A DAY AS LONG AS THE REST OF THEIR LIVES

The Trojan Women by Rosanna Bruno and Anne Carson

Bloodaxe BooksMay 2021Selected by Barbara Epler

This fantastic collaboration between the artist Rosanna Bruno and the poet and classicist Anne Carson, based on Euripides’ famous tragedy, may look like a lark (and in many ways is one), but swiftly starts landing wallops. Following the fates of Hekabe, Andromache and Kassandra (after Troy has been sacked and all its men killed), The Trojan Women is no walk in a park. The characters mostly take the form of animals (except Kassandra, whose mind is in another world): Helen’s often a fox; Hekabe is “an ancient emaciated sled dog of filth and wrath”; the cows and dogs are prisoners of war, soon slaves; the Greek guards are cats; the merciless Menelaos is a gear box. Bruno’s stunningly to-the-point ink paintings tell a tale almost unendurably rife with betrayals, destruction, suffering, lamentations. The Chorus sings: “Gone our offerings, our choirs, our echoing voices, our celebrations of you all night in the dark, gone the gold statues, gone the mooncakes, the sacred number 12. It is my deepest fear, King Zeus, that none of this matters to you at all or ever did. You float in clouds. Our city is struck to the ground.” When the gods discuss among themselves why they unleashed all these horrors, one explains: “Because they broke something of ours. / Because they squeak when they die. / Because we can.” — Barbara Epler