Antigonick - Winner of the Criticos Prize

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On separate translucent vellum pages, the artist Bianca Stone has created stunning drawings to overlay the text. Her Antigone is up against a ruler who is not only blundering and brutal but misogynistic and crass. But she knows that "spectral domesticity" isn't a satisfying reading, and in any case it wouldn't be supported by the other pictures. I do love the other Anne Carson books I own, and this truncation of Sophocles* original play Antigone is a gem. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.

Sophokles’ luminous and disturbing tragedy is here given an entirely fresh language and presentation: it will provoke poetry readers, classical scholars, theatre people and comic-book aficionados. As the blind seer Teiresias warns: “Watch out Kreon / Watch out I see the future plunging toward you. It’s indeed an act of revolt when Antigone secretly buries his brother Polyneikes against King Kreon’s tyranny where a domino effect of mishap and pain follows.Having now read yet another translation of Antigone (yes, maybe I am moderately obsessed with this play, sue me) I like this translation less and less. Carson twists the end of the play with an invented character, Nick, who never speaks but is always on stage, measuring.

She later offers an overview of Antigone's childhood – "we got her the bike we got her a therapist". Antigone, the daughter of ill-fated Oidipus, whose brothers Eteokles and Polyneikes (Carson's own spellings), kill each other in battle, goes against her uncle Kreon's edict to leave Polyneikes unburied, knowingly inviting her punishment of death. When her brother Polynices declares war on Thebes, the city is defended by her other brother Eteocles. Antigonick, which was published by New Directions, has little punctuation, and the pages are unnumbered. The characters of the play even comment on various interpretations that have been offered by Bertolt Brecht and G.

And I also get a very strong feeling about what Anne Carson thinks about men like Kreon and I like having that layer there in the language. The strangest thing about these lines is their power; even as Carson's translation teeters toward incomprehensibility, it conveys the compression of the ancient Greek, the fraught meaning of deinon (both "terrible" and "wondrous"). I felt like giving thanks the entire time I was reading it, that Anne Carson has written a translation of Sophocles's Antigone that manages to be very beautiful and very funny and utterly surprising, all at the same time.