As far as I am concerned, their birth-cryWe went out to see that play yesterday in Spring Green, which looked like this:
Is the first cry of the fatally injured.
The rest is you — and your morphine.
That is what they call you the god of healing.
Life is your hospital and you call it a funfair.
Your silly sickroom screen of giggling faces,
Your quiverful of hypodermic syringes
That you call arrows of inspiration.
The light through the reddish grass was lovely, but this wasn't one of the outdoor plays. We were indoors for this play...
... which is about a queen, Alcestis, who gives her life so that the king, Admetus, can live, in some deal that makes sense to the gods. Alcestis is the least interesting character in the play that gets her name, since it's established at the get-go that she's going to die, and she does exactly that early on. She's mostly talked about.
In fact, in the end, when — spoiler alert — Heracles brings her back from the dead, she's incapable of speaking for the first 3 days of resurrected life, and the play ends before that happens, so we never hear from her again. My favorite character was the king's father, who, we learn at the outset, refused to give his own life for his son's. The son is outraged that this old corpse of a man — as he sees it — clings to the meaningless shred of life he's got left. When the old man finally speaks for himself, he says just that: It's all he's got left.
Driving back home, (ad)Meade(us) and I talked about the play, and the phrase "death panels" came up. The son thought it was selfish and disgusting that his elderly father and mother wouldn't die. Quite apart from his need to have someone die for him, he had contempt for their attachment to worthless life. Of course, Death, quoted at the top of this post, thought all of life was agonizing drama, and the newborn baby's cry was crying at the fatal injury that is birth. All of life is a hospital, and you call it a funfair.
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It is just amazing to think that civilization has gone from that to this.
Awe is what we must feel when we meet the Greeks across the centuries through their plays.
The Western canon has no equal and legions of tenured twerps cannot change that.
Those Greek plays are the source of every intellectual thought man has had since 500 BC as they are rediscovered.
The gods did not keep much from those Greek guys.
Major theme: Hospitality.
Ancient Greece (from Wikipedia): "To the ancient Greeks, hospitality was a divine right. The host was expected to make sure the needs of his guests were met. The ancient Greek term xenia, or theoxenia when a god was involved, expressed this ritualized guest-friendship relation. In Greek society a person's ability to abide the laws to hospitality determined nobility and social standing."
Host... hospital... hospice...
Modern America: “Peace with justice means refusing to condemn our children to a harsher, less hospitable planet,” said Obama.
She couldn't speak for the first three days after resurrection? That's not a bug, it's a feature. It's reminiscent of the joke about the best thing about oral sex: ten minutes of silence.
"By conquering dangerous archaic forces [Heracles/Obama] is said to have 'made the world safe for mankind' and to be its benefactor."
I wonder what's the original Greek for hypodermic syringes?
And don't tell me that Euripides uses the word ὑπόδέρμα in the original, 'cause I ain't gonna believe ya!
Threnody
after Theogonis of Megara
Kyrnos, this city’s belly and spleen hold such things of which
I am in terror. They will bring forth a man
Who will smite us down once for all with our practice of Chaos.
The people still know a love for governing,
The people still know love, behaving as the seasons behave;
But shadows have appeared in their recent deeds.
Thus, well and still, their leaders have cajoled them along
With the poetry of serpents; torpid lyres
Are gently caressed by wicked forked tongues that play two ways;
Rulers turn them down corruption’s very path.
O my Kyrnos, it is only the wretched who do these things,
For I have yet to see a nobleman
Whose every deed does not follow his nature as a shadow
Follows a man. The same holds true for base men.
It is they and they alone who will destroy this city,
Spoiling the people, making seeming righteousness
Righteousness itself, all for the sake of selfishness.
What I’ve said can at last only come to pass;
And when it does, do not hold for yourself even a shred
From Hope’s garment, for you will not see
This city remain standing as a city, a place of birth
Yours and mine. Though it makes good way now
With open sail, the temptations that have already made
Inroads unseen will soon stave in the bulwarks
Of virtue, rendering even the noble naked, as private
Gain accompanies public loss. For this loss
Will give birth to bad blood, blood shed in blood against blood
On up to the king. But do pray, my Kyrnos,
That, after these storm-pangs that buffet the city from within,
Our city may see a different sort of birth.
