From Homer onwards, it is accompanied by another word which has had an astonishing career and lives on in the European languages of the present day: daimon, the demon, the demonic being. The Herakles is a broken play - split in half by the grief it contains, and the Alkestis, too, is split in half, with its merriment on one side of the house and its mourning on the other. In her poem “Clive Song,” the underworld that is Guantánamo Bay seems to have its own pitiless Hades and bureaucratic Cerberus.

And while Hippolytos himself is flawed given his obsessive abstinence, it would be hard not to see Phaidra as the heroine, who struggles between what she knows is best for everyone, and what she wants most of all. 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.lots of people claim to ‘love the translation’ of a text of which they don't speak the original language and I'm always feeling stupid and wondering, like, if you don’t speak the original how can you judge the translation? 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. Carson argues in this essay that a type of “metaphysical silence” occurs when it is impossible to translate a word directly from one language to another: “Metaphysical silence happens inside words themselves. To convey word for word and to convey the spirit are two different aims; to do both is difficult, nigh-impossible for some texts.

Tragedy is the statement of an expiation, but not he miserable expiation of a codified breach of a local arrangement organized by the knaves for the fools. Ive read and taught it so many times, I don't think I have anything new to say about it, but its an old friend and like the Hekabe features great social commentary. 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.Hercules killed his beloved children and wife, but was pulled from committing suicide by his beloved friend Theseus. I think I’ve mentioned before I’ve seen a Carson translation on stage and didn’t feel it worked that well (not necessarily the author’s fault).

Moreover, Euripides forces the reader to consider what to do after grief and trauma, and argues that the only way out is to continue living.This totally makes sense given the translator's intention in compiling these together, but as a new reader to Euripides, it would have been nice to have more context. i keep on thinking about how weird it is, what an accident of history, that these works are foundational to the western tradition but also only some of them, really. But the one who aims a bow- world's best weapon-can shoot a thousand arrows 190 and still have some to save his life.

The issue of such a union can take a reader's breath away because it just seems so right—a work that stands firmly on its own but is somehow contented to be the sum of its parts.Accompanied by a chorus of cows and dogs, Hekabe mourns the death of a final heir (drawn as a sapling) and says, ‘We can’t go on/ we go on. 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. So I-left in the house here to care for the children, along with their mother, when my son went underground- I've set us up at the altar of Zeus Savior, built by my son to mark his victory over the Minyans.