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Sep 27, 2011

Greg rated it:

It's been about ten years since I last read the more traditional translations of these plays so I'm not really in a position to compare and contrast. I also don't know what the original Greek is like, or what the original language was like in relation to the quality of everyday speech at the time. I mean were the original plays written in a highly polished 'intellectual' style, did they sound like how people on the street talked? When Helen is called a weapon of mass destruction in Carson's t More...

7 comments like (11 people liked it)

Sep 27, 2011

Emily added it

I intended to write about each of these plays individually, but the power of the famous stories and the language as rendered by Anne Carson's stunning translation job, meant that I devoured the whole volume in three sittings and never got the chance to sit down at my computer before the book was over. I've gushed about Carson's own work and her beautiful Sappho translation, and this alternate Oresteia lives up to all my high expectations of her offerings.

But first, a little backgr More...

2 comments like (4 people liked it)

Sep 27, 2011

Rick rated it:

The first thing Carson does is deny credit: “Not my idea to do this.” Despite this deflection she clearly warmed to the idea and these three plays by three different playwrights brilliantly tackle the progression of the Oresteia into deeper tragedy. In the first play Agememnon returns from the Trojan War and is murdered by his wife for the crime of sacrificing their daughter en route to Troy. In the second play Orestes and Elektra murder Klytaimestra for murdering their father. In the third pla More...

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Dec 16, 2009

Alex rated it:

This is perhaps ancient Greece's most famous tragic trilogy that has survived antiquity. "Agamemnon" deals with the treacherous murder of King Agamemnon, just returned from the Trojan war, at the hands of his wife, Clytemnestra, and his brother (who had an affair with his wife and coveted the throne). "The Libation Bearers" brings karmic and bloody retribution upon Clytemnestra at the hands of her only son, Orestes, avenging the death of his father. "The Eumenides" More...

1 comment like (4 people liked it)

Oct 22, 2007

Russell rated it:

I had in my mind that the these plays were full of mythology of the pantheon of Greek gods.

There are gods, yes, and other mythological creatures like the Furies, but there is so much more there, themes of duty, of humility, hubris, sin and forgiveness, the weight and fullness of history (the Trojan War) and family.

Out of these three plays Aeschylus sharply defined characters that still are echoed today. Clytemnestra, Cassandra and Iphigenia are still used as descriptions More...

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Oct 21, 2011

Kay rated it:

Even compared to other Greek tragedies, the Oresteia stands out. It's not just about the family drama or the bloody cycle of revenge. It's more than that. It's about peering deeply into the darkness of the human soul, stripping any semblance of control over one's destiny, and seeing what would result--madness.

Orestes was driven by forces more ancient and far bloodier than his mere judgment. In a society divinely centered on the family, Orestes was ordained to avenge his father's deat More...

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Sep 04, 2011

S.Annelise rated it:

Q: How many great authors were inspired by the characters in these plays?
A: Bazillions, give or take.

The Furies-- wrathful, smelly, wraith-like she-beasts-- are among the most fascinating creatures ever spawned by our collective unconscious. (Delivered by Dr. Aeschylus, no doubt via one putrid and grizzly c-section) these girls predate the Olympian pantheon and specialize in erasing people who murder their own family members.
Every time I experience a taste for revenge (and it More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Sep 27, 2011

Jeremy Allan rated it:

I was tempted by the fifth star. These three translations are wild. They stretch uncomfortably between courtly speech of ancient greek dynasties and the idioms we hear on the street in New York City. Therefore it isn't easy to just experience these plays as rendered by Carson. We are constantly aware of them as spectacle, even as they exist before us as text. They are uneven, raw, and sometimes hilarious. And these things make for a reading experience full of surprise. I would careen from More...

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Feb 28, 2011

Terry rated it:

Like so many other things that I've been reading lately, Aeschylus's trilogy is concerned with human beings thrown into the crucible of extremest intensity, pressured from every direction my conflicting obligations, driven to violent action and violent remorse. Few poets are as willing as Aeschylus to stare into the profound darkness of human suffering and name the curse that seems to hold us to the wheel of our own violence. Yet, even fewer are ultimately as hopeful about the possibility of our More...

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Sep 27, 2011

James rated it:

I'm serving 2 interests here: one in classical Greece, the other in Anne Carson. This isn't The Oresteian Trilogy of Aeschylus but new translations of 3 Greek tragedies by Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles. She's taken 3 plays concerning justice and vengeance and timed around the return of Agamemnon and Menelaus from Troy and combined them into a continuity. The primary attraction here is Carson's poetry. I find everything she writes terribly interesting. Here she's limited a bit because More...

