Re-read and aww, slayyyy

there’s something timeless about the way anne carson tells us antigone’s story. the way she weaves words together with so much love and understanding and even the translator’s note at the beginning. when she questions antigone, bringing forth different interpretations of her, and yet settling with brecht’s. making her carry a door she can never open on her back. a tired person who challenged the authority for what she thought was right. a simple girl who’s suffered a lot through life simply wanting to give one of her brothers a proper burial. anne herself tells antigone, by the end of the note, that she forbids her from losing her screams. she wants to make her voice heard. her words, her feelings, seen. and god, she does. the chorus, telling antigone: “you chose to live autonomous and so you die. the only one of mortals to go down to death alive.” antigone, later on, contradicting the chorus and even her own previous words by saying, “i’m alone on my insides. i died long ago.” saying she’s born for love and not hatred. a girl who’s gone through so much pain. a girl who longed not for freedom but to be wept, to be loved, and she was, she is. god, she is, by her sister and her lover and anne and us, the readers.

this translation simply has so much heart, the soul of the play is so palpable it burns. tickles the soles of your feet like hope, only for you to realize they’re on fire.

Gorgeous

anyone who hates this is a lil binch and i could beat them up at the back of a walmart

euripides has always been my greek tragedian of choice among the three, but every now and then i waver towards sophocles solely bc i remember antigone. there is so much in antigone the play, so many themes about what it means to be a citizen and what it means to abide by the law and to be your own autonomous person, so much about a city in ruin, but in antigone the person, antigone the girl, all of that just boils down to the fact that here is a young woman who has lost nearly all her family, and no matter what laws dictate, no matter who’s on whose side, the gods or whoever, she just wants to bury her brother. and you can’t help but feel for her, for her angry humanity, so potent her sister and fiancé and even the chorus couldn’t bear to watch her do what they all know is inevitable. you are a person in love with the impossible, ismene tells antigone at one point in this translation, but she also says, in one breath, you go as one beloved although you go without your mind.

at one point, antigone declares herself unwept, unwed, unloved, and yet—to me, to a reader, she is very much the opposite of all three. she is grieved by her sister and the chorus. she is followed to death by haimon. and she is beloved to all of us, and above all to anne carson, who always writes her greek tragedy women with such love and care but most especially cassandra and antigone. it’s strange to declare a translation perfect bc there is so much easily lost in even the most faithful ones, but it’s also a little like a good page to screen adaptation. i don’t ask every single scene to be what it is on the page, but simply that someone takes the time to convey the heart and soul of the same story through elements unique to the visual medium. in that sense, ac has taken the essential parts of the greek and quite literally translated that using the tools that english offers. it’s in how she has antigone saying, i was an organized (!) person and / this is my reward and kreon calling her a string of adjectives all burdened by the prefix auto, through which we hear ac’s solidarity with antigone bc she also writes in the preface: to quote kreon you are autonomos, a word made up of autos ‘self’ and nomos ‘law’ / autonomy sounds like a kind of freedom but you aren't interested in freedom / your plan is to sew yourself into your own shroud using the tiniest of stitches / how to translate this?

this is exactly how you do it, no? you translate her with everything that makes her who she is, anachronistic hegel quotes and defiance and rebellion of the heart and dear sister, my dead are mine and yours as well as mine and all. i don’t even really care anymore about who’s wrong or who’s right in this situation. i don’t even care, really, about who antigone’s parents were. but i care that we know there’s no other version of antigone’s story bc there’s no other version of her father’s story, yet we care about that inevitability nonetheless. i care that somewhere in this story, there is a girl who cared enough about her dead brother to defy authority to bury him. and i care that with this edition, there was a collection of people who cared this much about antigone’s caring, and in doing so, in everything wonderful about this translation, invited me to tag along.

maybe im biased. i probably am lol! it's antigone AND anne carson. but i love the fluidity of language here, the epithets, the lack of punctuation, the anachronistic references. how antigone says bingo. haimon, my love.