Antigonick - Winner of the Criticos Prize

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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. net, says the illustrations "lack the depth, in both subject and style, to dovetail with Carson's translation. 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. Antigonick won the 2012 Criticos Prize for an original work, written in (or translated into) English, inspired by Greece or Greek exploits, culture or history. Anne Carson has published translations of the ancient Greek poets Sappho, Simonides, Aiskhylos, Sophokles and Euripides.

Her poetry is expressionistic (you see this in Antigonick ), shot through with a spiritual turbulence and an almost violent sensitivity to experience, and the barbed edges of her lines can send shocks through you. Meant to be read in a single sitting but certainly thought provoking far beyond a single reading, Antigonick is another exquisite example of Carson’s inexhaustible creativity and craft. 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. Carson is also a classics scholar, the translator of If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, and the author of Eros the Bittersweet. Carson is nothing less than brilliant--unfalteringly sharp indiction, audacious, and judicious in taking liberties.The characters of the play even comment on various interpretations that have been offered by Bertolt Brecht and G. Rather, as the scene switches between the textual and the graphic, a temporal shift takes place between the past and the present: something is gone, and something is caught, and vibrates still. A nick of time is the gap between your eyes, the gap between a prelapsarian nothingness and a memory-swollen nothingness. Antigonick is her first attempt at making translation into a combined visual and textual experience: it will provoke poetry readers, classical scholars, theatre people and comic-book aficionados.

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. Carson, a poet influenced by authors as diverse as Sappho, Euripides, Emily Brontë, Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf, is known both for innovative translations of ancient texts and for her restrained but searing confessional poetry (try " The Glass Essay" or The Beauty of the Husband). You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. A dizzying little play that Carson directs towards maximum effect with minimal space, it is one to read again and again. Antigone, the daughter of ill-fated Oidipus, whose brothers Eteokles and Polyneikes (Carson's own spellings), kill each other in battle, goes against her uncle Kreon's edict to leave Polyneikes unburied, knowingly inviting her punishment of death.Everything I've read of hers- ( Autobiography of Red-Canada, Red Doc>, Nox, and now Antigonick-has been thought-provoking, fascinating, filled with language and images that are hauntingly beautiful.

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. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. 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. It would probably be less right to say that this image interrupts the text as the unconscious does, or that it is the unconscious in some symbolic sense.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.

Her poetry at it's best, like Antigone's character, is a thrilling combination of hot-blooded instinct and dispassionate resolve. Her books include Antigonick, Nox, Decreation, The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos, winner of the T.Carson (with background in classical languages, comparative literature, anthropology, history, and commercial art) blends ideas and themes from many fields in her writing. Instead the collaboration is a typical effect of the latitude that is given to visual artists in some contexts: the artist is allowed to do whatever she wants, because art is thought to work on the register of visuality, of the non-verbal. 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.