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    Trojan Women
    Trojan Women
    Trojan Women
    Ebook151 pages1 hour

    Trojan Women

    By Gwendolyn MacEwen

    4/5

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    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherIndependent Publishers Group
    Release dateAug 24, 2018
    ISBN9781550967401
    Trojan Women
    Author

    Gwendolyn MacEwen

    GWENDOLYN MacEWEN was born in Toronto in 1941. The author of numerous books of poetry, including The Shadow Maker and Afterworlds, which both won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry. She also published novels, plays, travel memoirs, and children’s books. MacEwen died in 1987.

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    Reviews for Trojan Women

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    • 4/5
      This is the first play I have read since I studied Hamlet at school, so I was slightly unsure of how to go about this, but I needn't have worried. There are a number of characters, but the number who are speaking at any one time is relatively limited, meaning that ypou're not trying to keep umpteen people straight in your head at once. I read an edition with a fairly long introduction (a fair proportion of which went way over my head), but it did help put the events leading up to the play's start into the forefront of my mind. I then read the play twice, once straight through, the second time reading the translator's notes in parallel. These were helpful in expanding what I had read the first time. it helped understand how this would have been viewed by the first theatre goers and the context in which they would have viewed what was happening and being said - or unsaid. I enjoyed this. It seems really very modern, there are 2 men & 1 male god with a speaking role in the entire piece, the remainder are all women. I would hesitate to call it a feminist piece in today's environment - all the women are largely at the mercy of the men who claim them as their slaves. But we hear them women themselves speak and explain their feelings in a way that things like [The Iliad] and [The Odyssey] just don't do. I have read a couple of the modern novels telling these stories from a female perspective, I didn't realise that it had already been started - a very long time ago. I feel like I both learnt something and enjoyed it, an excellent combination.
    • 4/5
      A short but devastating glimpse at the aftermath of war. I think I will teach this next time I teach Greek Mythology.

    Book preview

    Trojan Women - Gwendolyn MacEwen

    Formatting note:

    In the electronic versions of this book blank pages that appear in the paperback have been removed.

    THE TROJAN WOMEN

    by EURIPIDES

    a new version by

    Gwendolyn MacEwen

    HELEN and ORESTES

    by YANNIS RITSOS

    translated by

    GWENDOLYN MACEWEN

    with NIKOS TSINGOS

    Introduction by

    CLAUDIA DEY

    Publishers of singular books Fiction, Poetry, Nonfiction, Drama, Translation and Graphic Books

    2009

    Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

    Euripides

    [Trojan women. English]

    The Trojan women : and two long poems by Yannis Ritsos / Gwendolyn MacEwen ; introduction by Claudia Dey.

    (Exile classics series ; 13)

    Translations by Gwendolyn MacEwen and Nikos Tsingos.

    ISBN

    978-1-55096-123-2 (pbk)

    978-1-55096-740-1 (ePUB)

    978-1-55096-741-8 (MOBI)

    978-1-55096-742-5 (PDF)

    I. MacEwen, Gwendolyn, 1941-1987 II. Tsingos, Nikos III. Title. IV. Title: Trojan women. English. V. Series: Exile classics ; 13

    PA3975.T8M33 2009 882'.01 C2009-904869-8

    All rights reserved © Barry Callaghan, 1981

    Design and Composition by Digital ReproSet

    Cover Photograph © Brand X Images/JupiterImages

    Drawing by John Gould

    Published by Exile Editions Ltd ~ www.ExileEditions.com

    144483 Southgate Road 14 – GD, Holstein, Ontario, N0G 2A0

    PDF, ePUB and MOBI versions by Melissa Campos Mendivil

    Publication Copyright © Exile Editions, 2009. All rights reserved

    We gratefully acknowledge, for their support toward our publishing activities, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.

    Exile Editions eBooks are for personal use of the original buyer only. You may not modify, transmit, publish, participate in the transfer or sale of, reproduce, create derivative works from, distribute, perform, display, or in any way exploit, any of the content of this eBook, in whole or in part, without the expressed written consent of the publisher; to do so is an infringement of the copyright and other intellectual property laws. Any inquiries regarding publication rights, translation rights, or film rights – or if you consider this version to be a pirated copy – please contact us via e-mail at: info@exileeditions.com

    This play is fully protected under copyright laws and is subject to royalty. Any use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise stored in a retrieval system, without the expressed written consent of the publisher, is an infringement of the copyright law. Changes to the script are expressly forbidden without written consent of the publisher. Rights to produce, film or record in whole or in part, in any language or medium, by any group or individual, amateur or professional, are retained by the publisher. Interested persons are requested to contact the publisher at: info@exileeditions.com

    CONTENTS

    HELEN, by Yannis Ritsos

    THE TROJAN WOMEN, a play by Euripides

    ORESTES, by Yannis Ritsos

    Related Reading

    Questions for Discussion and Essays

    Websites of Interest

    INTRODUCTION

    Gwendolyn MacEwen died nine years after The Trojan Women premiered at the St. Lawrence Centre in Toronto. She was forty-six years old. Shortly before her death, she read at the wake for her first husband, the carnivorous raconteur, Milton Acorn. She quoted him back to himself from his poem, You Growing :

    Wherever you are be fearless;

    and wherever I am I hope to know

    you’re moving vivid beyond me,

    so I grow by the strength

    of you fighting for your self, many selves,

    your life, many lives… your people.

