Bakkhai
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- $33.99
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- $33.99
Publisher Description
Regarded by many as Euripides' masterpiece, Bakkhai is a powerful examination of religious ecstasy and the resistance to it. A call for moderation, it rejects the temptation of pure reason as well as pure sensuality, and is a staple of Greek tragedy, representing in structure and thematics an exemplary model of the classic tragic elements.
Disguised as a young holy man, the god Bacchus arrives in Greece from Asia proclaiming his godhood and preaching his orgiastic religion. He expects to be embraced in Thebes, but the Theban king, Pentheus, forbids his people to worship him and tries to have him arrested. Enraged, Bacchus drives Pentheus mad and leads him to the mountains, where Pentheus' own mother, Agave, and the women of Thebes tear him to pieces in a Bacchic frenzy.
Gibbons, a prize-winning poet, and Segal, a renowned classicist, offer a skilled new translation of this central text of Greek tragedy.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
