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4.47 AVERAGE
4.47 AVERAGE
adventurous
sad
medium-paced
adventurous
emotional
medium-paced
challenging
dark
emotional
tense
fast-paced
4-4.5 ★. I would say that to complain about a lack of stylistic and thematic coherence is to miss the point of this compilation.
Certainly the choice to cherry pick and juxtapose the three tragedians creates incongruities. The more contemporary (sometimes startling so - "weapons of mass destruction" comes to mind) translations also gives the entire work a vastly different tone.
But I think of these choices as another layer of interpretation. It's a sort of collage, the way that combining disparate parts through the lens of the artist creates a meaning larger than the sum of its parts.
Certainly the choice to cherry pick and juxtapose the three tragedians creates incongruities. The more contemporary (sometimes startling so - "weapons of mass destruction" comes to mind) translations also gives the entire work a vastly different tone.
But I think of these choices as another layer of interpretation. It's a sort of collage, the way that combining disparate parts through the lens of the artist creates a meaning larger than the sum of its parts.
On Translation
I've always had some difficulty reading Ancient Greek plays because the more traditional translations, which tend to keep a more formal register and complicated sentence structure, always felt a little remote. I was constantly conscious of their theatricality, of the aspect of spectacle that is the modern reader looking into the past.
By contrast, Carson's translations feel immediately more present, in all senses of the word; more accessible, visceral, and inviting empathy. I do think I might experience catharsis if I saw one of these performed live. And I think it's worth considering (for the classicists among you) that these language choices make Greek dramatists far more approachable for the average person on the street. To make something more accessible is to make it more relevant, and that to me makes it worth the disputes over the quality of translation.
By contrast, Carson's translations feel immediately more present, in all senses of the word; more accessible, visceral, and inviting empathy. I do think I might experience catharsis if I saw one of these performed live. And I think it's worth considering (for the classicists among you) that these language choices make Greek dramatists far more approachable for the average person on the street. To make something more accessible is to make it more relevant, and that to me makes it worth the disputes over the quality of translation.
On Collage, and the Premise Of This Thing
Going back to what I said about interpretation. I do think this Oresteia sort of becomes Carson's commentary - on the influence of time/context on the playwrights' perspective, as stated in the introduction, but also on how we (the readers) view characters, and how that is guided by the voice of the playwright. I'm only passingly familiar with Ancient Greek history, so I can't comment much on the former, but I will say that the attitude of each playwright to the canon, and their dramatic voices, are all distinct.
The strength of juxtaposing three authors is that we get a vastly different view of the same characters. Agamemnon's Clytemnestra is both magnificent, righteous and sympathetic, clearly vicious but understandably so; the incorporation of the Chorus (here, all old Greek men) lends itself to a commentary on gender that builds on the idea of justice that this play wrestles with. Elektra's Clytemnestra is shrewish, unfaithful and peevish, absent of the respect we accord her in Agamemnon. Instead we get Electra's perspective, and the play both fleshes her out and gives her agency. Then we come to Orestes, where Electra is more helpless, more forlorn, less defiantly wild. In Elektra Orestes was barely sketched out, a figure of calculated, reticent masculine assurance, in Orestes he is rendered vulnerable, wretched with grief. Our cast here is brought low and more desperate, matching the cynicism and disillusionment that pervades Euripides' contribution.
Carson is almost taking us by the hand and leading us like a silent spectre through the House of Atreus, asking us to continually reexamine our evaluation and connection to all its occupants, and to consider the different thematic aspects of the same epic. I found that this enhanced my (re)experience of the stories, and so I do appreciate the exercise in collage/interpretation that was this work.
