Antigonick - Winner of the Criticos Prize

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Este libro es una oportunidad para dejar de tomarse en serio (o demasiado en serio) aquellas obras clásicas que han sido tantas veces traducidas, interpretadas, diseccionadas, rearmadas, explicadas, adaptadas y todo lo -adas que quepa. Antigonick is a translation of Sophocles's Antigone only in the loosest sense—with significant changes and metatextual additions to the original, an extra character, and illustrations with interpretations left open to the reader, it could easily be considered a different work altogether. Carson is also a classics scholar, the translator of If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, and the author of Eros the Bittersweet.

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. It is really three books in one: a English language version of Sophocles' Antigone by Anne Carson, a designed book (non-standard, artistic layout, paper, binding, printing) by Robert Currie, and a book of illustrations by Bianca Stone. 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"). There are some beautifully terse pieces of dialogue in this play, sometimes they are no more than lists of words.

It is an unhappy reflection on some contemporary literary culture, and on how the art world presents itself, that a translation as radical and eloquent as Carson's can be marred by such an irresponsibly chosen, poorly executed, effectively random series of pictures, and almost no one notices.

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. Maybe the idea is for the illustrations to work against expectation by not meeting the reader's expectations of what illustrations should do, reflecting the way the text works against the reader's expectations of what a translation of Sophocles should be; if so, I for one found that the technique didn't work. She is a heroine who has been interpreted by critics in myriad ways: for Hegel, she represents the ethical value of the family against the state; for George Eliot, the strength of intellect against society; for Anouilh, during the French resistance, the rejection of authority. But Antigone believes leaving her brother unburied is so utterly wrong that she must break the law to bury him and be condemned to death herself.Her books include Antigonick, Nox, Decreation, The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos, winner of the T. When Sophokles’s Kreon loses his beloved son and his wife, his pride finally crumbles, and he recognizes it was his “own blind heart” that caused their deaths.