"Washington didn’t get to spend a lot of time enjoying Mount Vernon; even when he was at home, he didn’t get much peace. One of the conventions of the age was to feed and put up any respectable-looking person who presented himself at the door. Washington was plagued with guests—he had 677 of them in one year—and many of those stayed for more than one night."
Bryson, Bill (2010-10-05). At Home: A Short History of Private Life (p. 302). Random House, Inc.. Kindle Edition.
http://www.poetryarchive.org/poem/all-day-permanent-red-extract
Christopher Logue "translated" The Illiad into modern English. He could not read or write ancient Greek. See the passage at the link for a taste of what he did.
"I wonder what's the original Greek for hypodermic syringes? And don't tell me that Euripides uses the word ὑπόδέρμα in the original, 'cause I ain't gonna believe ya!"
Ted Hughes took some liberties.
From a review in The Guardian of a 2000 production of the play in this translation:
"What drove Ted Hughes to adapt Alcestis, the Euripides play in which a wife dies in order that her husband may live? The temptation is to see it as a deeply personal work hewn out of Hughes's relationship with Sylvia Plath...
"Hughes's version is anything but straight Euripides. He keeps the structure whereby Admetos, the king of Thessaly, accepts his wife's sacrifice of her life for his. He also preserves the magical conclusion in which Heracles resurrects Alcestis. But where Euripides casts his sceptical eye over woman's unequal relationship to man, Hughes makes this a story of struggle and, finally, hope in which death is conquered not just by Heracles but by unswerving love.
"Hughes heightens the conflict in several ways; one is by sharpening the exchanges between Admetos and his father who refuses to give up his own life. His chief innovation is to make Heracles a pivotal figure who, while sojourning in Admetos's house, re-enacts his 12 labours. My first reaction was that this clogs the narrative, but Hughes's purpose is twofold: to motivate Heracles's act of human resurrection and to show that all existence is a struggle between death and love."
Michael said...Awe is what we must feel when we meet the Greeks across the centuries through their plays.
I'm impressed by the relatively small sliver of time in which most of the important Greek works were made. Theirs was an ancient civilization but the good stuff seems to comve from a very small portion of the time they were around.
Get ready Ted Hughes' next project in which he translates Shakespeare from the original English. Its sure to be a triumph and improvement.
The juxtaposition of an exuberant fall day and a barren stage makes one wonder if watching a play by Euripides is the best way to expend the limited capital of one's life on earth.
I've often thought about the same question that HoodlumDoodlum raises.
I heard one explanation from an old Jesuit. He thought the ancient Greek writers were inspired in the same way that the writers of the Bible were inspired.
"The juxtaposition of an exuberant fall day and a barren stage makes one wonder if watching a play by Euripides is the best way to expend the limited capital of one's life on earth."
There's a thing called night, you know. The sun was just setting.
It's comparable to going to the movies, a restaurant, or staying in and reading a book. What do you do in the evenings?
No offense, but that translation reads like a Marvel Comics adaptation. Does shirtless Thor make a cameo?
After three millenia, "Philoctetes" still works as an AIDS play, even though AIDS didn't even exist then. Human nature is not fungible, no matter what the schools try.
Meade: Compare and contrast the Greek legend of Philemon and Baucis with the story of Lot from the old Testament. Simple coincidence of imagination or shared roots in a much older story from an older culture?
I watch Friends' reruns. Ode on a Grecian Urn. Everyone on that show is young and beautiful. They make witty comments about their little flaws, but they all love each other and everything works out alright in the end. It helps that Jennifer Aniston is still hot.....I used to like Mary Tyler Moore reruns, but, in real life, she now looks old and bleak and half the cast has croaked.....If you're looking for giggles in the hospital room, Frends is the way to go.
I'm impressed by the relatively small sliver of time in which most of the important Greek works were made. Theirs was an ancient civilization but the good stuff seems to comve from a very small portion of the time they were around.
Nobody wants to talk about it - not much anyway - but that "relatively small sliver of time" corresponds in no small part with the bloodletting of the Peloponnesian War. I've always kind of thought that in a perverse way the strife of the plague and the war was a prerequisite for such creativity and brilliance.
"Heracles brings her back from the dead ..."
Hey, Euripides, how can you have a good tragedy if death isn't final?
"O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?"
"All of life is a hospital, and you call it a funfair."
I guess that makes me The Devil,...
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