Sólo digo que me gustó este aire fresco, esta nueva Antígona, esta posibilidad de dejar a un lado la sobreinterpretación y lo academicista para, sencillamente, disfrutar de un drama que tiene un pelín de todo. Even the opening piece that introduces 'the task of the translator of Antigonick' contains lines and passages that I highlighted, phrases that seemed so new in the world. 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. At one point Kreon reels of a list of verbs and nouns for the day, at another he wants to keep splitting hairs with Antigone and adds the word auto- to the front of ten adjectives. It’s indeed an act of revolt when Antigone secretly buries his brother Polyneikes against King Kreon’s tyranny where a domino effect of mishap and pain follows.

Carson remains connected at least tangentially to original meanings, but she adds further layers of meaning that come solely from the mind of Anne Carson, as a poet, and as a reader of Sophocles, and as a unique individual woman living in the 21st century. Antigonick plays extensively with the conventions of narrative form, translation, and the physical presentation of literature. 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. 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.In Carson's hands, this small, familiar Greek volume takes on a thunderously fresh rhythm, a satisfying blend of poetry and prose.

Besides writing poetry Bianca is a visual artist, often combining verse and image, for which she was a 2011 NYFA fellow. 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. Back in 1992, I watched all three performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company, one after another at the Barbican theatre in London, which was simply too much tragedy for one long evening.Her latest book is The Trojan Women , a collaboration with Rosanna Bruno in a comic book reimagining of Euripides' tragedy, published in 2021 by New Directions (USA) and Bloodaxe Books (UK). Some words are translated directly, some are paraphrased, but it’s all still there, yet it’s different. Carson (with background in classical languages, comparative literature, anthropology, history, and commercial art) blends ideas and themes from many fields in her writing. Bianca Stone's illustrations are a surreal assortment of images, printed on transparent pages that overlay the text, and which relate only occasionally to what is happening in the text.

It is a tale much pondered over by great thinkers and artists, reconfigured on the stage as political statements addressing a current moment many times through history, and here exists in the always inventive Anne Carson’s “translation” Antigonick. For me, that points to a visual illiteracy that is wildly at odds with the reviewers' sometimes acute observations about Sophocles, tragedy, translation, theater, Brecht, and Hegel. Despite these strictures, I thought this version is worth reading and at its best (again like Pound) points the way to a form of poetic diction which can be an effective solution, or partial solution, to the notoriously intractable problem of presenting the mood of ancient tragedy to a modern audience. 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. The visuals also often appears completely independent of the story, though also occasionally reference the original text, such as the wild horses seem to nudge the metaphor Kreon uses about breaking women that does not appear in Carson’s telling.only add dimension to a work that does not need any support to be completely satisfying and intriguing. Her books include Antigonick, Nox, Decreation, The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos, winner of the T. One of the oddest and most interesting elements of this was the use of the 'Nick' character, who measures things out: this functions as a commentary on the measured amounts of time we have for mortality. Carson is nothing less than brilliant—unfalteringly sharp indiction, audacious, and judicious in taking liberties.

For two decades her work has moved–phrase by phrase, line by line, project by improbable project–in directions that a human brain would never naturally move.Sophokles' luminous and disturbing tragedy is here given an entirely fresh language and presentation. 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). and i thought that, although their words are incredibly condensed in this version, each character remained intact. She meets his autocracy with insolence, as if to say: this breed of extremism can only be met with extremes. Like Nox, the hardcover volume here also has a nearly handmade appearance and is notable for the strange surreal drawings that appear almost jarringly against the text and make this a dynamic work of art beyond just the text.