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

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Not sure but they are a nicely representative sampling of Euripides’ corpus of 19 plays (17 if you eliminate Cyclops and Rhesus, the authenticity of which many scholars have long doubted). Hekabe, the fallen queen of Troy, watches her last child get slaughtered in the still-smoking ruins of Troy. Hippolyta's name would have been 'he who sets horses free'; Hippolytos' name, though, means something more like 'he who the horses destroy'. Too often, modernizations like these can seem gimmicky—reflexive attempts to make old plays relevant to new audiences. While the Greek word theos is commonly used to describe the appearance of a god in person, in this play it is fitting that Euripides often refers to Dionysus as a daimon, a much more nebulous word to define or translate.

Old man side by side with old man-as our young spears once stood side by side in war, no shame to our glorious country. I've always liked Herakles because it inverts the normal chronology of the labors and makes an interesting point out of it. CHORUS ( entrance song) Leaning on my stick I come, quavering my laments, like some old white bird- I am nothing but words, 110 just a shape of dreams or night. Instead, they tend to be a place for the translator to discuss the theme of grief, among other things.

This might explain why I'm filled with extra rage after watching a banal "we're okay, you're okay, la la la" American movie. By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions. Herakles is a fantastic play that I think fully captures the tragedy of someone great brought low, and by no fault of their own. These plays spit in the eye of anyone who claims, "It all worked out for the best," or "There's a reason for everything. The women at the center of this shattering play-turned-graphic novel lose husbands, sons, brothers and grandsons among them, brutally.

To convey word for word and to convey the spirit are two different aims; to do both is difficult, nigh-impossible for some texts. is nothing less than brilliant—unfalteringly sharp in diction, audacious and judicious in taking liberties. Theories have ranged widely, from a claim that the drama mirrors a deathbed conversion of a poet who had previously rejected the pantheon of gods to an assertion that it is a commentary on religious fanaticism. The book hit its zenith right in the last three pages, I could read Anne Carson wax poetic as Euripides for days.

Even the infamous Helen, a shape-shifter who appears as a silver fox and a mirror, must defend her life to her husband, the king Menelaos, after Hekabe wants her ‘sentenced to death out of her own mouth’ for her apparent complicity in the downfall of Troy…. But books can seem like anachronisms to us, too, in the age of e-readers and smartphones, when information is immediate and ethereal and pleasure so often lacks a body of any kind.