Grief Lessons

“The amazing poet Anne Carson offers a new translation of four plays by Euripides, each of which unfurls in searing, plainspoken English. Her essays and introductions are priceless.” -Time Out NY

“In Grief Lessons, the contemporary poet and classicist Anne Carson’s spare and beautiful new translation of four of Euripides’ lesser known tragedies, we have a kind of primer on the intrinsic dangers of blind devotion to ideology.” -The New Yorker

“An eclectic selection that provides an excellent introduction to Euripides’s range. Ms. Carson’s Euripides is bleak, moving, and provocative, offering a painful reminder of the resonance of these ancient plays with our own times.” -The New York Sun

“Grief Lessons…reminds us that the difference between competent and inspired translation is more than a matter of even bravura technical competence. It involves a kind of discreet union between writer and translator, a certain convergence of aesthetic impulse and intellectual inclination. The issue of such a union can take a reader’s breath away because it just seems so right–a work that stands firmly on its own but is somehow contented to be the sum of its parts. Carson’s is, in other words, an altogether worthy heir…It’s a reasonable and reasonably provocative contemporary reading.” -The Los Angeles Times

“Writing with a pitch and heat that gets to the heart of the unforgiving classical world, Carson..is nothing less than brilliant–unfalteringly sharp in diction, audacious and judicious in taking liberties…Worth the price of admission alone is Carson’s blistering essay afterword, written in Euripides’s voice…This amazing book gets very close to the playwright’s enigmatic answers.” -Publishers Weekly*

Euripides (c. 485-406 BCE) wrote ninety-two plays, of which eighteen survive-more than twice as many as survive from any other Greek tragedian. They include Medea, Andromache, Cyclops, Electra, The Trojan Women, Helen, The Phoenician Women, Orestes, and The Bacchae.

Anne Carson was twice a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; was honored with the 1996 Lannan Award and the 1997 Pushcart Prize, both for poetry; and was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2000. In 2001 she received the T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry (the first woman to do so), the Griffin Poetry Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She currently teaches at the University of Michigan.

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