Carson has translated Euripides’s plays before, and in her introduction to her translation of Hekabe she describes how she keeps a file on her computer entitled “Unpleasantness of Euripides.” When I asked her what she has recorded in her document about The Bakkhai she said, not surprisingly, “That is a secret.” But this drama has a lot of unpleasant, disturbing moments, including Pentheus’s murder at the hands of his own mother. (Pentheus is tricked by Dionysus into dressing up as a woman and spying on the maenads, the female followers of the god, and is killed by these women, among whom is the king’s own mother.)
Scholars have debated for decades about what moral lesson or message Euripides intended to convey in his play. Is Pentheus’s punishment deserved or is Dionysos unnecessarily harsh and vengeful? Theories have ranged widely, from a claim that the drama mirrors a deathbed conversion of a poet who had previously rejected the pantheon of gods to an assertion that it is a commentary on religious fanaticism. In an essay entitled, “Tragedy: A Curious Art Form,” Carson states about Euripides’ dramas: “There is in Euripides some kind of learning that is always at the boiling point. It breaks experiences open and they waste themselves, run through your fingers.”
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