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For much of Euripides life, the world was at war. The anguish and rage that resulted from a world given over to violence provoked the poet and playwright to create stunning tragedies, whose grief reverberates as accurately today as it did when democratic Athens succumbed to the Peloponnesian Wars. Following an acclaimed translation of Sappho's poems and fragments, If Not, Winter, the acclaimed poet and classicist Anne Carson now turns to the plays of Euripides, chronologically the latest and certainly the most troubled of the major Greek tragedians. One of the most versatile, accomplished, fertile, and plain astonishing writers of our day, Carson is a poet with the acumen of an essayist; and essayist with the lyric gift of a poet; a scholar who is as daring as she is erudite. Euripides, Carson says, is the most unpleasant of the tragedians, which is to say the most tragic, and her bold new translation of his chronicles of superstition and despair offers a new view of his discordant and unsparing art. The four plays included here are Alkestis, Hekuba, Herakles Mad, and Hippolitos. The book includes a general introduction by Carson, along with introductions to each of the plays, and a final "Address to Euripides."