The strength of juxtaposing three authors is that we get a vastly different view of the same characters. Agamemnon's Clytemnestra is both magnificent, righteous and sympathetic, clearly vicious but understandably so; the incorporation of the Chorus (here, all old Greek men) lends itself to a commentary on gender that builds on the idea of justice that this play wrestles with. Elektra's Clytemnestra is shrewish, unfaithful and peevish, absent of the respect we accord her in Agamemnon. Instead we get Electra's perspective, and the play both fleshes her out and gives her agency. Then we come to Orestes, where Electra is more helpless, more forlorn, less defiantly wild. In Elektra Orestes was barely sketched out, a figure of calculated, reticent masculine assurance, in Orestes he is rendered vulnerable, wretched with grief. Our cast here is brought low and more desperate, matching the cynicism and disillusionment that pervades Euripides' contribution.
Carson is almost taking us by the hand and leading us like a silent spectre through the House of Atreus, asking us to continually reexamine our evaluation and connection to all its occupants, and to consider the different thematic aspects of the same epic. I found that this enhanced my (re)experience of the stories, and so I do appreciate the exercise in collage/interpretation that was this work.
Aeschylus' AGAMEMNON
KLYTAIMESTRA: I am fearless and you know it.
Whether you praise or blame me I don't care.
Here lies Agamemnon, my husband, a dead
body, work of my righteous right hand.
Whether you praise or blame me I don't care.
Here lies Agamemnon, my husband, a dead
body, work of my righteous right hand.
I admit to being cheerfully biased as I've always been Team Clytemnestra and Team Everyone Except Agamemnon. I was surprised by the clarity that more contemporary language brings to Clytemnestra's justifications and the Chorus' admonishments (of her, of Cassandra, of Helen), but it makes this play all the more enjoyable.
KASSANDRA: [scream] [scream] ... The house is reeking blood!
I really liked the choice to disrupt meter and form for Cassandra, and the fact that (iirc) this translation gives her greater prominence in the play. Veering from madness and incoherence to starkly articulated grief, Cassandra the prophet becomes a grim forewarning of what is to befall the house. It also highlights Agamemnon's commentary on our ability to see our flaws and mete out justice, the idea of a rot, the ability of female characters to convince and gain sympathy. I did come away from feeling more for Cassandra than I recall the last time I read Agamemnon.
Sophocles' ELEKTRA
ELEKTRA: I ask this one thing:
let me go mad in my own way.
[...]
By dread things I am compelled... I know what I am.
... No number exists for griefs like these.
[...]
Do I not live? Badly, I know, but I live.
[...]
I must not violate Elektra.
let me go mad in my own way.
[...]
By dread things I am compelled... I know what I am.
... No number exists for griefs like these.
[...]
Do I not live? Badly, I know, but I live.
[...]
I must not violate Elektra.
Again, I'm extremely biased here because Electra is one of my favourite tragic characters ever. I think this is the best out of the trilogy, if only because its main character is as defiant and tragic a personality as the pace and tone of the play itself.
Electra is a woman without agency, a creature of wrath and despair who cannot act and so must voice her grief. That tension between the need to act and the inability to do so, combined with her keen self-awareness, makes her a deeply compelling character. She knows her desires to be both right and wrong, she recognises the trap she is in and that it is not wholly of her own making, she knows herself to be "extreme" and that this will not lead to any good end. Yet she is deeply self-possessed and knows she must continue, any other course being a disavowal of her self.
Carson's translations really shine when it comes to Electra's monologues. The reversion to simpler language and the transliteration of Electra's wails and cries into "OIMOI" and such, instead of the usual Alas! and similar gives the play a greater sense of frenzy, making Electra's anguish far more visceral and urgent. Arresting and pitiable, Electra cannot help but captivate us.
It also brings Electra's dynamic with Clytemnestra and her siblings Chrysothemis and Orestes into sharper focus. This is of benefit because the motivations and fundamental disputes of Elektra's characters are the most clearly presented of this trilogy. They have realised they are at a fundamental impassé, and they are beginning to recognise the corruption and doom that pervades their house. Disillusionment is beginning to set in; the House of Atreus is no longer a place of glory, but the siblings seem to be bound to see the bitter finale through.
