Antigonick - Winner of the Criticos Prize

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The drawings force the reader into deeper contemplation in an effort to connect the two (I did not, for the most part, succeed in finding a connection but still enjoyed the visuals). I see the GR reviews admiring passages like these but wonder whether most of them read Sophocles or adaptations like the one by Brecht. And we still stand observing it from the outside, words still don't have the privilege of its enunciation - only the mute, only the enmangled.

Readers who are not familiar with ancient Greek texts will most likely feel a bit alienated by all this, but unfamiliarity is, perhaps, the point.Her poetry at it's best, like Antigone's character, is a thrilling combination of hot-blooded instinct and dispassionate resolve. But of course there is hope look here comes hope / wandering in / to tickle your feet // Then you notice the soles are on fire. Other fun plays on words is Antigone mentioning she is lonely inside herself, poking at her fate of being sealed alone inside a cave. It is a cry of grief posed in question form, emphatic, handwritten, excessive and abbreviated and, in this sense, a measured scream that gives us some sense of who or what lives on when it is all too late.

I watched the BBC Four programme and actress Juliette Binoche undoubtedly gives a stupendous performance as Antigone.i was in a production of antigone two years ago and it was kind of an earth-shattering experience that forged within me a deep bond with the play. It's a powerful contemplation on the right to resist the ruthless tyrant and his wars of conquests, the right to remain true to one's own human values and defy the appropriation of "patriotism" by corrupt and brutal rulers. Carson's work is so erudite, and Stone's so elliptical, that the composite effect is frustratingly opaque. 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.

Her testament that “I am born for love not hatred” is a response to his “Enemy is always enemy, alive or dead. We readers know from the beginning, of course, that Kreon's speech is just empty words, and that he will soon discover this for himself.

In his Antigone of Sophocles (in David Constantine's excellent translation), Brecht frames it in the context of World War II and Hitler's debacle (Creon is adapted from a tyrannical but nonetheless complicated figure in Sophocles into the mindless "Führer"). A beautiful, bewildering book, wondrous and a bit scary to behold, that gives a reader much to think about without making it clear how she should feel. Surely this is not something Sophocles’ Antigone would or could say, but this single word establishes a lot about her character and attitude in a modern context. Recommendation: if this book were the standard text of the play alone, I'd probably give it four stars, and I'd recommend it for the text to people interested in ancient drama in modern translation. Carson also induced me to pick George Steiner's Antigones off my shelf where it had languished for decades and read it straight through.

In Sophokles’s version (as per the 1939 translation by Dudley Fitts and Robert Fitzgerald), Antigone is respectful in her speech, willing to argue her case. He does not seem to hold himself fully accountable for the vast devastation his actions have unleashed, the human cost of his unjust wield of power. Within the dialogue there are many references to nick, as in the nick of time, and you can imagine how a director could have a great deal of fun with this mute character, always onstage and always measuring.

Everything I've read of hers- ( Autobiography of Red-Canada, Red Doc>, Nox, and now Antigonick-has been thought-provoking, fascinating, filled with language and images that are hauntingly beautiful. Such light-handed scholarship is characteristic of Carson, a poet interested in those moments when precedents can't be found and normal translations fail: "Now I could dig up those case histories, tell you about Danaos and Lykourgus and the songs of Phineas," they continue: "it wouldn't help you / it didn't help me / it's Friday afternoon / there goes Antigone to be buried alive. The illustrations (by the artist Bianca Stone) are a surreal assortment of icy landscapes, domestic interiors, gothic houses, unravelling spools of thread, precarious staircases and drowning horses, which are printed on transparent vellum that overlay the text, and which relate only occasionally to what is happening in the play. Anne Carson's retelling of Sophocles' Antigone is just that-- a matryoshka-doll-like tomb of what Antigone has come to mean over the centuries, what death has come to mean over the centuries.