AN ORESTEIA - trans. ANNE CARSON

Now this book presents an interesting question for this project. Typically, I do like the credit the translator, since their work is often overlooked, but as a secondary author. With this book, I’m crediting Anne Carson as the primary author even though this is actually a collection of translated plays. Typically, Oresteia refers to the three play cycle written by Aeschylus that tells of what happens to the Atreus family after the Trojan war. Carson switches it up and tells the same story but through 3 authors. She presents her translations of Agamemnon by Aiskhylos, Electra by Sophokles and Orestes by Euripides, which is the same story but from three different perspectives. Each play gets an intro from Carson that doesn’t help illuminate the historical context as much as give Carson's bizarre and brilliant thoughts, such as declaring that a messenger is, “a sort of hysterical Trojan version of Venus Xtravaganza” or writing that, “Sometimes I wonder if Euripides saw the very texture of reality as ironic.” The last play in her cycle, Orestes by Euripides was my favorite this time. It's so unhinged and fast moving that you can really imagine it staged in your mind. It wrestles with the bigger questions of these series of plays, namely, where is the line between legitimate and illegitimate when it comes to vengeance? Who gets to seek vengeance? Agamenom is helping his brother seek vengeance for having his wife taken which starts the Trojan war, he kills his own daughter in order to get the winds moving correctly (which asks a lot about the Greek relationship to human sacrifice, something that also comes up in the Iliad). His wife kills him when he returns, is that justice? What about when her son kills her for killing his father? What about vengeance for starting a war that killed thousands of Greeks? Like I said, I feel that the last play, Orestes, takes these questions on most directly, especially the question of whether it was okay for Klytaimestra to kill Agamenon, as revenge for him killing their daughter. Or maybe she did it mostly because she fell in love with a new person and just wanted him dead. The typically hyper-misogonist Greeks are given a bit more nuance w/r/t women here. It’s also interesting to think of all of this as a continuation of the Trojan war story line, just like the Odyssey, this is what happens afterwards and this is what happened why the men were away at war. There are some beautiful/strange Carson translations here like, “The curses are working./ Under the ground / dead men are alive / with their black lips moving, / black mouths sucking / on the soles of killer’s feet.” and I like her use of compound words like Godruined. Overall, if you dig Carson’s thing, or if you’re familiar with these stories and like ancient Greek shit, this is a good pickup. I’d love to see this staged.