Where Agamemnon exhilarated in its violence, Elektra's is shot through with agony. A good turn for this Oresteia to take.
Euripides' ORESTES
CHORUS: I begin the lament...
Envy came down from gods
and a bloody vote from citizens.
O you human beings made of tears,
look how your fate goes astray from your hopes.
Grief upon grief,
the life of mortals is a line no ruler can draw.
Envy came down from gods
and a bloody vote from citizens.
O you human beings made of tears,
look how your fate goes astray from your hopes.
Grief upon grief,
the life of mortals is a line no ruler can draw.
Sorry, Euripides, I think yours is the weakest offering of the three. It's partially because I don't really like the way Euripides handles prose — I like him much better with long monologues, as in Medea, but also because Orestes lacks the drive of the prior two plays. Granted, this 'decline' is an intentional choice in keeping with the premise of this Oresteia, but I couldn't help feeling somewhat disinterested throughout this one.
The characters as presented here are the most alienating of the trilogy, but my main problem is how internally incoherent the play seems. Orestes's reminders are repeatedly and plainly stated — the threat of madness, guilt mixed with the recognition of an impossible choice, cynicism about the goodwill of one's community and of justice, disillusionment with the gods. Yet the irony doesn't come through as strongly in the tone as Euripides may have intended, leaving the result feeling rather like someone telling a tale on the side of a street that you may linger to hear, but won't stay much with you after you leave.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Death, Violence
“Zeus put mortals on the road to wisdom
when he laid down this law:
By suffering we learn.
Yet there drips in sleep before my heart
a griefremembering pain.
Good sense comes the hard way.
And the grace of the gods
(I'm pretty sure)
is a grace that comes by violence.”
I originally wanted to read this collection of plays, not because it relates to Greek myths, but because of Anne Carson's translation. And, I must say, I'm not disappointed. Whether she writes in rhyme or in prose, her translation is smooth and reads really well, while still giving intensity and meaning to the words.
The three plays she chose to build her Oresteia are very different from one another:
✦ Agamemnon is the shortest, and the one where the Chorus has the most lines. It takes place after the Trojan War, just as Agamemnon is coming home, so there's a lot of exposition, a lot of explaining the reasons for the war, what happened there, and putting into perspective why his wife would want his death. Compared to that, the core of the play, the deed itself, is quick and to the point. It's the one I was the least surprised by, since I already knew the myth.
✦ Elektra, on the other hand, is the longest and, surprisingly, my favourite of the three. I'm going to say it really plainly but, Elektra is super extra and emo, and I think that's why I enjoyed her character so much. She's portrayed as a sort of Greek Cinderella, stuck in the house of her murderess mother, where she's abused and insulted. She seems like she's withering away in her grief and despair, but I actually found her incredibly resilient, stubborn and strong-willed. She's also the most eloquent character in the play, always rebutting her mother's or her sister's arguments with strength and panache. It's also the only play of the collection where most of the front-and-center characters are female. You gotta appreciate that.
✦ Orestes, therefore, was not my favourite of the collection. It's surprising because I've always been more interested in Orestes than Elektra, but Euripides' tragic take on Orestes' story and the play's resolution which, in Carson's words, are "a series of solutions that make nonsense of all the actions and anguish of the characters up to that point" didn't hook me as much as the other plays. The one thing of note I wrote down while reading this part is about Pylades, Orestes' companion, who was silent in the previous play but was "silent no more" in that last one. "No shit, dude! Wow, the snark!" is what I wrote down. I don't think it was intentional but, to me, he brought a bit of dark humour into the play. I also loved Orestes and Pylades' connection, the way they finished each other's sentences as they were plotting, and the strength of their bond...
