Far From Brooklyn

An Oresteia, translated by Anne Carson

Anne Carson is probably my favorite writer these last 10 years or so.

I first read her in 2001 or thereabouts – “Autobiography of Red” was my introduction to her – and since then I’ve read and reread pretty much everything she’s written.  Only “Eros the Bittersweet” failed to get me.

She talks different, Anne Carson does. Her sentences snap back and forth in a most unusual way.  She dispenses with much punctuation and yet her writing is full of sudden silences – the kind most people can only achieve with dashes and parentheses and commas and whatnot.

Recently she seems to have set aside straightforward creation of new narratives and poetry and focused instead on translation – “Grief Lessons,” a blistering translation of four Euripedes plays, and “If Not, Winter,” a translation of every single scrap of Sappho’s work, including single words, if that is all that has survived, and most recently this, “An Oresteia.”

(Glancing at Amazon, I see that I have her bibliographic timeline a little screwed up but never mind.)

“Grief Lessons” was, as I said, blistering, and “An Oresteia” is also a disturbing document. Unlike most other translations of the Greek playwrights, Carson’s work has an incredible immediacy.  There is no distance between you and the playwrights, no sense of the millennia having passed between their time of writing and your own time of consuming it.  With Carson, it’s right in your face.  When the characters scream, you flinch.

(FYI, Greek characters scream very strange words, according to Carson: “OTOTOI POPOI DA,” for instance.)

This “Oresteia” is a bit strange, as it takes a play each from three separate tragedians: (using Carson’s spellings here) Agamemnon by Aiskhylos, Elektra by Sophokles, and Orestes by Euripides.

The combination was not her idea, she notes in the forward.  But there is an interesting logic to it – the Aiskhylos was composed at the height of democratic Athens’ power and intellectual flowering; the Euripides as the state was crumbling under the pressure of the Peloponnesian war.  So in theory we can read societal values of the day into these texts.  I have to admit I didn’t pick up on this from the plays themselves and wouldn’t have made the connection without her help in the translator’s note.

These translations feel like Carson has somehow channeled the consciousness of a writer dead 2,500 years, and made him available to us in the modern day. It’s as if someone found a perfectly-sealed amphora of ancient Greek wine and poured it for you to taste: There it is on your tongue, something utterly different from the modern day and yet utterly familiar, truly ancient and yet alive.

That’s what reading these plays is like.  If you believe (as I do) that human consciousness is not a fixed state but something evolving, responsive to environments and technology, then you can’t help but feel that you are experiencing ancient man in these texts.

The work is just so raw and in your face, it’s amazing.