H of H Playbook

by Anne Carson

H of H Playbook is an explosion of thought, in drawings and language, about a Greek tragedy called Herakles by the 5th-century BC poet Euripides. In myth Herakles is an embodiment of manly violence who returns home after years of making war on enemies and monsters (his famous "Labours of Herakles") to find he cannot adapt himself to a life of peacetime domesticity. He goes berserk and murders his whole family. Suicide is his next idea. Amazingly, this does not happen. Due to the intervention of his friend Theseus, Herakles comes to believe he is not, after all, indelibly stained by his own crimes, nor is his life without value. It remains for the reader to judge this redemptive outcome."I think there is no such thing as an innocent landscape," said Anselm Kiefer, painter of forests grown tall on bones.

Genres: Poetry, Plays, Mythology, Classics, Drama, Fiction, Art

208 pages, Hardcover

First published October 26, 2021

About the author

Anne Carson is a Canadian poet, essayist, translator and professor of Classics. Carson lived in Montreal for several years and taught at McGill University, the University of Michigan, and at Princeton University from 1980 to 1987. She was a 1998 Guggenheim Fellow, and in 2000 she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. She has also won a Lannan Literary Award.

Carson (with background in classical languages, comparative literature, anthropology, history, and commercial art) blends ideas and themes from many fields in her writing. She frequently references, modernizes, and translates Ancient Greek literature. She has published eighteen books as of 2013, all of which blend the forms of poetry, essay, prose, criticism, translation, dramatic dialogue, fiction, and non-fiction. She is an internationally acclaimed writer. Her books include Antigonick, Nox, Decreation, The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry; Economy of the Unlost; Autobiography of Red, shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the T.S. Eliot Prize, Plainwater: Essays and Poetry, and Glass, Irony and God, shortlisted for the Forward Prize. Carson is also a classics scholar, the translator of If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, and the author of Eros the Bittersweet. Her awards and honors include the Lannan Award, the Pushcart Prize, the Griffin Trust Award for Excellence in Poetry, a Guggenheim fellowship, and a MacArthur Fellowship. Her latest book, Red Doc>, was shortlisted for the 2013 T.S. Elliot Prize.

Reviews

[prashant]

it’s always an experience reading anne carson and this one was very jarring. something made between the stars but still of this world (even if an older, more melodramatic world). a world of red. i love her so much


“your gods crafted a soul too big for the space of life they give you to live in”


“i cannot rise. too heavy with filth and sin.”
“give me your hand.”
“i’ll stain you.”
“i’ll take it.”

[Jesse]

I love that this is a "playbook," not only indicating that this is something more than "just" a translation of an ancient Greek play, but invokes a collection of strategies (as in sports or business), or even a "book" where one can "play" (like a coloring or activity book for children).

Carson, of course, is a master of playing in multiple registers at once, of cheerfully chipping away at familiar binaries (ancient/contemporary, high/low art, mythic/personal, hero/villain, etc, etc). As has become characteristic of her idiosyncratic oeuvre there are excursions here into surreality, disorientation, confusion of expectations, bawdy gags, whimsical flights of fancy, unpredictable images—& moments of gawp-inducing resonance & beauty.

Adored this as an art object (a big thank you New Directions), an artist's book, as an experiment in the boundaries of translation, as a reading experience. The unexpected appearance of Geryon (*sigh*) made me want to return to Red Doc> to continue puzzling out what exactly Carson was attempting there. And it's been too long again since I last revisited Autobiography of Red ...

The endless explorations continue. Onward!

"Brief pause. I'm walking backward into my own myth. I was trying to walk out. // I was trying to walk out."

[Yong Xiang]

herakles redeems himself after war ptsd makes him commit sin. typical anne carson writing style (good) including lines like: "what's it like to wear an olympian overall held up by the burning straps of mortal shortfall?" and "i'm the H of H wife. we're a suppliant stack. every time the door creaks the kids think he's back." followed by a drawing of people stacked on top of each other.

[L.S. Popovich]

No offense to fans of Anne Carson. I did not get along with this book. It says it is "translated by Anne Carson" but it is more of an homage. Translation should not be an act of loosely rewriting and adapting an idea into a disputable interpretation. I don't consider it poetry or prose, just scrapbooking. The deeper meanings and Easter eggs and anachronisms could offer food for thought for some, but the random brown smudges and clippings serve no discernible purpose but distraction in my eyes. With other experimental novels, I can sometimes appreciate the physical effort that went into composition. But like the post-post modern paintings where it's just a twenty-foot wide white canvas with a skid mark in the corner, called Untitled # 345, I don't buy in to its purported profundity.
I'll read up on what this mess is supposed to mean as well as try some of her other productions, but convicting me will probably be a lost cause.