Other than the fact that each playwright sure likes to pit it all on women and generally treat them very poorly, I can't really fault these plays. As a modern reader, I found that especially aggravating but, I suppose, it's not surprising for the time period and its culture.
when he laid down this law:
By suffering we learn.
Yet there drips in sleep before my heart
a griefremembering pain.
Good sense comes the hard way.
And the grace of the gods
(I'm pretty sure)
is a grace that comes by violence.”
I originally wanted to read this collection of plays, not because it relates to Greek myths, but because of Anne Carson's translation. And, I must say, I'm not disappointed. Whether she writes in rhyme or in prose, her translation is smooth and reads really well, while still giving intensity and meaning to the words.
The three plays she chose to build her Oresteia are very different from one another:
✦ Agamemnon is the shortest, and the one where the Chorus has the most lines. It takes place after the Trojan War, just as Agamemnon is coming home, so there's a lot of exposition, a lot of explaining the reasons for the war, what happened there, and putting into perspective why his wife would want his death. Compared to that, the core of the play, the deed itself, is quick and to the point. It's the one I was the least surprised by, since I already knew the myth.
✦ Elektra, on the other hand, is the longest and, surprisingly, my favourite of the three. I'm going to say it really plainly but, Elektra is super extra and emo, and I think that's why I enjoyed her character so much. She's portrayed as a sort of Greek Cinderella, stuck in the house of her murderess mother, where she's abused and insulted. She seems like she's withering away in her grief and despair, but I actually found her incredibly resilient, stubborn and strong-willed. She's also the most eloquent character in the play, always rebutting her mother's or her sister's arguments with strength and panache. It's also the only play of the collection where most of the front-and-center characters are female. You gotta appreciate that.
✦ Orestes, therefore, was not my favourite of the collection. It's surprising because I've always been more interested in Orestes than Elektra, but Euripides' tragic take on Orestes' story and the play's resolution which, in Carson's words, are "a series of solutions that make nonsense of all the actions and anguish of the characters up to that point" didn't hook me as much as the other plays. The one thing of note I wrote down while reading this part is about Pylades, Orestes' companion, who was silent in the previous play but was "silent no more" in that last one. "No shit, dude! Wow, the snark!" is what I wrote down. I don't think it was intentional but, to me, he brought a bit of dark humour into the play. I also loved Orestes and Pylades' connection, the way they finished each other's sentences as they were plotting, and the strength of their bond...
Other than the fact that each playwright sure likes to pit it all on women and generally treat them very poorly, I can't really fault these plays. As a modern reader, I found that especially aggravating but, I suppose, it's not surprising for the time period and its culture.
More great translations by Anne Carson. The choice to bring the language *so* far forward is pretty radical and (for me) occasionally oversteps, but the flow and liveliness of it all compensates. Be sure to read the introductions to each play, too. She’s incredibly insightful.
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
fast-paced
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Excellent
Truly an excellent translation from a legend in her field. I adored Agamemnon and like Elektra quite a bit. Did not care for Orestes, though that is no fault of Ms. Carson's translation.
Truly an excellent translation from a legend in her field. I adored Agamemnon and like Elektra quite a bit. Did not care for Orestes, though that is no fault of Ms. Carson's translation.
medium-paced
I intended to write about each of these plays individually, but the power of the famous stories and the language as rendered by Anne Carson's stunning translation job, meant that I devoured the whole volume in three sittings and never got the chance to sit down at my computer before the book was over. I've gushed about Carson's own work and her beautiful Sappho translation, and this alternate Oresteia lives up to all my high expectations of her offerings.