2 comments like (1 person liked it)

Nov 14, 2010

Elizabeth rated it:

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here

3 comments like (1 person liked it)

Oct 15, 2007

Krystal rated it:

Well, this book started out great. I loved the first play, Agamemnon because the style of the writing and the diction was absolutely amazing. I was enthralled through the whole first play and I was excited to keep reading. Unfortunately, Libation Bearers kind of killed it for me. It was boring and not half as interesting as the first play. The Eumenides saved the book a little but the last two plays were definitely a let-down after the first one. So if you enjoy Greek tragedies, which I usually More...

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Feb 07, 2012

Ben rated it:

And so we come, at last, to the first pieces I had have previously read from the Penguin Classics range, The Oresteian Trilogy of Aeschylus, made up of the three plays Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers and The Eumenides. It won the first prize at the Dionysia festival in Athens in 458 BC.

Agamemnon

Agamemnon, king of Argos, returns home following the Trojan War. His wife, Clytemnestra, has been planning his murder as revenge for the sacrifice of their daughter, Iphigenia. In Agam More...

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Jul 24, 2011

Michael rated it:

Having seen the hill of Argos rising from across the Peloponnesian plain from where we stood at Mycenae this spring, I had to go back to this famed trilogy of Greek tragedy and reread for the first time since college. The issues and conflicts were more complex than I think I had understood back then. Clytaemestra makes a powerful case for the justice that she deals out to Agamemnon, in that first play. She neglects to mention the role of Aegisthus, however -- her conflict of interest.

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May 30, 2011

Matt rated it:

It's hard to rate these classics against modern plays. On the merits, if you were to read this with no knowledge of its author or history, these are not good plays. If you read a modern treatment of this trilogy(there are many), by a modern playwright, you would probably like it better.

So why is this still a worthwhile read? First, if you're into the Trojan war, or at least know something about it, these plays read like a sequel for one of the main characters, Agamemnon. We all k More...

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Jan 30, 2010

Laura rated it:

Murder, betrayal, revenge, torment . . . you might wonder, “Why would I bother reading three Greek plays when I could see the same sort of lurid problems on an episode of Jerry Springer? And fold laundry at the same time??” Two possible answers: First, you’re not going to get patricide, matricide, human sacrifice and unintentional cannibalism on daytime TV because we still draw the line somewhere, and you have to admit those are pretty dramatic. More importantly, though, along with the dysfunct More...

0 comments like (6 people liked it)

Oct 20, 2009

Karen rated it:

This dramatic trilogy is amazing. Unless you are intensely familiar with Greek history and myth, get a good copy of Aeschylus' writing with notes and glossary in the back. I read a Penguin publisher edition, translated by Robert Fagles. It was beautiful. The language: stunning. My vocabulary, like most eary-twenty-somethings I know,is grossly bleak. My language skills suck. The third play, The Eumenidies is the first record of a trial in dramatic history. Drama is at its core, the art of More...

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May 28, 2009

Rick rated it:

“I have suffered into truth.” Orestes makes that declaration in The Eumenides, the third of the trilogy of plays dealing with the House of Atreus’s tendency to take empassioned revenge as their only acceptable call to action in a crisis. You expect excellence from Robert Fagles. His translations of Homer are superb. And you also expect it from Aeschylus, whose surviving plays endure and thrive in the hands of translators of craft and imagination across the centuries. Aescyhlus presents a generat More...

3 comments like (2 people liked it)

May 03, 2009

Rick rated it:

A more formal and, if you will, more elegant translation than Anne Carson’s just published An Oresteia, Lattimore’s Oresteia provides two counterpoints to Carson. One is the translator’s approach; second is the tale told by the three dramas. Carson, working on a commission, constructed an Oresteia from Aeschylus (Agamemnon), Sophocles (Elektra), and Euripides (Orestes), that is a relay of sorts not imagined by the plays authors, whereas the Oresteia by Aeschylus is an intended sequence, a single More...

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Apr 12, 2009

Jesse rated it:

Recently I spent a day as an extra on Werner Herzog's latest film, serving as an audience member watching a performance of a Greek play. Though able to recognize it as the Oresteia, I 01) found it unacceptable that I was not able to tell the friends with me details of the play and 02), became more and more curious about the context of the scene I had to watch (and react to) over and over and over again. Turns out it is from the beginning of Eumenides, the third and final play in this trilogy, More...