[Deborah]

This is a modern twist of the Greek tragedy of Herakles written by Euripides, which was first performed in 416 B.C. I felt like pieces were thrown together in this playbook of drawings and thoughts set in a trailer of the 12 labours performed in 10 years and H’s search for self. Very creative but as he was descending into madness, it took me forever to read.

[menal]

H of H:
I cannot rise. Too heavy with filth and sin.
Th:
Give me your hand.
H of H:
I'll stain you.
Th:
l'Il take it.

anne oh my god anne

[Teo]

"𝘈𝘯𝘥 𝘧𝘳𝘰𝘮 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘱𝘰𝘪𝘯𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘥𝘢𝘺 𝘶𝘯𝘳𝘢𝘷𝘦𝘭𝘭𝘦𝘥."

Wenn es jedes Jahr ein neues Buch von Anne Carson gäbe, wäre die Welt ein besserer Ort.

[Sammy Mylan]

the way she writes about tragedy and translation and heroes is so personal to me

“I’m walking backwards into my own myth. I was trying to walk out.”

“you call them gods, they call you walking ash.”

[Steven R. Kraaijeveld]

"Chorus: We go in grief.
We go in tears.
So many swift and dirty years.
We've lost a man of greatest merit,
truly a devil of a spirit,
our greatest, our most legendary friend."

H of H is a beautiful facsimile of Anne Carson's personal playbook about Euripides's tragedy Herakles. Herakles is an embodiment of manly violence—when he returns home after many years of fighting enemies and monsters (the Labors of Herakles), he discovers that he cannot adapt himself to domestic life. He goes mad and murders his wife and children. Once lucidity returns, he wants to commit suicide. But his friend Theseus intervenes:

H of H: "I cannot rise. Too heavy with filth and sin."
Theseus: "Give me your hand."
H of H: "I'll stain you."
Theseus: "I'll take it."

[kate]

now how can i make this about seneca


(2023) really enjoyed rereading this after having studied ajax !! and nox !!

[Chris Via]

Video review, along with Nox and The Trojan Women : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xo4Mf...

[Samrat]

I can't recall the last time I've enjoyed a book as a physical object this much.

[Amber]

Someone give her a Nobel already

[Eliot]

“If you're to tell me about grief, Anne, then please, talk about everyone's. / But that I did, Daddio, that I did, in that small and quite little Airstream trailer.“

[Júlia]

queria agradecer aos funcionários da travessa que me ajudaram na busca pela obscura seção de teatro e possibilitaram esse momento emocionante

[r.j.]

Anyone who knows me knows that I’m a huge fan of Anne Carson. Her books Autobiography of Red and Red Doc originally introduced me to her work, so seeing her revisit one of the myths that she wrote about in those made me know I had to buy this immediately. H of H Playbook is a translation of part of the Herakles labours story, specifically the aftermath in which he returns home and cannot cope with domestic life.

I would recommend Carson’s translations to anyone who is interested in learning more about the nature of translation and the ways in which we retell and reframe mythology and narratives. It’s hard to explain her work - you have to read it to see if. But if you’re interested in translation, language, or mythology, I would definitely recommend H of H Playbook or any of her other translations/retellings.

[Cooper Renner]

This is a beautifully made book, a beautiful object. The writing—a recasting and semi-translation of Herakles by Euripides—is more problematic: often wonderful, often too clever by half. Carson is considered an intellectual author, and in many ways she is, but she is also a popularizer, with the flaws that “effort” can engender. In many ways, what she does—often with Greek myth—is resonant of what Laurie Anderson, in a very different milieu, does: but Anderson is better, more authentic, less glib.

[victoria marie]

H of H [voiceover):
All those years. Hitchhiking everywhere.
Rock my pillow.
Rain my liquor.
Being told to throw myself into every kind of fire. Being given to believe I could burn away the weak parts, keep only one father (god), get rid of the other (the emotional), skip wife, skip kids, steal a Corvette, read dictionaries at night and beat the blue devils. And great acclaim being predicted for me based on my looks alone! And those being good times! So I get done with the Labours, I come home, I look in the mirror and the mirror is uninhabited.

*

[…] anyway he asked me to hold up the sky for a while and I said, Sure, and that's all there was to it. Rumours of an affair or a lot of highjinx with golden apples are just that, rumours.