But first, a little background: the original Oresteia is a tri-play cycle—Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and The Eumenides—by ancient Greek playwright Aiskhylos (often transliterated Aeschylus), which chronicles the murderous fall of the house of Atreus after the Trojan War. Carson's alternate play cycle tells the same basic story and begins with the same play, Aiskhylos's Agamemnon (c. 458 BCE), but then diverges, offering a progression through time: the second installment of the cycle is Sophokles's Electra (c. 401-9 BCE), and the third is Euripides's Orestes (c. 408 BCE). Thus the reader can sense the shifting attitudes toward the same myths over the course of fifty-odd to a hundred years, as Athenian society became less optimistic, darker, more corrupt. Carson writes that the idea for the alternative cycle was originally brought to her by Brian Kulick, artistic director of the Classic Stage Company in New York City, who wrote:
Kulick makes a fascinating case, but I was concerned that, as a relative novice in ancient Greek literature, I wouldn't be able to pick up on the progression he outlines here. I needn't have worried. The stylistic differences among the three plays are so pronounced that, despite Agamemnon's messy end and Orestes's ostensible resolution, the reader is left feeling much surer of herself and the universe after finishing Aiskhylos's inferno of a play, than after making one's way through Euripides's altogether more ironic, darker offering.
For those not familiar with the famous story being told, it goes thusly: after Paris abducts Helen, her husband Menelaos and his brother Agamemnon, king of Argos, gather their forces to sail to Troy and get her back, beginning the Trojan War. But the goddess Artemis refuses to send the desired wind until Agamemnon sacrifices his own child, continuing a long history of child murder in his family. Agamemnon kills his daughter Iphigenia, earning the hatred of his wife (her mother) Klytaimestra, and the ships set sail. Fast forward ten years, and Klytaimestra receives word that Troy has fallen; she and her lover Aigisthos, both intent on revenge for their own reasons, murder the returned Agamemnon and his prophetess sex-slave Kassandra, planning to rule Argos themselves in Agamemnon's stead. These are the events of Aiskhylos's Agamemnon.
As I mentioned, despite the bloody murder that makes up the body of this play, Aiskylos's language as rendered into English by Carson is such a bonfire blast of virtuosity that I finished it feeling almost giddy. The sense of gut-clenching foreboding and inevitability is pitch-perfect. The malignant patrimony lurking in the House of Atreus is a force of nature, and all the stories anyone tries to tell—be they about the war, or an allegorical tale, or a supposedly happy homecoming—are infected by it. The Greek invaders at Troy "beached in blood"; the chorus claims of one man's pet lion "That thing was a priest of ruin Bred in the / house. Sent by god." When the Chorus tells the story of Paris and Helen, the image of a house cursed by a phantom resonates between Klytaimestra and Agamemnon:
The idea of infection, of seepage from one evil to another, is everywhere in Agamemnon. Klytaimestra, after she convinces Agamemnon to enter the house on a red carpet, against his wishes, gives this masterful speech suffused with rage and grief for the "roots and leaves" of her own family that will never return, a vision of a happy homecoming that is irrevocably perverted by Iphigenia's murder and the consequent murder Klytaimestra herself is planning; a vision of perfection that only infuriates by its distance from the truth.
There are so many amazing and exhilarating passages in Agamemnon that I could continue quoting them all day, but in brief: the predominant feelings are of white-hot fury and dread, and of conflicting, equally strong concepts of justice. Everyone in Agamemnon believes with absolute certainty that he or she knows what justice is, and the tragedy comes out of the clashes between these mutually exclusive justice concepts.
