"Carson calls her book An Oresteia—as opposed to the Oresteia. This isn’t the trilogy of Aeschylus. Rather, the book consists of plays by three different authors: Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, Sophocles’ Electra, Euripides’ Orestes. Each takes up some aspect of the House of Atreus, whose members, relations and dependents included not only Agamemnon and Clytemnestra and Helen, but Orestes, Electra, Menelaus, Cassandra . . . Many of them, predictably, came to a bad end. Half a century separates Agamemnon from Orestes, and Carson, who supplies an introduction to each play, offers interesting speculation about how shifts in tone and perspective may reflect developments in Athenian history. Perhaps equally striking, however, is the continuity in her trilogy. In American poetry, anyway, 50 years is a long time (it would bridge the gulf between, say, Robert Frost and John Ashbery), and Carson’s intelligent compilation—an Oresteia—attests to our enduring fascination in watching the highest-born families laid low."—Brad Leithauser, The New York Times Book Review

"Carson creates a new and very different resolution to the questions posed by Agamemnon's homecoming and murder. Her Oresteia includes only Aeschylus' Agamemnon, juxtaposed with plays by two younger Athenian contemporaries based on the same myth: Sophocles' Electra and Euripides' Orestes . . . A brilliant reimagining of Aeschylus' trilogy, which is far darker and more ambiguous in its resolutions than the original."—Emily Wilson, The Nation

"Carson, a Canadian poet who teaches at the University of Michigan, is one of my favorites. Most people have heard of The Iliad and The Odyssey. Far fewer know the Oresteia, a story cycle that follows Agamemnon home after the Trojan War. Tragedy, blood, and caustic human blindness ensue, landing his son Orestes in an impossible dilemma. Carson translates one play each from Aeschylus (Agamemnon), Sophocles (Elektra), and Euripides (Orestes), for a brand-new cycle. Her translations are in this moment's English, drolly modern even as they remain faithful to the plays. This is not the condensed, wry idiom of Carson's personal poetry. Instead, she loosens things up, goes for the conversational, with language to work well on stage . . . A new Oresteia with rasp, sass, and pungency."—John Timpane, The Philadelphia Inquirer

"It's the go-to myth: Soldier comes home from the Trojan War, gets hacked to death by wife; the kids go bananas. At the very dawn of theater, Agamemnon, Klytaimestra and matricidal siblings Orestes and Elektra were the fodder for the ancient Greeks' greatest tragedians. And now, the scholar-poet Anne Carson, at the prompting of theater director Brian Kulick, has woven a new tapestry out of the old threads, braiding together Aiskhylos' cool-headed Agamemnon, Sophokles' psychodrama Elektra and Euripides' neurotic Orestes. Why retranslate these tragedies and stick them in the same book? Perhaps because this makes for a juicier trilogy than Aiskhylos' extant one, which ends with a sober-minded trial (The Eumenides) instead of Euripides' punch-drunk kidnapping scheme. (If Aiskhylos is Ingmar Bergman, Euripides is the Coen brothers.) As a theatrical exercise, it's daring and cool . . . Carson's informal style works like gangbusters in the Orestes. Reading her idiom-rich renditions, you can bet your sandals that somewhere a moldering Euripides is hugging himself with glee . . . Carson is a master in full enjoyment of her powers, and the individual pieces can be searing, funny and bizarre."—Helen Shaw, Time Out New York

"To those who would doubt the capacity of any 21st century poet to follow Ezra Pound's first commandment to 'make it new,' a constant, ever-jolting answer is provided by Anne Carson, poet, essayist, translator, professor of Greek. There is simply no such thing as an Anne Carson book that doesn't present us with something new under the sun. What we have here is, in response to a request by Brian Kulick, artistic director of New York City's Classic Stage company, to complete, as a trilogy a kind of Oresteia she'd already started with a translation of Sophokles' Elektra in 1987 and Euripides' Orestes in 2006 . . . And wait until you read the new beginning of her all-star Greek tragedians' trilogy—the newly translated Agamemnon of Aiskhylos complete with such newly coined compound words as 'dayvisible' and 'dreamvisible' and 'manminded' and 'godaccomplished'—not to mention, in the intro, references to painter Francis Bacon (subject of a 2007 retrospective at the Albright-Knox Gallery) who 'makes his painting as Kassandra makes her prophecies, by removing a boundary in himself.' Anne Carson is not one to genuflect at boundaries. This is NEW."—The Buffalo News

