Also reading Anne Carson's translation of Sophocles' Electra, and as with Grief Lessons, I'm as fascinated by the commentary as by the text itself. The translator's forward has a great epigraph from Elizabeth Barrett Browning: "And how the red wild sparkles dimly burn/ Through the ashen grayness." Carson describes a translator as "someone trying to get in between a body and its shadow."
The chorus keeps trying to convince Electra to stop grieving her father and move on:
Not from Hades' black and universal lake can you lift him,
not by groaning, not by prayers.
Yet you run yourself out
in a grief with no cure,
no time-limit, no measure.
It is a knot no one can untie.
Why are you so in love with
things unbearable?
...but she wouldn't be Electra if she could get over it.
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