Elle (ellexamines)'s Reviews > Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides

There is a theory that watching unbearable stories about other people lost in grief and rage is good for you – may cleanse you of your darkness. Do you want to go down to the pits of yourself all alone? Not much. What if an actor could do it for you? Isn’t that why they are called actors? They act for you. You sacrifice them to action. And this sacrifice is a mode of deepest intimacy of you with your own life.

The Greek concept of catharsis is a fascinating one and one easy to misunderstand.
ORIGINAL COMMENTARY: I often struggle with tragedy, in its inevitable sad ending: to me, sadness with happiness at the end are often more cathartic. But the idea that seeing sadness at the end is the true point: that, to me, is fascinating.
UPDATED COMMENTARY: I have actually been in a Greek Tragedy class now and read fifteen greek plays (a long review can be found here), so I feel more qualified to talk about this now. As given by Aristotle, the definition of a tragedy is not actually in its sad ending: it is in experiencing human suffering. (Most of the extant plays, not by coincidence but by generations of selection, end negatively.) Catharsis, by his definition, is a type of cleaning: "we experience, then expurgate these emotions". Tragedy can attempt to make the worst experiences consumable. It is not the ending, but the process.

On Colloquial Translation

Anne Carson’s style of translation often focuses on colloquialism: making a text often translated in direct wording into something palatable for readers. This translation of this text feels… raw. Carson does not waste words: the sense of a line is conveyed, not perhaps the exact wording. (This review gives a good example of how, as does this post on the Oresteia.)

Having spent the last eight years in Latin class (I know), I have learned that to make a text as readable to modern eyes as it would have been to ancient ones is a very different skill than direct translation. To convey word for word and to convey the spirit are two different aims; to do both is difficult, nigh-impossible for some texts. Debates over the merit of certain translated works are rife in scholarly circles.

For those of you more interested in the politics of translation, here are some cool things I found while going down a rabbit hole on this topic last month:
→Cecily Fasham, on the politics of translating sappho
→a tumblr post on the politics of translation
→Emily Wilson, interview notes on The Odyssey

The Play Reviews

→Heracles ★★★★☆ Euripides← (421-416 BCE)
This was my personal least favorite of the plays I read for this collection, possibly because of how thoughtless it is: no decision is made by any character that caused this ill, simply a trickery of the gods. It feels deeply wrong and deeply unsatisfying. I believe is the point. Sometimes, the world is too evil to show mercy.

Notable Lines (Anne Carson translation):

HERAKLES: Come back! Even as a shadow, even as a dream.

→Hekabe ★★★★★ Euripides← (424 BCE)
There is a sense of inevitable death that pervades this play: taking place during a mythical war, it serves on some level as a reflection of the destruction of society that Euripides himself would have feared during the Peloponnesian Wars. 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. This fate is horrifying, but what I found most horrifying about it was its ambiguity: she has received a prophecy about her fate, but we shall never really see the truth of it. In her new life as a Greek slave, she will perhaps become a dog anyway.

Notable Lines (Anne Carson translation):

AGAMEMNON: O poor woman. There is no measure to your evils.
HEKABE: I do not exist. There is nothing else. Not even evils.

CHORUS: Don’t sweep the whole female species together for condemnation
because of your own catastrophe.
We are many—some blameless,
some not.

→Hippolytus ★★★★★ Euripides← (428 BCE)
In her introduction to this text, Carson says two things that stuck out to me:
→[Hippolytos] seems to want to place Artemis, and himself, in a special third gender—the translucent gender—unpolluted by flesh or change.
→If you asked to Hippolytos to name his system he would say “shame”. Oddly, if you asked Phaedra to name her system she would also say “shame”. They do not mean the same thing by this word. Or perhaps they do. Too bad they never talk.
The politics of shame lie at the heart of this text. What is it to love, what is it to be ashamed of that love? It's really interesting that the male character, Hippolytos, is the one taking on this role of being in love with chastity. It's also interesting that he, like Phaedra and like Theseus, is taking on the role of his Amazon mother. Phaedra, daughter to Pasiphae, is in love with the impossible and impossibly ashamed; Theseus, son of Aegeus, takes on his stubbornness. (The family tree helps.)

A fun tidbit from my Greek Tragedy teacher, who is in love with Greek double meanings: Hippolytus derives from 'horses' and the verb λυω or 'luo', which can mean either 'to release' or 'to destroy'; it is also ambiguous whether 'hippos' is the subject or the object. Hippolyta's name would have been 'he who sets horses free'; Hippolytos' name, though, means something more like 'he who the horses destroy'. As they do.

This was my favorite of these four plays.

Notable Lines (Anne Carson translation):

NURSE: Not much profit in desire then,
If everyone touched by it has to die.

→Alcestis ★★★★☆ Euripides← (438 BCE)
This is a strange and comedic tragedy. Admetos loves his wife and yet is okay to watch her die for him: either way, however, he gets her back. It's a splitting of fate unexpected in this genre (Oedipus wishes).

Notable Lines (Anne Carson translation):

CHORUS: We all owe a debt to death, you know.

ADMETOS: if I found another savior, if I look upon this daylight, it’s her I owe.
I hate the going on of doors!

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