Antigonick - Winner of the Criticos Prize

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The characters of the play even comment on various interpretations that have been offered by Bertolt Brecht and G. 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. In Carson’s version, Kreon does not invoke the wild horse metaphor; there is no lengthy commentary on what Antigone, as a woman and a prisoner, has to learn.

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. Rather than offering a separate commentary to explain her text, Carson gives her characters their own. In Sophokles’s version (as per the 1939 translation by Dudley Fitts and Robert Fitzgerald), Antigone is respectful in her speech, willing to argue her case. 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 nothing less than brilliant—unfalteringly sharp indiction, audacious, and judicious in taking liberties.Antigonick, which was published by New Directions, has little punctuation, and the pages are unnumbered.

Carson's cast has known them all: "Remember how Brecht had you do the whole play with a door strapped to your back? Carson updates the language to current times, with Antigone feeling rather modern herself with snarky responses such as when Kreon asks if she is the one who touched the body, Antigone spits out ‘ BINGO. Antigone, daughter of Oedipus, defies an edict issued by the new king, her uncle Kreon, that forbids the proper burial of her brother, Polyneikes, who was just killed in battle. As the blind seer Teiresias warns: “Watch out Kreon / Watch out I see the future plunging toward you.

By leaving us with Nick, still measuring, Carson inverts the traditional Sophoklean notion that it is better to learn, as Kreon does, even too late. The text is handprinted by Carson and creates a feeling of emotional fervor and highlights the poetic elements of the play. Carson's translation plays delightfully with the idea that a work of art changes and accumulates meanings as it moves through time. I see the GR reviews admiring passages like these but wonder whether most of them read Sophocles or adaptations like the one by Brecht.

But Anne Carson eliminates the intrinsic misogyny of the Ancient Greek culture and now a more feminist theme (we are girls / girls cannot force their way against men // yet I will ) is prominent. For Carson, her uncompromising solutions are little kidnaps in the dark, a trail of softly glowing lamps that mark the way through the centuries and out of the shadows. This short retelling of Antigone still managed to be a brand new story, and it somehow managed to make me laugh, to make me marvel, and to make me want to leave the world of men and their murderous ways.

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. I was startled then by the harrowing dystopia Anne Carson had conjured to depict ancient Greece; how at odds it seemed with our twenty-first-century America, how removed. Her testament that “I am born for love not hatred” is a response to his “Enemy is always enemy, alive or dead. Rather, he abdicates, shifting into third person: “Take Kreon away/he no more exists than someone who does not exist. But as it is, my three star recommendation is for a book that seems less than the sum of its parts: three different good books which don't succeed in working together closely enough to make one excellent book.