    The Trojan Women also reads as an elegy to the self. But in MacEwen’s case, she chooses, rather than the epic scale of love, a different colossal disruption, another aftermath of flame – the Trojan War.

    Euripides’ 415 B.C. tragedy is the perfect flint for MacEwen’s intellectual assiduity, the compulsive dark of her investigations, and the sly wink of her humour. It flickers with hilarity. It punishes with ugliness. Above all, it is the too familiar story of human failure.

    The play takes place in the ruins of Troy. The war has ravaged the once great walled city. The last stones standing threaten to collapse. The men have been killed. The women have been left to the excruciating task of bearing witness. Once regal and gowned, they are now defeated, widowed and caught between the lunacy of belief and the lunacy of disbelief. Exasperated, they ask: How can I call upon the gods these days? How can I pray?

    Enemy Greeks wait in their docked ships. There, they choose and buy wives from those Trojan women that remain: Hecuba, the disgraced Queen of Troy, crippled by her interesting arthritis; her virgin daughter, Cassandra; Andromache, widow of Hector; and of course, that renowned harlot, Helen.

    When I think of adaptation, I think of evolutionary intelligence: The thickening coats of animals, the sharpening of claws, the precision of camouflage – how the animal achieves currency in its conditions. MacEwen’s The Trojan Women performs this same feat. Her take on Euripides’ tragedy is equal parts indictment and mischief. She invokes Roosevelt, Hamlet and the good guys of westerns. By parading our most famed phrases about war, she reminds us Troy is the same war forever, fought over and over.

    Given the prescience and contemporariness of MacEwen’s adaptation, it is no wonder it has been staged across Canada by university and commercial theatre troupes, as well as performed internationally in the United States, and more broadly, South Africa and the drama’s place of origin, Greece. MacEwen unpins The Trojan Women from time. In dragging it through the centuries, she plays messenger. She tells us we are still somnambulists. History is an act of idiot repetition. We are complicit in its witless construction. Her message: we are each one of us an arbiter of war. Her message is one that continues to cross borders – into libraries, classrooms and theatres around the world.

    In an interview with the Toronto Star’s theatre critic, Ken Adachi, cited in Rosemary Sullivan’s Shadow Maker, MacEwen says, "Hecuba’s agony is [the] result of this step by step realization, i.e. women are as responsible as men. The play is Hecuba’s discovery and consequent agony/breakdown. Hecuba must see through each woman in turn, beginning with her own daughter. The same is true of MacEwen. She must also see through."

    Like Cassandra, MacEwen holds a torch to the past. She too knows the places where the unofficial future lies. She too has an overbearing, preternatural intelligence. As such, is she mad or is she not? Is she holy or is she not? Hecuba’s dire wish – There must be some holy meaning behind this destruction – is Gwendolyn’s own. She too tries to wring sense out of war. And then questions the hopefulness of this act.

    The structure of Greek tragedy dictates most of the action occurs offstage. Consequently, The Trojan Women relies largely on language. Its language is its action. Its language is its theatre. Renovated through MacEwen’s mastery, The Trojan Women reads as both play and poem. Who could write the angry lament of Poseidon more convincingly than MacEwen? Like the chorus whom she instructs to be impressively hideous, MacEwen is a murder of crows. She chooses her words with power. They punctuate. They flex. At once brutal and incisive, they are direct hits.

    Then, the other side of the ache, her language is curvaceous and tender. It delivers a rhapsodic spareness. Anguish is nearly inexpressible. It has tricked artists into melodrama through the ages. If ever a writer has given us a language of anguish, it is MacEwen.

    Whatever its cost, MacEwen chose grandness. Surely, the giant stallion with golden reins is the most flamboyant war tactic ever deployed. It was offered as a gift to Athena. Yet inside its gilded shell was not the promise of peace, but invaders whom like maggots were set to crowd upon mindless death. The duplicity of the great beast, its fantastic devastation, would have appealed to MacEwen’s sensibility. Her imagination was consistently extravagant.

    Conversely, I cannot help but picture the monkish order of MacEwen’s basement apartment: the fold-up bicycle in the corner, the typewriter, the admonishing notes in the margins of her

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