Anne Carson’s Antigonick sits comfortably in the groove of what she does in her other works, from poetry to academic research. And in fact, it contains pretty much the entire spectrum of her interests: It’s a translation, an adaptation, a poem, a personal essay and an academic survey of the legacy of Antigone – both the work and the character.
Bianca Stone’s artwork for the illustrated edition of Antigonick
Carson opens the book with a short introduction in verse, “the task of the translator of antigone,” which she starts with “dear Antigone.” These pages are partially about the implications and possible difficulties of adaptation, but also about the reader-interpreter’s personal association to material. She lets us into the relationship she has to this fascinating figure. Appropriately for these notes, Ingeborg Bachmann is cited. It seems I – and by extension you my readers – can’t escape her this summer:
we were always already anxious about you
perhaps you know that Ingeborg Bachmann poem
from the last years of her life that begins
"I lose my screams"
dear Antigone,
I take it as the task of the translator
to forbid that you should ever lose your screams
Antigone is the character, yes, but there’s also a way in which Carson addresses the play itself, its constructs and its footprint. She goes on to list versions and interpretations of the character/play: Bertold Brecht, Jean Anouilh, Hegel, Žižek, Judith Butler, Lacan, George Eliot. In that prologue she asks what all versions of Antigone ask, obliquely or directly: What does this story mean? How does that meaning change depending on its translation to different words and different contexts?
Carson gave me the compulsion to dip back into Hegel (briefly) and Butler.
This version is at once viscerally personal and detachedly academic. It’s modernized in part through its dive into ugliness and pettiness. There’s less grandeur and formality in this Antigone. Creon (Kreon) is more overtly a tyrant, his speeches cut down to an almost petulant and childish skeleton of language. His very first entrance is simply a list of authoritarian words:
Kreon: here are Kreon’s verbs for today
Adjudicate
Legislate
Scandalize
Capitalize
here are Kreon's nouns
Men
Reason
Treason
Death
Ship of State
Mine
Chorus: “mine” isn’t a noun
Kreon: it is if you capitalize it
Kreon’s word lists also illustrate the book’s relationship to language. The poem knows that it’s made of words. It’s a translation that self-consciously knows it’s a translation. And the characters – particularly Antigone – know that they exist within a cultural lineage. They’re enacting their story while knowing how the fallout will later get dissected. Hegel comes up several times, mentioned by the characters themselves.
Antigone: some think the world is made of bodies some think forces
I think a man knows nothing but his foot when he burns it in the hot fire
Ismene: quoting Hegel again
Antigone: Hegel says I am wrong
Ismene: but right to be wrong
Antigone: no ethical consciousness
Ismene: is that how he puts it
In that sense, scholarship or interpretation largely replaces fate in this version of the play. The characters aren’t locked into actions by virtue of the gods as much as by thousands of years of readings.
Meanwhile, the Chorus:
how is a Greek chorus like a lawyer
they're both in the business of searching for a precedent finding an analogy locating a prior example so as to be able to say this terrible thing we're witnessing now is not unique you know it happened before or something much like it
we're not at a loss how to think about this we're not without guidance there is a pattern
we can find an historically parallel case and file it away under
ANTIGONE BURIED ALIVE FRIDAY AFTERNOON
COMPARE CASE HISTORIES 7, 17 AND 49
For all these metatheatrical trappings, I found death less conceptual and more humanly present in this rendering. I’ve found that the reality of death becomes somewhat subsumed into fate and the confines of roles in my reading of the Antigone. Death is a trigger and an inescapable finale, but I’ve had a hard time grasping its human implications. Carson’s collage of analysis and translation somehow captured the personal cost of death for me. It’s worth noting that Antigonick is her follow-up to Nox, in which she elegizes her brother and comes to terms with his death through the deconstructed translation of a short Catullus poem.
And now, one last thing: Nick. Who (what) is “Nick,” a character added by Carson? He is, per her cast description, “a mute part [always onstage, he measures things].” What is he measuring? Cost, time, death? He’s a ghost, a witness, a reminder of injury (“nick” as in cut or scratch), a reminder of time passing or things carried out (“nick” as in notch).
At the end of the play, Creon’s wife Eurydice (Eurydike) asks while trying to grapple with her son’s suicide :
have you heard this expression
the nick of time
what is a nick
I asked my son
what is a nick
I asked my son
And the Chorus contemplates “a nick” in this way:
You can watch a performance of Antigonick (with Anne Carson as the Chorus) at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in 2012: