( Translator: Anne Carson)
Preface (Tragedy: A Curious Art Form)
"Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief." (Anne Carson)
"Grief and rage—you need to contain that, to put a frame around it, where it can play itself out without you or your kin having to die. 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. Do you want to go down to the pits of yourself all alone? Not much. What if an actor could do it for you? Isn’t that why they are called actors? They act for you." (Anne Carson)
Who was Euripides?
"he was born never to live in peace with himself and to prevent the rest of mankind from doing so.” (B.M.W. Knox)
"One thing that was really going on for much of Euripides’ lifetime was war— It brought corruption, distortion, decay and despair to society and to individual hearts. He used myths and legends connected with the Trojan War to refract his observations of this woe." (Anne Carson)
"Not all his plays are war plays. He was also concerned with people as people—with what it’s like to be a human being in a family, in a fantasy, in a longing, in a mistake. For this exploration too he used ancient myth as a lens. Myths are stories about people who become too big for their lives temporarily, so that they crash into other lives or brush against gods. In crisis their souls are visible." (Anne Carson)
"Herakles is a two-part man. Euripides wrote for him a two-part play. It breaks down in the middle and starts over again as does he." (Anne Carson)
"Herakles’ flesh is a cliche. Perfect physical specimen, he cannot be beaten by any warrior, by any athlete, by any monster on the earth or under it. The question whether he can be beaten even by death remains open; it is a fact that he has gone down to Hades and come back alive: here is where the play starts. This fact becomes the turning point—the overturning point—of his cliche.
How do you overturn a cliche? From inside. The first eight hundred lines of the play will bore you, they’re supposed to. Euripides assembles every stereotype of a Desperate Domestic Situation and a Timely Hero’s Return in order to place you at the very heart of Herakles’ dilemma, which is also Euripides’ dilemma: Herakles has reached the boundary of his own myth, he has come to the end of his interestingness. Now that he’s finished harrowing hell, will he settle back on the recliner and watch TV for the rest of time? From Euripides’ point of view, a playwright’s point of view, the dilemma is practical. A man who can’t die is no tragic hero. Immortality, even probable immortality, disqualifies you from playing that role. (Gods, to their eternal chagrin, are comic). For this practical dilemma Euripides’ solution is simple. From inside the cliche he lets Herakles wreck not only his house, his family, his perfection, his natural past, his supernatural future, but also the tragedy itself." (Anne Carson)
CHORUS:
"... these evils here
belonging to the son of Zeus
go far beyond
anything in the past.
What groaning,
what lament,
what song of death,
what dance of Hades
shall I do?"
"The Greek word choros means a dance accompanied by song, also the people who perform the dance. One of the functions of the tragic chorus is to reflect on the action of the play and try to assign it some meaning. They typically turn to the past in their search for the meaning of the present—scanning history and myth for a precedent. It was Homer who suggested we stand in time with our backs to the future, face to the past. What if a man turns around? Then the chorus will necessarily fall silent. This story has not happened before. Notice they do not dance again. Let the future begin." (Anne Carson)
"—not to believe, that is, in the story of his own life. Bold move.
Perhaps he is a tragic hero after all."
AMPHITRYON:
"Who can help?
Friends disappear
or they are powerless.
This is what misfortune means
an acid test of friendship.
I wouldn’t wish it on anyone."
The first topic which took my attention in this tragedy was friendship (maybe this is a sensitive topic for me, cause last two week was really difficult for me, but at the same time, this hard time showed me how lucky I am to have friends so smart, kind, strong and just to have them in my life). Ampthiryon (Herakle's "father") in the beginning of the tragedy says testing friendship and understanding that some friends are not there when you need them the most is so painful, makes you so lonely and frightened that he wouldn't wish it on anyone.. and then in the end of this story we see dreadful things, but we also see that "Whoever values wealth or strength more than friends is mad" (Herakles); and also we see that friends won't leave us not only in the darkest times of our life, but even when we are the darkness itself:
well, we understood that true friendship is one of the main treasure of a human being and this discovery gives us a hope, but we shouldn't forget that we are in tragedy..