"Imagine: only four of Shakespeare’s plays survive. The rest were destroyed by the Puritans or burned in the Great Fire. Hamlet is one of the survivors. It becomes so universal a myth that it is rewritten by every great playwright who follows. Then imagine someone today producing a Hamlet with the first two acts by the Bard, III and IV by Ibsen, and V by Pirandello. Welcome to Anne Carson’s Oresteia. Carson takes Agamemnon, the first of Aeschylus’s three plays about the house of Atreus, and follows it with Sophocles’s Elektra and Euripides’s Orestes. It’s a wonderful concept: the three great Tragedians of classical Athens collaborating for the first time, two and half millennia later. Add to the mix her bold and idiosyncratic translation of the plays, and you have a truly fresh take on the origins of Western drama . . . Carson’s language is simple and direct, in text with elegant line breaks reminiscent of modernist poetry, the emotional rhythms of the speech laid out for the eye. She preserves the rhyme scheme of the chorus’s speech in places, so much so that at times the resulting singsong seems almost silly. Her innovative creation of compound words ('manminded', 'strifeplanting') is more effective. 'A dread devising everrecurring everrembering anger' sums up the three plays in one phrase. The most effective of the bold strokes is the original conceit of letting the three tragedians’ essences stand out in contrast to each other. Aeschylus is all clean line of action, with only one pause in the movement toward retribution, for Cassandra’s ever-unheeded warning. Sophocles dwells on the paradox of obsession, that Elektra achieves nothing by it, yet would be nothing without it. Euripides lets the madness previously contained in the characters break out in the play as a whole: Orestes goes from moaning wreck to homicidal maniac to bridegroom of his intended victim, while the chorus echoes every change in mood, becoming as unstable as the protagonist. The ever-increasing complexity of plot from play to play mirrors Athens’s history during the lifetimes of the three playwrights, from leader among the Greek city-states allied against Persia to hated empire defeated by its former allies. 'Evil is a pressure that shapes us to itself,' says Elektra. Could the America of the last eight years deny it? For all the darkness in these dramas, there are moments of giddy humor, banter like a knife tossed back and forth, and Carson’s emphatically contemporary diction makes the dialogue snap and shine . . . In freeing the language from the lofty to flowery range in tone of so many earlier translations, she taps into the live-wire shock the plays contain: hatred a force as strong as gravity, memory an anchor that can drag you under. The ponderous pace other translations have laid over the plays is stripped away; you feel the action straining to leap to its conclusion, or, in Euripides’s case, rushing to its inconclusion. Carson’s brief introductions, preceding each play, are dense pleasures."—Win Clevenger, The Brooklyn Rail

"The versatile poet and scholar breaks new ground by retelling an old story—the classical tragedy of the House of Atreus, as dramatized by the three greatest tragedians of Athens's Golden Age. Acting on a suggestion from a theater director friend, Carson offers a sequential version of the often-told tale of murder, betrayal and revenge performed in the aftermath of the Trojan War, in free-verse translations of plays focused on King Agamemnon, his daughter Elektra and her brother Orestes, as told by Aiskhylos, Sophocles and Euripides, respectively. Each is prefaced by Carson's brief 'Introduction.' For example, she points out Aiskhylos's emphasis on the role of captured Trojan princess Kassandra, who envisions the ruin ensuing from the war and from Agamemnon's sacrifice of his daughter, which set his queen Klytaimestra onto her murderous path . . . the lethal velocity of 'Agamemnon,' the arc of guilt and doom that courses throughout 'Elektra,' even the Euripidean melodrama of the ferocious closure enacted in 'Orestes'—all grate on the reader's nerves with unflinching intensity. It's a great narrative, whose savage grandeur holds an undiminished power to enthrall."—Kirkus Reviews

"This is a very strange masterpiece. It is an ancient Greek tragedy, but also new, and not just because Carson is its brilliant and original translator. The work of only three ancient Greek playwrights who wrote tragedies survives: Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. They were the voices of distinct generations. Sadly, only a few of even their plays have made it down to us. Worse, the plays were often written as sets of three, and only one full set survives: the 'Orestia,' Aeschylus's story of the blood-drenched Atreus family. The odd thing is that among the surviving plays of the other two, Sophocles and Euripides, there exist plays about this same family, at different points in the action. Putting them together—as Carson does here—gives us a whole new set. Creating an Orestia comprising a play from each of the tragedians, translated by the same person, was the idea of theater director Brian Kulick. Carson tells us in her introduction that she initially resisted. As she had already translated two of the plays in question, she happily gave in. Lucky for us. We get to witness the horror unfold while also watching the ancient style develop: ever more players, ever more of the inner life, ever more self-reflection and wit. The laws of the story go from mythic, to human, to pure chaos. The drama is all blood: Dad kills daughter (for luck in war!); and mom kills dad in revenge (and because both have new lovers); the children kill mom in revenge for dad; and Orestes, who performed the matricide, has a howling, bedridden, breakdown. Elektra tells Orestes, in the second play, that no degradation could be worse than 'to live in a house with killers.' In the third play they discover something worse: being killers. It all ends in an orgy of violence, madness, a sudden god and two marriages. Readers will find stunning expressions of the pain that grown children feel after bad parental separations and neglect. The various characters' impressions of events is psychologically enthralling, and the poetry is sublime. Carson is one of the great poets writing today and is an equally compelling translator. Her language here is clear and comfortable and the volume can be read fast, like a novel, for a weird and thrilling ride. Read it slowly and you will find grace everywhere . . . The great Greek playwrights may still be ancient, but the play is triumphantly fresh—and bloodier than a vampire novel."—Jennifer Michael Hecht, Publishers Weekly