are you mockers of me
you grabbing old men
are you laughers at me
though I’m not yet gone
O springs of the rivers of Thebes
O reaches of the plains of Thebes
bear me witness
no one sheds a tear for me
as I go to my strange new grave
no one knows what kind of laws they are that sentence me
nor what kind of tomb it is I go to
I’m a strange new kind of inbetween thing aren’t I
not at home with the dead nor with the living

Sophocles’s play Antigone asks many questions about our relationship to the law, to the state, to our families, and to the dead. The new king in town, Creon, wants his nephew Polynices’s body to go unburied, as he died an enemy of the state. Polynices’s sister Antigone says she will bury the body herself, because that is the right and necessary thing to do. Things escalate.

Chris and Suzanne revisit this work and its world—how it depicts the gods and the dead, and how we might read the struggles of a king trying to rule and a young woman trying to do right by her brother. They also explore two different translations by the poet and classicist Anne Carson.

SHOW NOTES.

Sophocles: Antigone. [Bookshop.]

Anne Carson: Antigonick and its less fancy edition.

Also by Anne Carson: Autobiography of Red; Nox; Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides; and many more.

Elizabeth Wyckloff’s translation of Antigone.

Euripides: Hippolytus, translated by Sean Gurd, recreates the Greek (lack of) punctuation.

Our episode on the Iliad.

And our episode on To the Lighthouse.

Walter Benjamin: The Task of the Translator.

Will Aitken: Antigone Undone: Juliette Binoche, Anne Carson, Ivo van Hove, and the Art of Resistance.

Next: Song of Songs.

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