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Sep 26, 2011

Debby rated it:

I loved this particular translation of the Oresteia, these are great stories, and this edition makes it them a lot more accessible. These would make such a great movie!

In part 1, called appropriately "Agamemnon", you have a husband, Agamemnon, leader of the Greeks during the Trojan War (and who hasn't heard of that!) returning home after conquering Troy, and after sacrificing his daughter to get there in the first place, and all to retrieve another man's wife, the famous More...

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May 17, 2010

Rowland rated it:

Ambiguity of sympathetic for Clytemnestra; applaud or condemn her husband's murder?

On one hand, the murder of Iphigenia is presented as a terrible crime, and Clytemnestra acts to avenge this wrongful death. She is convinced of her own righteousness, freely confessing to the crime and showing no signs of guilt, and Agamemnon, arrogant and foolish, certainly is not a sympathetic victim. On the other hand, in the structure of the trilogy, Clytemnestra's crime is terrible and necessitate More...

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May 29, 2009

Barnaby rated it:

It's easy to see why Aeschylus is still revered as one of the great dramatists of the ages. 2500 years later The Oresteia still presents poetical problems of great urgency, probing the darkest depths of the human psyche. While Agamemnon, the first work in this trilogy, is the most lauded, all three are of nearly equal value.

I'm of two minds regarding Vellacott's translation. For the most part the language is vivid and the verse is spacious and eloquent, though his fixed rhyme (which More...

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Apr 22, 2011

Briynne rated it:

Well, apparently the sentiment of “they all look alike to me” is just as useless when it comes to Greek tragedians as is it with any other group. I was expecting Sophocles under a different name, but that’s not at all what I found. Aeschylus’ style is very different – it’s a bit stiff at times, and the characters are given to speechifying rather than having dialogues. I almost got the impression as I was reading that the actors would be looking at the audience and not each other when they del More...

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Mar 29, 2010

Willie rated it:

Snapshot: In the first play of The Oresteia trilogy, King Agamemnon returns home to Mycenae after ten years of brutal war in Troy. After facing a formidable foe in the Trojans, Agamemnon has no idea what is in store for him upon his return to his palace and his homeland.

“Hook”: Enough war, curses, plots, twists, sex, blood, and violence to keep anyone interested, even the most hormonally-crazed and active middle school boys.

Challenges: The language. Even with an adept t More...

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Feb 08, 2010

Lindsey rated it:

I ordered copies of this trilogy for my AP Lit class, but I meant to order the Robert Fagles translation. Apparently there was a mistake somewhere along the way, and instead we received copies of this Peter Meineck translation. Although it was unintended, this actually provided a nice opportunity to compare versions.

Personally, I like the Fagles translation better; his language is much more symbolic, and I like his ideas for staging more than Meineck's. That being said, I think More...

1 comment like (1 person liked it)

Mar 12, 2011

Silvio rated it:

A trilogy of ancient Greek plays which I read in my first semester of college and enjoyed very much. I still get chills in my spine when I remember the chorus of Furies in the last play murmuring in their sleep, "Get him, get him, get him, get him, get him. Make sure." Though they're all tragedies in ancient Greek classification because they're not funny, The Eumenides in fact has a happy ending of a sort.

Besides being enjoyable for its plot, this trilogy is interesting (no More...

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Jun 22, 2010

Brad rated it:

It's paradoxically inspiring and frightening that the things the Greek playwrights were writing about still resonate today: inspiring that their insights and idiocies remain relevant to modern readers, and frightening that humanity has made so little progress that the insights and idiocies of Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles still concern us.

I picked up the Oresteia because I thought it was about time I put the plays to the tale I thought I knew. I found what I expected:

The childre

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4 comments like (1 person liked it)

Mar 23, 2008

Lisbeth rated it:

One of the classic tragedies of the human history - this particular trilogy tells the tale of the murder of Agamemnon by his wife, Clytemnestra, and their son's subsequent revenge and torment. Beautifully written and translated, Clytemnestra's speech as she waits to hack her husband to shreds is still one of the most poignant in existence. Just beautiful.

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Sep 23, 2011

Kienie rated it:

Agamemnon:
The Chorus, being the voice of the status quo, are tiresome. They have more screen time than they deserve, voicing their fears and opinions, while most of the interesting action happens behind the scenes. Clytaemnestra is an interesting character though, because on the one hand she wants to avenge her daughter's death (whom Agamemnon sacrificed before the war), but she also wants to end the family curse. She thinks that by killing Agamemnon, the cycle of violence will be over. Sh More...

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