Antigonick - Winner of the Criticos Prize

Product Information

Carson is also a classics scholar, the translator of If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, and the author of Eros the Bittersweet. Carson's work is so erudite, and Stone's so elliptical, that the composite effect is frustratingly opaque. I have to confess to making one very grave mistake with this book, which was to purchase a paperback edition in the hope of saving a few dollars. But Carson is a poet and extracting vast meaning from the most minimal of linguistic space is something she excels at, building characters with mere lines and bypassing anything that doesn’t feel like it is bestowing climactic-like energy to each scene.

There are some beautifully terse pieces of dialogue in this play, sometimes they are no more than lists of words. Anne Carson's translation of "Antigone" received a number of serious reviews, including thoughtful pieces by Judith Butler, George Steiner, and Nick Mirzoeff. Particularly of the timing being too late and Kreon coming to ‘ wisdom’ just too late once everyone has died. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.Some words are translated directly, some are paraphrased, but it’s all still there, yet it’s different. 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. Her poetry is expressionistic (you see this in Antigonick ), shot through with a spiritual turbulence and an almost violent sensitivity to experience, and the barbed edges of her lines can send shocks through you.

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. This passage is good, but it still isn't an interpretation of the individual image: it's a reading of any image (especially one with an empty room, but any image could be construed the same way).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. It is a very stylistic, aphoristic retelling of the tale for a contemporary audience, done in a radical style.

Antigone is sharp and direct with Kreon, creating a strong rebuke of authoritarian rule where she notes ‘ they all think like me / but you’ve nailed their tongues to the floor.These drawings overlay the text creating a powerful experience of the language shining through the drawings. Antigonick plays extensively with the conventions of narrative form, translation, and the physical presentation of literature. 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. Antigone is probably my favorite of the classic Greek text and the image overlays and layout of the book were masterfully done.

Antigonick is a translation of Sophokle'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. Rather, she reminds us that the imperative is to refuse to turn away from the suffering exacted by oppression and injustice, to bear witness and hold up the words of those who have been silenced. I do love the other Anne Carson books I own, and this truncation of Sophocles* original play Antigone is a gem. He has been such a boorish strongman—sexist, brutal, rash—and his final realization comes so hard and fast that it feels less earned.It's sad that the pictures, by Bianca Stone, don't try to either work with the text, or against it; it's sad Stone seems to think that this kind of freedom is both expressive and appropriate; it's sad that Carson chose this artist for the project: but worst of all is that reviewers, with almost no exceptions that I could find, think the images are interesting, good, and even profound. She reaches past the contemporary moment to craft her unique and universal voice, one that is both as ancient as Sappho and intimidatingly modern. Rather, as the scene switches between the textual and the graphic, a temporal shift takes place between the past and the present: something is gone, and something is caught, and vibrates still. 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.