So in tragedy (in real life too, but let's now only talk about fiction) we see that even in the world with so many gods, a human being is alone:
"O Zeus, in vain I shared my wife with you!
In vain I shared my son.
Your love is not what it seemed.
In fact I surpass you in virtue—and you a god! A big god.
Herakles’ children I did not betray.
But you—you know how to sneak into other mens' beds,
how to get whatever sex you want,
but not how to save your own kin.
For a god, you’re an idiot. Or simply immoral."
that there is no limit to pain and that being a slave, even if you are a slave of luck can bring so much suffering, that you are pitied by another person, even though you killed your own children:
HERAKLES
You pity me although I killed my children?
THESEUS
I weep for your whole changed life.
HERAKLES
Have you seen a man more ruined?
THESEUS
Your misfortunes could touch the sky.
HEKABE
PREFACE (Unpleasantness of Euripides)
Why is Euripides so unpleasant?
"Certainly he is. Certainly I am not the only person who thinks so. Not the only person whose heart sinks at the prospect of reading, teaching or attending one of his plays. Aristotle may have been registering some such impression when he mysteriously labeled Euripides tragikotatos, “the most tragic” of the Greek poets." (Anne Carson)
"Tragedy is not concerned with human justice. Tragedy is the statement of an expiation, but not the miserable expiation of a codified breach of a local arrangement organized by the knaves for the fools. The tragic figure represents the expiation of original sin, of the original and eternal sin of... having been born."
Samuel Beckett
"Hekabe, a character who, until the final scene of this play, has committed no other sin than that of having been born." (Anne Carson)
Yes, for sure Hekabe is a tragic character ("most blessed, and most unlucky
of all mothers") for who the main punishment is staying alive, while everyone she loves is dead or a slave of brutal enemy. It's so obvious that even her daughter POLYXENA, who was just informed that she will be given in sacrifice to Achilles, says:
"You poor mother of mine,
I weep
for your endless tears.
Not for my life, not for my pain, not for my outrage
do I weep.
No.
For you.
To die is lucky."
her suffering really deserves this comment from the servant:
"Women, where is the all-suffering Hekabe
who surpasses every human being in evils?
No one shall rob her of this crown."
If you ask me it's much more emotional tragedy than the previous one; the monologue of Polyxena full of pride and Hekabe's phrase “Farewell” is for others—not for a mother" just broke my heart into several pieces.
while reading it, you become part of the Chorus who asks:
"Do announcements of grief never sleep?"
But then comes power of Revenge and Women (there are stories in which these two words are synonyms). "The moral issue of this play is revenge. Hekabe is a crushed human being in the first half of the play, who raises herself up in the second half through an action of revenge. Revenge brings her to life. Why? Because the world after a world war becomes a simple place. It is divided simply into the dead, who are the majority, and those who have somehow managed not to die, whom we call the living. How they live is not important." (Anne Carson)
AGAMEMNON
And how can women prevail over men?
HEKABE
There’s a strange power, bad power, in numbers combined with cunning.
AGAMEMNON
Strange indeed. But I am skeptical.
HEKABE
Why? Didn’t women wipe out the sons of Aigyptos?
Didn’t women depopulate Lemnos of men?
So it will be. That’s enough talk.
and then there was this satisfing revenge episode, where You will lose your life to a hand that never fought a war.
"In the final scene Hekabe receives a prophecy that at her death she will suffer metamorphosis into a dog. She appears not to care very much about this prophecy. Her suffering for the original sin of having been born is already off the human scale. Really there is nowhere for her to go but out of the species.
The only tragic katharsis Euripides can imagine for Hekabe is to cleanse her of her very human skin—by turning her into a dog." (Anne Carson)
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