In their new collaborative comic-book adaptation of Euripides’ The Trojan Women, poet and classicist Anne Carson and artist Rosanna Bruno lean into the irrationality, the volatility of translation. What surprised me more with this collection, especially in the Alkestis, is just how funny a dude Euripides could be. In the last days of the Peloponnesian War, Athenian prisoners held captive in far-off Sicily were said to have won their freedom by reciting snatches of Euripides' latest tragedies.

lesser-known tragedies by famous tragedians are at this weird intersection between The Canon and the plays laid bare as they really are: work specific to the culture it was born from. The gods, theoi, are many-shaped and beyond number, but the term theos alone is insufficient to comprehend the Stronger Ones.Greek tragedy is not difficult to translate literally, although literal translations are often laughable. Go to where the centaurs live, ask them- those monsters on four legs-ask what man they judge the bravest: they'll say my son!

Adementus’ wife was taken by death in exchange for his life, but Hercules manages to save her from the underworld. There is a theory that watching unbearable stories about other people lost in grief and rage is good for you—may cleanse you of your darkness. Violence occurs; through violence we are intimate with some characters onstage in an exorbitant way for a brief time; that’s all it is.The independent press New Directions published that beautiful volume and this new one; Knopf published “Float,” a collection of loose chapbooks drifting in an aquarium-like case. Even if an audience member was too far away to catch every word of that question, the actor’s low-to-the-stage position would convey his humble situation, and the next bit makes clear that it is the cuckold Amphitryon speaking: “son of Alkaios, / grandson of Perseus, / father of Herakles, / me!

Of course, I haven't read the original Greek versions, so I can't say this definitively, but I feel Carson's presence here, in the phrasings and elements of wordplay. Some might criticize Carson for not reflecting the distinct differences in the grammar, syntax, tone, and diction of these ancient authors. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry (the first woman to do so), the Griffin Poetry Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. The fact that Euripides himself was critical of the traditional Greek gods adds to the problems of interpretation.That’s how Euripides told the story in “Herakles,” which was first performed some twenty-four hundred years ago and which has recently been reimagined by the poet Anne Carson, in “H of H Playbook. Herakles has left them alone, vulnerable to the whims of the new king of Thebes, Lykos, who has sentenced the hero’s family to death. It is that ability to act, however constrained and imperfect our actions may be, which makes us interesting and unpredictable.

Admetos and his father Pheres are both unlikeable in this play, but Admetos is a little more forgivable due to his position being a unique one of unsure standing. Herakles soon arrives, reassuring his family that he will save them, and when Lykos comes to kill them Herakles kills Lykos instead.

Myths are stories about people who become too big for their lives temporarily, so that they crash into other lives or brush against gods. Catharsis, by his definition, is a type of cleaning: "we experience, then expurgate these emotions". Almost everyone believed that the gods made Herakles kill his family, but exactly when he did so was the subject of some disagreement.