Antigonick - Winner of the Criticos Prize

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But Antigone evenly counters: “Actually no they all think like me / but you’ve nailed their tongues to the floor. Antigone will quote Hegel via Samuel Beckett, observe Jacques Lacan’s idea of Antigone as ‘ between two deaths’, or Judith Butler who finds her ‘ the occasion for a new field of the human’ and wrote Antigone's Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death where she observes that Antigone upsets gender traditions through her role that would traditionally be expected to be a man and, with Eurydike’s mention of finding Antigone a therapist, questions if we had taken Antigone instead of Oedipus as the departure of psychoanalysis. You are a person in love with the impossible,’ Ismene admonishes Antigone, pleading with her ‘ don’t cross the line…girls can’t force their way against men. She meets his autocracy with insolence, as if to say: this breed of extremism can only be met with extremes.

And like in Sophocles’’ work, Antigone stands still like a heroin – she is cognizant, she knows what her fate is, she makes a decision perfectly recognizing the consequences, she picks family, she picks justice, she fights for what she thinks it’s right. Anne Carson's translation of "Antigone" received a number of serious reviews, including thoughtful pieces by Judith Butler, George Steiner, and Nick Mirzoeff.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. Jean Carroll’s allegations that she had been sexually assaulted by Donald Trump were made public, I pulled Antigonick off the shelf.

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. 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.i was in a production of antigone two years ago and it was kind of an earth-shattering experience that forged within me a deep bond with the play. It's a riff, perhaps, on Judith Butler's investigation into what might have happened had Antigone, rather than Oedipus, been the point of departure for psychoanalysis.

But Antigone believes leaving her brother unburied is so utterly wrong that she must break the law to bury him and be condemned to death herself. Carson's translation plays delightfully with the idea that a work of art changes and accumulates meanings as it moves through time. 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.This really can only be half true, because if it appeared that Carson and Stone both intended that effect, it could have worked: the pictures could have been intentionally shallow, dissonant with the text, and hard to read.