In Sophokles and especially Euripides, on the other hand, people struggle to decide what is just, or sometimes knowingly act in opposition to what is just. In a few cases, they even seem to stop caring about justice, or about the tragedy unfolding all around them. (In the second two plays of the cycle, Agamemnon and Klytaimestra's son Orestes returns from exile, and he and his sister Elektra murder their mother and her lover. The citizens of Argos then must decide what to do with the two siblings.) Elektra, for example, finds the title character arrested, unable to either marry out of her mother's household or avenge her father on her own, crippled by her never-ending grief, which she admits is excessive by any social definition. "There is no pity / but mine, / oh Father, / for the pity of your butchering rawblood death," she cries, and "Lament is a pattern cut and fitted around / my mind" Unlike her mother before her, she witnesses herself becoming the next tool of the curse of the house of Atreus, but cannot avert the coming disaster:
"Evil is a pressure that shapes us to itself," Elektra says. At the end of Agamemnon Klytaimestra believes she has ended the cycle of violence; she attempts to call a truce with the lineage's curse. But Elektra has no such illusions; part of her grief trap is that she recognizes she has been shaped to evil by the evil around her. The fact that Klytaimestra may deserve to die for the deeds she has committed, doesn't absolve Elektra and Orestes from their own guilt; there seems no escape from the cycle. But because the house's cycle of violence has become part of Elektra herself, to break it would be to go against her own selfhood; "I need one food," she says: "I must not violate Elektra." And to Klytaimestra:
Elektra's tragedy is that of someone who has been made into the wrong shape, but who cannot now act against her nature.
From Aiskhylos's cleansing fire and Sophokles's self-regenerating corruption, Euripedes's vision seems almost farcical in its irony. Instead of an Elektra wracked by grief, her opening monologue in Orestes seems almost bored:
We've heard it all before, she seems to say, and here we go again. Whereas Sophokles's Elektra is often sickened or horrified by the ways in which her evil situation has shaped her to itself, Euripides's Elektra is either too broken or too cynical to continue surprised at her family's bloodbath. Elektra and Orestes's tragedy in this last play seems, not so much that they have been sentenced to death for their mother's murder, but that the world in which they live is devoid of any overarching meaning or justice. Even the deus ex machina that saves them in the end seems ridiculous and almost random, much like the further murders they're attempting when Apollo arrives to sort them out, or the messenger's report on the democratic meeting called by the citizens of Argos to decide the siblings' fate. It's a far cry from the savage yet conflicting visions of justice held by the cast of Aiskhylos's Agamemnon.
There's far more in these three plays than I can do justice in a single blog entry, but suffice to say I fell utterly in love with the entire cycle, and can't wait to look into Carson's other Euripides translations, published in Grief Lessons. A note on her translation: as you can tell from the many excerpts above, it has a very modern feel, yet (I think) also gives the impression of agelessness. I've heard a few criticisms of places where people feel the language gets too modern, but I found it absolutely galvanizing; I could read Anne Carson's Aiskhylos all month and never wish myself elsewhere. That said, I believe in the usefulness of having multiple translations, especially of works as influential as these plays. If you love the excerpts above, you will love the whole book. If you prefer a different, more Victorian or Modernist feel, you have many translations to choose from. Personally, I only regret that Carson has not yet translated the rest of Aiskhylos's original Oresteia, as I would love to compare and contrast with this alternate version.
But first, a little background: the original Oresteia is a tri-play cycle—Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and The Eumenides—by ancient Greek playwright Aiskhylos (often transliterated Aeschylus), which chronicles the murderous fall of the house of Atreus after the Trojan War. Carson's alternate play cycle tells the same basic story and begins with the same play, Aiskhylos's Agamemnon (c. 458 BCE), but then diverges, offering a progression through time: the second installment of the cycle is Sophokles's Electra (c. 401-9 BCE), and the third is Euripides's Orestes (c. 408 BCE). Thus the reader can sense the shifting attitudes toward the same myths over the course of fifty-odd to a hundred years, as Athenian society became less optimistic, darker, more corrupt. Carson writes that the idea for the alternative cycle was originally brought to her by Brian Kulick, artistic director of the Classic Stage Company in New York City, who wrote:
In Aiskhylos' hands the story of the house of Atreus is designed to end in a valedictory celebration of Athenian democracy and its newborn sense of justice; when Sophokles takes over the tale it becomes more complex and contradictory; with Euripides the design is completely turned on its head. We follow a trajectory from myth to mockery. What happened to effect this? History happened. Aiskhylos composed his Oresteia shortly after Athens' victory at the battle of Marathon, which marked the height of Athenian military and cultural supremacy; Euripides finished his Orestes almost a hundred years later as Athens headed for ruin, due to her protracted involvement in the Peloponnesian War...The house of Atreus, for these tragedians, was a way of talking about the fate of Athens.