*

Holding up the sky for 5 days was prison, a nightmare I retain even now and why I don't like standing still. What did Atlas do with his free time? Eat sandwiches I think, I don't know. When he returned we had a weird conversation about what would happen if he refused to take the sky back. I told him I'd just drop it. He believed me.

*

volcano there you are buried alive in your own brain it is mantrap. It plays you it plays all the enemies you've ever had it is a living person but also it is hell. Coal flowers resemble snowflakes. They are very beautiful. Their beauty can be enhanced by chemical additives. You see in the video it blowing the head off its son. You see heavy rain that's liquid of body. You see it hollering for — hours. You see later on the video it doesn't know anything its wife is foam. Body bags lying. It falls to the ground. It streams. Head in hands. It has no plans for the future don't ask. Don't try prying its lips open. No survivors we say. You curtain it off. What is the worse that can happen. You mean the worst.
Oh it's never the worst.

*

A:
Quiet now, quiet now.
He sleeps.
I don't know how.

*

Th:
So, the future. What's next for H of H?
Hof H:
Jump from a cliff. Stab myself in the liver. Burn this flesh away with fire and cleanse its infamy.
Th:
I had in mind Athens.

[Essi]

more a retelling, an homage, than a translation, but still you never miss when it comes to anne carson. some things that stayed with me:

Beware the twitch of dialectic action:
the great myths flounder in contradiction,
while pretending to be simple as a black and white flower,
and deep within the cellar
something drips
hour by hour.

So I get done with the Labours, I come home, I look in the mirror and the mirror is uninhabited.
No one there.

I heard him speaking, I know who you are, he said, there are two ways this can go, no, three ways. I don't want to count ways, I said, I just want to finish it. I need to get to the end. His wings lifted and sank. Oh my darling, he said, you're a long way from the end.

Brief pause. I'm walking backwards into my own myth. I was trying to walk out.
I was trying to walk out.

Who weights the blame?
Who makes the call?
"I think there is no such thing as an innocent landscape," said Anselm Kiefer, painter of forests grown tall on bones.

So, different situation. My son didn't die. My son isn't buried in a plastic bag in Moscow. My son didn't cost me 14 days of hospital bills. My son awoke the day after Chernobyl, looked around and asked who committed all this atrocity. And I had to tell him, You did.

I'm not saying move back towards life, I'm saying the future isn't elsewhere. We're in a locked spaceship, H of H, we have nothing but continuing.

H of H: I cannot rise. Too heavy with filth and sin.
Th: Give me your hand.
H of H: I'll stain you.
Th: l'Il take it.

[carmen]

when i was a kid there was no other greek myth that obsessed me as much as the 12 labors did, so maybe i was always meant to love anne carson. the ending of his story (which seemed to me, at least back then and with the middle school edition i had, a little hasty) always left me dissatisfied, lacking, jittery. ive never been able to get over it or even fully wrap my mind around it. enter h of h playbook. the moment i knew miss carson had created an artbook i went crazy. wonderful book, sensitive, intelligent and funny as always. almost cried when herakles and geryon met. i could almost feel carson smiling slightly at the other end of the page. i think my inner child has a better understanding of herakles' ending (beginning?) now.

[Amir]

i have nothing bad to say about carson. the way she uses classical convention in pair with modern language (and my god, the LANGUAGE is dripping with beauty) is so wonderful. i love the treatment of this script as both text and art, the illustrations and publish stylizations are so beautiful. if i ever meet carson i will cry.

[silas]

loved this when I read it three years ago… didn’t love it upon re-reading… there is feeling in the drawings, some banger lines… the modernisation of the play is done in a way that is off-putting for me… an interesting project in its successes and failures I guess

[Karli]

Heracles — Anne Carson once again makes me feel stupider than a fruit fly. To begin to grasp the plane of existence she lives on would take more drugs than I can imagine having access to.

I'm going on a walk

[Harry]

a beautiful book-as-art object! thanks KOs

[Richard Anderson]

A beautifully sculpted book. Brilliant, laconic.

[King]

Oh the possibilities for storytelling this opens up.....

[syd]

i love that the one things i know about ms. carson is that she is a classicist, professor, and lives in canada. really respect the fact that i don't know a lot about her.

[Lucia]

3,75

[Trey Purves]

“I get dizzy when I talk about Geryon. I don’t like to say the name. Brief pause.”
Anne Carson, the poet you are

[Rowan]

She just can't miss