Antigonick - Winner of the Criticos Prize

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It is better to learn too late, she implies, than never at all, yet the body count is now high, Kreon has abandoned himself entirely (‘ he no more exists than someone who does not exist’) and yet Nick--or time--goes on unbothered, always measuring. The beauty of the tragedy is that you can read it on various levels, you can find multiple meanings in it – and Anne Carson aware of it (we get Hegel references for instance). There are some beautifully terse pieces of dialogue in this play, sometimes they are no more than lists of words. He has been such a boorish strongman—sexist, brutal, rash—and his final realization comes so hard and fast that it feels less earned. In this aspect, and occasionally even in its style, it's reminiscent of Ezra Pound's Sophokles: Women of Trachis .

Other fun plays on words is Antigone mentioning she is lonely inside herself, poking at her fate of being sealed alone inside a cave. Antigonick is a comic-book presentation of Sophokles' Antigone in a translation by Anne Carson, with text blocks hand-inked on the page by Carson and her collaborator Robert Currie. I love Sophocles’ Antigone, I loved the Italian translation and I loved even more the original Greek.What I didn’t notice was the disparity of pages – my slim edition of 44 pages is not a cheaper version of the hardback of 180 pages. only add dimension to a work that does not need any support to be completely satisfying and intriguing.

But all that’s quibbling - it’s of course a fantastic interpretation of Antigone, and somehow she’s made it stunningly, brutally new. An undeniable master stroke beating in its poetic vibrance, this play was stunningly brought to life on Ivo van Hove’s minimalist stage where a circle resides in the middle; a spectator; its luminescence deliberately mimics the moon / sun as they run their course in parallel with the development of the tragedy. She reaches past the contemporary moment to craft her unique and universal voice, one that is both as ancient as Sappho and intimidatingly modern. Again Anne Carson wins, and I skulk into a corner thinking I'll never assemble words together in any way that matters.To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.

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. As the blind seer Teiresias warns: “Watch out Kreon / Watch out I see the future plunging toward you. Following one of Carson’s most personal and emotional works, Nox, which is a recreation of her scrapbook dealing with the death of her brother, Carson released Antigonick which revisits the grief over the death of a brother. Rather than offering a separate commentary to explain her text, Carson gives her characters their own. Carson (with background in classical languages, comparative literature, anthropology, history, and commercial art) blends ideas and themes from many fields in her writing.I'm going to read it a few more times - already been through it twice - and try comparing it with another translation. This is less a translation of Sophocles' Antigone than a separate poetic drama inspired by the ancient Greek.

I don't know if Anne Carson has read that book, but I wouldn't be surprised if she had, especially since it is published by the same publisher.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. These drawings overlay the text creating a powerful experience of the language shining through the drawings. 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. I enjoyed my reading experience, but honestly found parts of the translation took away from the language I liked in previous translations I have read of Antigone. For readers of Nox, in which Carson describes poem 101 as "a room I can never leave", there is something quietly horrific about Carson's choice of Antigone for a sequel – another difficult text about mourning a brother, in which the heroine is condemned to a living death in a sealed cave.