Iphigenia among the Taurians

Anne Carson, one of the greatest living poets of the English language shows off her chops as a classical scholar in this translation of one of Euripides' less well known plays. This translation dating to 2013 is perhaps a bit tighter to the original Greek than some of Carson's best known work, and casts a keen insightful eye into a world populated by women, men and their gods some 2500 years ago without losing any modern reader of English along the way. While this is not much like Carson's free-wheeling translation of Sophocles in "Antigonick," what it loses in free inventiveness it more than regains in deep insight into a world that is at once intensely human and familiar, and at the same distant in custom and presuppositions from our era some 25 centuries later. Though not the special effect laden Hollywood version of the Trojan war, Carson's version of this aspect of the Trojan myth is compelling and intimate. Like Euripides, she gets us inside the head of the characters who are both immensely powerful and at the same caught up in dilemma not of their own making.

Anne Carson is a true giant in the field of Greek translation and deservedly so. Her work is concise, poetic, and entertaining, not always an easy task with the subject matter. I read her translation of the Oresteia last year, and this is a worthy conclusion to the House, of Atreus's story.

Although I hate this book, it was delivered on time and as advertised.

Ann Carson's translation is a joy for lovers of Classical Greek drama.

Anne Carson’s work is taken very seriously, even if sometimes I suspect behind the serious scholarship she likes to be a little playful. Her translations of ancient Greek tragedy can take on a very 21st Century feel by virtue of the language she employs. For example Amphitryon, in another Euripides play Herakles says things like:‘Daughter, I find it hardto rattle off advice like that.We’re weak, let’s play for time’Or sometimes she can do low / high vernacular in the same breath, verse 48 from Fragments of Sappho:‘you came and I was crazy for youand you cooled my mind that burned with longing’As far as Iphigenia among the Taurians goes, it is an unusual tragedy for Euripides because as pointed out in the introduction it has ‘an unexpected “happy ending”…..in contrast to the more common plot structure that ends in disaster and death for the main characters’.The plot also plays through the wider mythology around power, sacrifice and family revenge which we love today just as much as the ancient Greeks did. The story of Agamemnon sacrificing his daughter Iphigenia so that his fleet set sail for Troy. His victorious return to Greece where his wife Clytemestra and her lover murder him in the bath (revenge for Iphigenia?) and the later plotting of Elektra to push Orestes into killing their mother Clytemnestra for murdering their father. The ‘furies’ then pursuing Orestes for this act of murder and the over-arching role of the Goddess Artemis in playing out and resolving these events.And nothing is simple is it? Turns out Iphigenia wasn’t actually killed by Agamemnon, because Artemis whisked her away from the sacrificial altar and made immortal as her Priestess in Tauris where this play is set with much unfinished business to unfold.The play itself was apparently one of the most popular in ancient Greece, and even today who could resist an opening scene with ‘the temple of Artemis in the island of the Taurians, with a large bloodstained altar in front of it’.What I find so special about Anne Carson is I think the range of scholarship which makes these very strange and ancient plays something to think about and possibly understand in terms of today’s values? I also find it quite irresistible that in 2014, a clever woman in Canada can reach back and illuminate the thoughts and minds of people in Greece 2500 years ago. She does this with far more than her playful translation of the vernacular. Many of her introductions and articles elsewhere open many doors of understanding. She wrote a fascinating fictional address from Euripides to the Audience about the character and motivation of Phaidra (LRB 5 September 2002), where amongst other things she says ‘what do we desire when we love other people? Not them. Something else. Phaidra touched it. You hated her for that’Enjoy Ms. Carson – she’s well worth it!