em agamemnon / as a translator, i have spent years trying to grasp kassandra in words. long before i had any interest in the rest of agamemnon, i found myself working and reworking the single scene in which she appears with her language that breaks open. i got some fire sentences out of it and thought to publish them, but this seemed vain. i dreamed of her weirdly mixed with the winters of my childhood and imagined a play where someone like bjork would sing wild translingual songs while sailing down a snowy river of ancient asia minor. but other people have tried such things and anyway the play already exists. it is agamemnon. eventually i accepted that what is ungraspable about kassandra has to stay that way.

em elektra / sounds of every kind emerge from her, articulate an inarticulate. her power of language is fantastic; she can outtalk anyone in the play. her vocabulary of screams is so rich that i chose to transliterate her cries letter for letter - OIMOI! instead of the conventional alas! or woe is me! this is not a person who would say woe is me! she is a torrent of self. actionless, yet she causes things to happen and people to change. hopeless, yet she keeps elektra going.

em orestes / sometimes i wonder if euripedes saw the very texture of reality as ironic. saw the gods as ironic. saw the gods in their interactions with human beings as essentially playing. a frightening idea. but at least it entails the assumption that euripedes himself was not playing. that he was a serious playwright who knew his target and took aim. [...] if i take it as a story of real people, i can find no character to like in the play. on the other hand, as an allegory or abstract design, it lacks all exactitude - seems to unfold like a bolt of cloth falling down stairs, spilling itself, random. yet again, isn't there something terrible in randomness - the idea that at the very bottom of its calculations, real depravity has no master plan of any kind, it's just a dreamy whim that slides out of people when they are trapped or bored or too lazy to analyze their own mania.