An Oresteia

January 19, 2009
Signature

Reviewed by
Jennifer Michael Hecht
This is a very strange masterpiece. It is an ancient Greek tragedy, but also new, and not just because Carson is its brilliant and original translator. The work of only three ancient Greek playwrights who wrote tragedies survives: Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. They were the voices of distinct generations. Sadly, only a few of even their
plays have made it down to us. Worse, the plays were often written as sets of three, and only one full set survives: the “Orestia,” Aeschylus's story of the blood-drenched Atreus family.
The odd thing is that among the surviving plays of the other two, Sophocles and Euripides, there exist plays about this same family, at different points in the action. Putting them together—as Carson does here—gives us a whole new set. Creating an Orestia
comprising a play from each of the tragedians, translated by the same person, was the idea of theater director Brian Kulick. Carson tells us in her introduction that she initially resisted. As she had already translated two of the plays in question, she happily gave in. Lucky for us. We get to witness the horror unfold while also watching the ancient style develop: ever more players, ever more of the inner life, ever more self-reflection and wit. The laws of the story go from mythic, to human, to pure chaos.
The drama is all blood: Dad kills daughter (for luck in war!); and mom kills dad in revenge (and because both have new lovers); the children kill mom in revenge for dad; and Orestes, who performed the matricide, has a howling, bedridden, breakdown. Elektra tells Orestes, in the second play, that no degradation could be worse than “to live in a house with killers.” In the third play they discover something worse: being killers. It all ends in an orgy of violence, madness, a sudden god and two marriages. Readers will find stunning expressions of the pain that grown children feel after bad parental separations and neglect. The various characters' impressions of events is psychologically enthralling, and the poetry is sublime.
Carson is one of the great poets writing today and is an equally compelling translator. Her language here is clear and comfortable and the volume can be read fast, like a novel, for a weird and thrilling ride. Read it slowly and you will find grace everywhere. When Helen of Troy explains how some widows of soldiers are angry with her and Elektra says, “No kidding.” The great Greek playwrights may still be ancient, but the play is triumphantly fresh—and bloodier than a vampire novel.
Jennifer Michael Hecht is a historian and poet, author of
Doubt a History and
Funny: Poems, among other books.

February 15, 2009
The versatile poet and scholar breaks new ground by retelling an old story—the classical tragedy of the House of Atreus, as dramatized by the three greatest tragedians of Athens's Golden Age.

Acting on a suggestion from a theater director friend, Carson (Grief Lessons, 2006, etc.) offers a sequential version of the often-told tale of murder, betrayal and revenge performed in the aftermath of the Trojan War, in free-verse translations of plays focused on King Agamemnon, his daughter Elektra and her brother Orestes, as told by Aiskhylos, Sophocles and Euripides, respectively. Each is prefaced by Carson's brief"Introduction." For example, she points out Aiskhylos's emphasis on the role of captured Trojan princess Kassandra, who envisions the ruin ensuing from the war and from Agamemnon's sacrifice of his daughter, which set his queen Klytaimestra onto her murderous path. Though the pace and dramatic momentum of each play never flags, readers may balk at Carson's employment of conversational, colloquial and often jarringly anachronistic speech. Arresting coinages like"dreamvisible" and (as an adjective)"rawblood," and superb use of animal imagery (e.g., Kassandra's characterization of Agamemnon's murderess as"a soft lion [that] tumbles in the master's bed/awaiting him"), jostle with reductive language that labels the temptress Helen"that weapon of mass destruction" or permits a terrified slave to warn of"real bad shit happening." Nevertheless, the lethal velocity of"Agamemnon," the arc of guilt and doom that courses throughout"Elektra," even the Euripidean melodrama of the ferocious closure enacted in"Orestes"—all grate on the reader's nerves with unflinching intensity.

It's a great narrative, whose savage grandeur holds an undiminished power to enthrall. But is Carson's unconventional conflation of its components indeed"an Oresteia" for our time? That's another story.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

February 15, 2009
Carson (classics & comparative literature, Univ. of Michigan) has translated, edited, and assembled three classic plays into a single volume of rage and revenge. These versions, to be performed by the Classic Stage Company in New York this spring, will need the magic and spectacle of live theater to vivify them, because they weigh heavily on the page. Carson's command of the original language must assuredly be great, and her poetry (e.g., "The Beauty of the Husband") has reaped many awards, but these translations make sustained attention difficult. "Agamemnon" begins with the Watchman's bored lament, "I've peered at the congregation of the/ nightly starsbright powerful creatures/ blazing in air." Robert Fagles's more actor-friendly 1977 version of those lines"I know the stars by heart, / the armies of the night, and there in the lead/ the ones that bring us snow or the crops of summer, / bring us all we have/ our great blazing kings of the sky"reads and speaks more dramatically. Modern colloquialisms appear throughout the plays, but it's difficult to see how these translations will survive without strong and sustained performances by master actors and technicians. Recommended for research libraries and theater departments.Larry Schwartz, Minnesota State Univ. Lib., Moorhead

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