Kulick makes a fascinating case, but I was concerned that, as a relative novice in ancient Greek literature, I wouldn't be able to pick up on the progression he outlines here. I needn't have worried. The stylistic differences among the three plays are so pronounced that, despite Agamemnon's messy end and Orestes's ostensible resolution, the reader is left feeling much surer of herself and the universe after finishing Aiskhylos's inferno of a play, than after making one's way through Euripides's altogether more ironic, darker offering.
For those not familiar with the famous story being told, it goes thusly: after Paris abducts Helen, her husband Menelaos and his brother Agamemnon, king of Argos, gather their forces to sail to Troy and get her back, beginning the Trojan War. But the goddess Artemis refuses to send the desired wind until Agamemnon sacrifices his own child, continuing a long history of child murder in his family. Agamemnon kills his daughter Iphigenia, earning the hatred of his wife (her mother) Klytaimestra, and the ships set sail. Fast forward ten years, and Klytaimestra receives word that Troy has fallen; she and her lover Aigisthos, both intent on revenge for their own reasons, murder the returned Agamemnon and his prophetess sex-slave Kassandra, planning to rule Argos themselves in Agamemnon's stead. These are the events of Aiskhylos's Agamemnon.
As I mentioned, despite the bloody murder that makes up the body of this play, Aiskylos's language as rendered into English by Carson is such a bonfire blast of virtuosity that I finished it feeling almost giddy. The sense of gut-clenching foreboding and inevitability is pitch-perfect. The malignant patrimony lurking in the House of Atreus is a force of nature, and all the stories anyone tries to tell—be they about the war, or an allegorical tale, or a supposedly happy homecoming—are infected by it. The Greek invaders at Troy "beached in blood"; the chorus claims of one man's pet lion "That thing was a priest of ruin Bred in the / house. Sent by god." When the Chorus tells the story of Paris and Helen, the image of a house cursed by a phantom resonates between Klytaimestra and Agamemnon:
Alas for the house! Alas for the house and the
men of the house!
Alas for the marriage bed and the way she loved
her husband once!
There is silence there: he sits alone,
dishonored, baffled, mute.
In his longing for what is gone across the
sea
a phantom seems to rule his house.
The idea of infection, of seepage from one evil to another, is everywhere in Agamemnon. Klytaimestra, after she convinces Agamemnon to enter the house on a red carpet, against his wishes, gives this masterful speech suffused with rage and grief for the "roots and leaves" of her own family that will never return, a vision of a happy homecoming that is irrevocably perverted by Iphigenia's murder and the consequent murder Klytaimestra herself is planning; a vision of perfection that only infuriates by its distance from the truth.
There is the sea and who shall drain it dry?
It breeds the purple stain, the dark red dye
we use to color our garments,
costly as silver.
This house has an abundance. Thanks
be to gods, no poverty here.
Oh I would have vowed the trampling of
many cloths
if an oracle had ordered it, to ransom this
man's life.
For when the root is alive the leaves come
back
and shade the house against white dogstar
heat.
Your homecoming is warmth in winter.
Our when Zeus makes wine from bitter
grapes
and coolness fills the house
as the master walks his halls,
righteous, perfect.
Zeus, Zeus, god of things perfect,
accomplish my prayers.
Concern yourself here.
Perfect this.
There are so many amazing and exhilarating passages in Agamemnon that I could continue quoting them all day, but in brief: the predominant feelings are of white-hot fury and dread, and of conflicting, equally strong concepts of justice. Everyone in Agamemnon believes with absolute certainty that he or she knows what justice is, and the tragedy comes out of the clashes between these mutually exclusive justice concepts.
