Grief Lessons. This item is unavailable.Grief Lessons

Euripides was the last of the three great tragedians of ancient Athens. His plays were shockers: he unmasked heroes, revealing them as foolish and savage, and he wrote about the powerless-women and children, slaves and barbarians-for whom tragedy was not so much exceptional as unending. <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Four of those tragedies are here presented in new translations by the contemporary poet and classicist Anne Carson. They are Herakles, in which the hero swaggers home to destroy his own family; Hekabe, set after the Trojan War, in which Hektor's widow takes vengeance on her Greek captors; Hippolytos, about love and the horror of love; and the strange tragic-comedy fable Alkestis, which tells of a husband who arranges for his wife to die in his place. The volume also contains brief introductions by Carson to each of the plays along with two remarkable framing essays: "Tragedy: A Curious Art Form" and "Why I Wrote Two Plays About Phaidra."

Euripides (c. 485-406 BCE) Of his ninety-two plays, eighteen survive--more than twice as many as survive from any other Greek tragedian. They include: Medea, Andromache, Cyclops, Electra, The Trojan Woman, Helen, The Phoenician Women Orestes, and The Bacchae.<br /><br />Anne Carson was twice a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and has received the Lannan Award; the Pushcart Prize; the T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry; the Griffin Poetry Prize; and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Author of many books, including Decreation and The Autobiography of Red, she currently teaches at the University of Michigan.<br /><br />Anne Carson was twice a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and has received the Lannan Award; the Pushcart Prize; the T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry; the Griffin Poetry Prize; and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Author of many books, including Decreation and The Autobiography of Red, she currently teaches at the University of Michigan.