Imagine an Old Testament movie epic in which only the Genesis part is filmed by Cecil B. DeMille, Exodus goes to Alfred Hitchcock and Deuteronomy to Quentin Tarantino. The laws of Israel would still arise from the birth of the world and the lives of Abraham and Moses. But the differences in the storytelling would be stark, striking, revelatory maybe, but with the ever-present peril of lapse into an extended overstatement, an educational aid, a film-school history project.
An Oresteia is Anne Carson's application of this technique to the bible of the Ancient Greeks, the central tragic story of King Agamemnon's victorious return from the Trojan War, how his wife murdered him in his bath and how his children, Orestes and Electra, avenged that murder.
Aeschylus, the grand originator of Greek tragedy, told the whole story in his own Oresteia trilogy. But Carson translates only Act One from him; Acts Two and Three come from her previously composed versions of later plays by Sophocles and Euripides, allowing the Canadian modern poet and University of Michigan classics professor to display the history of early theatre in a single theatrical event.
An Oresteia: Agamemnon by Aiskhylos; Elektra by Sophokles; Orestes by Euripides
, translated by Anne Carson, Faber & Faber, 255 pages, $33.95
The art of Greek tragedy, like that of 20th-century cinema, grew fast when it was young. Aeschylus, writing in the middle of the fifth century BC, after Athens had first established its strength in the Persian Wars, set out a confident saga of man resolving problems of divine law. Should children avenge a father's murder, or was the act of killing a mother a crime far worse?
Aeschylus's answer, reached after hours of grand high drama, was to hand the decision to a popular court, helped by a suitably progressive representative from Mount Olympus. The cycle of violence is ended by the judicious application of democracy.
Carson's selection from Aeschylus, which covers Agamemnon's homecoming and murder, not their consequences, conveys powerfully the playwright's struggle to bend a language to the new demands of a young art, his compounding of words into a “griefremembering pain” and “purplepaved, redsaturated path.”
Sophocles saw both what Aeschylus had achieved – and not achieved. As a politician and general, he was as committed as Aeschylus to the advance of the Athenian empire; he himself fought in its battles. As a theatre writer, he cared more about the possibilities of individual character that accompanied power. His tragedy, Electra , the second in Carson's An Oresteia (and which she renders as Elektra ), is for most of its length an obsessive expression of personal grief from a daughter about her father's murder, Western literature's first great delineation of one woman's mind.
For all the three tragedians' differences ... there was a sure and common expression of awe in Greek theatre
Carson's own poetic range, proved over the years by novel renderings of Simonides and Sappho, allows her to vary and invigorate the rolling metaphors of Electra's assault on Clytemnestra and her lover: “You are some sort of punishment cage/ locked around my life./ Evils from you, evils from him/ are the air I breathe.”
