their freedom by reciting snatches of Euripides’ latest tragedies.
 
Four of those tragedies are here presented in new translations by the contemporary poet and classicist Anne Carson. They are Herakles, in which the hero swaggers home to destroy his own family; Hekabe, set after the Trojan War, in which Hektor’s widow takes vengeance on her Greek captors; Hippolytos, about love and the horror of love; and the strange tragic-comedy fable Alkestis, which tells of a husband who arranges for his wife to die in his place. The volume also contains brief introductions by Carson to each of the plays along with two remarkable framing essays: “Tragedy: A Curious Art Form” and “Why I Wrote Two Plays About Phaidra.”

About this title

From the Back Cover:

"Writing with a pitch and heat that gets to the heart of the unforgiving classical world, Carson, a poet translates four of the 18 surviving plays by Euripides: Alkestis, Herakles, Hekabe and Hippolytos. Worth the price of admission alone is Carson’s blistering essay-afterword, written in Euripides’s voice, which asks questions like "Is all anger sexual?" This amazing book gets very close to the playwright’s enigmatic answers."--Publishers Weekly, starred review

About the Author:

Anne Carson is professor of classics and comparative literature at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She has been honored with the Lannan Award for Poetry and the Pushcart Prize for Poetry. In 2000, she received the MacArthur Genius fellowship. She was twice a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

About this edition

• Publisher: NYRB Classics
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 1590171802
• ISBN 13: 9781590171806
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 312