Antigonick - Winner of the Criticos Prize

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The illustrations are of good quality and excellent reproduction, but they seem to have only a vague, and often not even that, relation to the text. Jean Carroll’s allegations that she had been sexually assaulted by Donald Trump were made public, I pulled Antigonick off the shelf.

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. When Antigone is caught pouring dust and water on her brother’s body, she is brought before the king. Sophokles' luminous and disturbing tragedy is here given an entirely fresh language and presentation: it will provoke poetry readers, classical scholars, theatre people and comic-book aficionados. Carson's translation makes a mockery of translations – that seems to be half its point, the other being a kind of aesthetic experiment that I found irritating throughout.Creo que Carson acaba de darme un ejemplo claro de por qué el traducir es tan cercano al arte, a la creación. Unlike versions of Antigone that try to capture the drama's grandeur (such as Robert Fagles's translation for Penguin) or to make it relevant (including Don Taylor's version, currently at the National Theatre), Carson's aims to show the difficulty of translation, the truly unbearable nature of tragedy.

Less translation than reinvention, Antigonick is also a deft work of scholarship, strung through with allusions to earlier interpreters of Sophokles’s tragedy, from Bertolt Brecht (who had his Antigone perform the entire play with a door strapped to her back) to the French dramatist Jean Anouilh, who rewrote the script in such a way that it opened in Paris in 1944, creating a version that was at once palatable to the Nazis in the audience and an unswerving symbol of the French Resistance.

I love Sophocles’ Antigone, I loved the Italian translation and I loved even more the original Greek. 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. It is really three books in one: a English language version of Sophocles' Antigone by Anne Carson, a designed book (non-standard, artistic layout, paper, binding, printing) by Robert Currie, and a book of illustrations by Bianca Stone. 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. It shows how the book fits into the world and speaks to the society of the time, and how translating requires deciding on word choices that must navigate how you feel best respects the work while still acknowledging it as a piece being told in the present but written long in the past.

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. She later offers an overview of Antigone's childhood – "we got her the bike we got her a therapist". Kreon tries to isolate her mentally, to gaslight her: “You’re the only one in Thebes who sees things this way. only add dimension to a work that does not need any support to be completely satisfying and intriguing. Carson twists the end of the play with an invented character, Nick, who never speaks but is always on stage, measuring.Readers who are not familiar with ancient Greek texts will most likely feel a bit alienated by all this, but unfamiliarity is, perhaps, the point. 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.