In Sophokles and especially Euripides, on the other hand, people struggle to decide what is just, or sometimes knowingly act in opposition to what is just. In a few cases, they even seem to stop caring about justice, or about the tragedy unfolding all around them. (In the second two plays of the cycle, Agamemnon and Klytaimestra's son Orestes returns from exile, and he and his sister Elektra murder their mother and her lover. The citizens of Argos then must decide what to do with the two siblings.) Elektra, for example, finds the title character arrested, unable to either marry out of her mother's household or avenge her father on her own, crippled by her never-ending grief, which she admits is excessive by any social definition. "There is no pity / but mine, / oh Father, / for the pity of your butchering rawblood death," she cries, and "Lament is a pattern cut and fitted around / my mind" Unlike her mother before her, she witnesses herself becoming the next tool of the curse of the house of Atreus, but cannot avert the coming disaster:
By dread things I am compelled. I know
that.
I see the trap closing.
I know what I am.
But while life is in me
I will not stop this violence.
"Evil is a pressure that shapes us to itself," Elektra says. At the end of Agamemnon Klytaimestra believes she has ended the cycle of violence; she attempts to call a truce with the lineage's curse. But Elektra has no such illusions; part of her grief trap is that she recognizes she has been shaped to evil by the evil around her. The fact that Klytaimestra may deserve to die for the deeds she has committed, doesn't absolve Elektra and Orestes from their own guilt; there seems no escape from the cycle. But because the house's cycle of violence has become part of Elektra herself, to break it would be to go against her own selfhood; "I need one food," she says: "I must not violate Elektra." And to Klytaimestra:
Shame I do feel.
And I know there is something all wrong
about me—
believe me. Sometimes I shock myself.
But there is a reason: you.
You never let up
this one same pressure of hatred on my life:
I am the shape you made me.
Elektra's tragedy is that of someone who has been made into the wrong shape, but who cannot now act against her nature.
From Aiskhylos's cleansing fire and Sophokles's self-regenerating corruption, Euripedes's vision seems almost farcical in its irony. Instead of an Elektra wracked by grief, her opening monologue in Orestes seems almost bored:
It's a known fact,
when the gods asked him to dinner he shot
off his mouth.
So Tantalos begot Pelops, Pelops begot
Atreus—
you know all this don't you? the strife, the
crimes...
We've heard it all before, she seems to say, and here we go again. Whereas Sophokles's Elektra is often sickened or horrified by the ways in which her evil situation has shaped her to itself, Euripides's Elektra is either too broken or too cynical to continue surprised at her family's bloodbath. Elektra and Orestes's tragedy in this last play seems, not so much that they have been sentenced to death for their mother's murder, but that the world in which they live is devoid of any overarching meaning or justice. Even the deus ex machina that saves them in the end seems ridiculous and almost random, much like the further murders they're attempting when Apollo arrives to sort them out, or the messenger's report on the democratic meeting called by the citizens of Argos to decide the siblings' fate. It's a far cry from the savage yet conflicting visions of justice held by the cast of Aiskhylos's Agamemnon.
There's far more in these three plays than I can do justice in a single blog entry, but suffice to say I fell utterly in love with the entire cycle, and can't wait to look into Carson's other Euripides translations, published in Grief Lessons. A note on her translation: as you can tell from the many excerpts above, it has a very modern feel, yet (I think) also gives the impression of agelessness. I've heard a few criticisms of places where people feel the language gets too modern, but I found it absolutely galvanizing; I could read Anne Carson's Aiskhylos all month and never wish myself elsewhere. That said, I believe in the usefulness of having multiple translations, especially of works as influential as these plays. If you love the excerpts above, you will love the whole book. If you prefer a different, more Victorian or Modernist feel, you have many translations to choose from. Personally, I only regret that Carson has not yet translated the rest of Aiskhylos's original Oresteia, as I would love to compare and contrast with this alternate version.