Sobonfu Somé, one of today's top voices of African spirituality, recently shared lessons on grief from the Dagara tradition of Burkina Faso at a talk in Asheville, North Carolina.
Ultimately, everyone learns a hard and terrifying lesson about grief.
A classics scholar, Carson has also translated Euripides' plays (Grief Lessons, 2006) and Sappho's poems (If Not, Winter, 2002).
In "Grief Lessons," the contemporary poet and classicist Anne Carson's spare and beautiful new translation of four of Euripides' lesser-known tragedies, we have a kind of primer on the intrinsic dangers of blind devotion to ideology.
By Hilton Als In "Grief Lessons," the contemporary poet and classicist Anne Carson's spare and beautiful new translation of four of Euripides' lesser-known tragedies, we have a kind of primer on the intrinsic dangers of blind devotion to ideology.
I am reminded of what Anne Carson wrote in the introduction to "Grief Lessons," her translation of four plays by Euripides: Grief and rage — you need to contain that, to put a frame around it, where it can play itself out without you or your kin having to die.
And we're old enough to have lost people whom we loved; we thought we had grasped the lesson of that grief.
For me there are two wise lessons in this story: Grief and loss are ubiquitous even for a young child.
The characters' relationships are wonderfully vivid, and West's vagueness about their backstory makes "The Lesson" a very immediate portrait of grief that is at once keen and banal.
Good grief, Sony, learn your lesson already!
