Launch event by Anne Carson & Rosanna Bruno
Anne Carson and Rosanna Bruno read from The Trojan Women and discuss their new comic-book version of Euripides’ tragedy with bookseller Ryan Cook in this online launch event organised by New York’s McNally Jackson Books on 27 May.
Anne Carson was at home in Ann Arbor, Rosanna Bruno in her studio in Saratoga Springs, and Ryan Cook at home in Brooklyn. They read two sections from the book and talked about how they worked on their collaboration, with pages from the book shared as they discussed their visual and translation choices.
Rosanna Bruno and Anne Carson’s The Trojan Women: a comic was reviewed in Fiona Sampson’s best recent poetry round-up in The Guardian of 15 May. It was illustrated online with a detail from this book.
‘… it’s a joy to come across a mistress of the art taking rumbustious pleasure in revisiting the matter of poetry itself. Anne Carson’s new version of Euripides’ The Trojan Women (Bloodaxe), with artist and cartoonist Rosanna Bruno, is resolutely subtitled A Comic; and a graphic novel is exactly what it is. But of course the words are Carson’s. Simultaneously straight-talking and experimental, the Canadian has been reclaiming the classical tradition as an essential resource since the 1980s.’ - Fiona Sampson, The Guardian
Read the full review here.
A double-page feature review of Rosanna Bruno and Anne Carson’s The Trojan Women: a comic is included in the Times Literary Supplement’s classics special of 21 May. Edith Hall, Professor in the Classics Department at King’s College London, was the reviewer. Her piece was illustrated in print and online with a detail from book.
‘Carson and Bruno have risen to an unusual challenge. Their medium’s conventions could have flattened distinctive literary qualities, but their book instead refocuses our attention on Euripides’ styles. The format highlights this play’s outstanding quality, praised by Sidney as ‘sweet violence’. That phrase was borrowed by Terry Eagleton to entitle his own book on the tragic (2002), in which he said that tragedy can only survive as a twenty-first-century art form if it is metaphysically open, aesthetically beautiful and unflinching in its depiction of suffering. All three criteria are fulfilled by this innovative version of Trojan Women.’ – Edith Hall, Times Literary Supplement
Available in full by subscription. Read here.
[31 May 2021]
