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Bakkhai

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

A stunning, new translation by the poet and classicist Anne Carson, first performed in 2015 at the Almeida Theatre in London

Anne Carson writes, "Euripides was a playwright of the fifth century BC who reinvented Greek tragedy, setting it on a path that leads straight to reality TV. His plays broke all the rules, upended convention and outraged conservative critics. The Bakkhai is his most subversive play, telling the story of a man who cannot admit he would rather live in the skin of a woman, and a god who seems to combine all sexualities into a single ruinous demand for adoration. Dionysos is the god of intoxication. Once you fall under his influence, there is no telling where you will end up."
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    The publisher provides the following statement about the accessibility of the EPUB file supplied to OverDrive. Experiences may vary across reading systems. After borrowing the book, you may download the EPUB files to read in another reading system.

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      November 20, 2017
      Multidisciplinary poet-scholar Carson (Antigonick) unveils a stripped-down and faithful “new version” of Euripides’s classic tragedy. Though she has been known to take liberties with her interpretations of classical Greek literature, here the Dionysian “desire/ before the desire,/ the lick of beginning to know you don’t know,” appears much in the vein of her previous translations of classic dramas. The dialogue is imbued with a minimalist, almost rustic conversationalism that’s countered by gripping and dramatic choral odes, a slithering Bakkhic entrance song, and the crazed fragmentation of Agave’s awakening from the Bakkhic spell. At times, Carson puts forth a kind of affectless droll, a mode that might serve the dialogue but falls flat in the work’s opening and closing moments (“Here I am./ Dionysos.”; “That’s how this went/ today.”). Otherwise, this rendition is a hilarious and razor-sharp romp full of sex, violence, and drink-guzzling (Dionysos: “They say he gave the gift of wine to men:/ why, without wine we’ve no freedom from pain./ Without wine there’s no sex./ Without sex/ life isn’t worth living.// .”). In traversing the eternal pull between what humans call reason and what that reason deems primal, Carson’s trademark simplicity allows this work to feel simultaneously ancient and contemporary.

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  • Kindle Book
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  • EPUB ebook

subjects

Languages

  • English

Levels

  • Lexile® Measure:1400
  • Text Difficulty:12

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