AN ORESTEIA - ANNE CARSON

Where is the gofundme to get Anne Carson to translate and publish every scrape of Greek that we have? Her Sappho translations are among the greatest Classics stuff I’m aware of. I love Anne Carson, she easily my favorite living poet (not a competitive category, I’ll bet I can name less than a dozen living poets). I remember people talking about AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF RED, and by people, I mean artsy English majors I knew when I was in college, but I never picked it up until I was across the world as a Peace Corps volunteer. During this time, I had no power so for entertainment, I’d read the same magazines my mom had mailed me again and again. In one of the New York Times Magazine issues, there was a long profile of Ms. Carson that I read again and again. She came off as so strange and thoughtful and otherworldly, or maybe ancient. Either way, I got my hands on AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF RED and it’s sequel RED DOC> (who’s publishing was ostensibly the reason for the profile) then I was hooked. I’ll get through them all at some point, I actually think I’m pretty close. All of her work is weaved through with ancient greek culture and concerns, even AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF RED is technically a retelling of part of the Hercules myth. I took Latin in high school and, despite being very bad at it, it was perhaps my favorite subject. It is basically the only high school class I look back on fondly (there were other teachers I enjoyed but, in retrospect, I was mostly taught bullshit). My Latin teacher was engaged in the same project that Carson is, namely, making sure the ancient world stays strange. There’s a bizarre trend in classics to pitch the idea that the ancients speak to our world or that they’re just like us or that we can learn a lot about our society from reading Homer or whatever. This isn’t true, or rather, this isn’t the right way to read this stuff. The ancients are very strange. They’re basically aliens. Their world and values are as curious and unusual as anything available in the “world literature” category. In fact, the idea of placing these surveying greek plays and fragments and epics etc. as the bedrock to a unified “Western Civilization” is racist nonsense that we don’t really have time to get into here. I digress but rest assured this stuff is strange. Carson’s crack at these plays is unique in that she translates the typical Orestiea cycle but chooses a different playwright and thus time period for each of the 3 plays. The short intros to each play describe the state of Athenian democracy and how we can see these conditions in the plays. This is interesting but not the main draw. The plays themselves are translated in a style that manages to be both contemporary/colloquial with moments of unexpected strangeness and beauty. The sense of grief and duty that characters feel is really zeroed in on and rendered wonderfully. The way the gods are cruel and inscrutable really resonates with me. Interestingly, Apollo at one point says the Trojan War was arranged by the gods in order to reduce the population as a sort of quasi-environmental intervention. I’ve never seen that reason articulated before. Also, might this be the earliest example of that trope where someone give a long speech before killing their victim, a character complains to another that it’s silly to lay out all your reasons to someone you’re just going to stab anyway.The profound misogyny of the ancient Greeks is clear (this is the one area where the Romans really come out on top) yet the female characters are not reduced to a cutout. I’d love to see these preformed. It was only last year that a translation of the Odyssey (my favorite Greek poem or play) into English rendered by a woman was published. Perhaps Anne Carson can give us the second. 458 furies.