Elektra

‘Carson’s translation is a jewel: caustic, forceful, filling the air with memorable images without losing the pulse of action’

‘Penetrating… lean, charged and fresh… translated by Canadian poet Anne Carson, with crystalline verse… this is a play about women, power and patriarchy… an oblique lesson for our times’

‘Stripped back… full of strangeness and insight… Anne Carson’s poetic, prickly translation’

‘Anne Carson’s vivid translation [is] rigorous but very actable, violently poetic but not above the occasional joke or injection of contemporary irony… riveting’

Sophokles (or Sophocles) (c.496–405 BC) was an ancient Greek tragedian. Of his more than 120 plays, only seven have survived in a complete form: Ajax, Antigone, Women of Trachis, Oedipus Rex, Electra, Philoctetes, and Oedipus at Colonus.

Anne Carson is a Canadian poet, essayist, translator, classicist, and professor, and winner of the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature. She has taught classics, comparative literature, and creative writing at universities across the United States and Canada. With more than twenty books of writings and translations published to date, Carson was awarded Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellowships, has won the Lannan Literary Award, two Griffin Poetry Prizes, the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Princess of Asturias Award, the Governor General’s Award for English-language poetry, and the PEN/Nabokov Award, and was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada in 2005 for her contribution to Canadian letters.

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