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). Antigonick, which was published by New Directions, has little punctuation, and the pages are unnumbered. Translation seems loosely applied, as it is more of a metatextual retelling in minimalism, often humorous, beautifully bizarre and explosively emotional. There is no poetry, no dramatic sensibility, all the themes are lost in the apparent need to be witty (variably successful) with frequent contemporary jargons ("Bingo!

And does the author really intend the bathetic potential of the lines given to various chorus members at a particularly poignant juncture of the action: "Here comes Creon . When asked if she was the one who went against Creon's edict and buried her brother, Antigone replied, "Bingo!

Anne Carson's translation of "Antigone" received a number of serious reviews, including thoughtful pieces by Judith Butler, George Steiner, and Nick Mirzoeff. I watched the BBC Four programme and actress Juliette Binoche undoubtedly gives a stupendous performance as Antigone.

Even her beloved sister Ismene remarks, “You are a person in love with the impossible … although you go without your mind. But somehow the grip of the original poem is still there, refracted and hollowed out and exposed from the beginning as pompous, hot-gas, baggy stuff.When the blind prophet, Teiresias, enters he looks to the Chorus instead of Kreon to declare ‘ Hail, King of Thebes’ as a reminder the power is in the people and not the King, lest he is a tyrant. Kreon tries to isolate her mentally, to gaslight her: “You’re the only one in Thebes who sees things this way. It's sad that the pictures, by Bianca Stone, don't try to either work with the text, or against it; it's sad Stone seems to think that this kind of freedom is both expressive and appropriate; it's sad that Carson chose this artist for the project: but worst of all is that reviewers, with almost no exceptions that I could find, think the images are interesting, good, and even profound. It is, however, precisely Antigone’s single-minded reach—her fierce tenacity and vision, her bold ideal of what law is and what it’s meant to be—that gives Carson’s version its haunting contemporary relevance. This is where Carson's best work is staged: in the uncanny gateway between the temporal and the timeless; in the nick between the world of powerboats and the sublime, terrifying realm of the dead and the still lively gods.

When her brother Polynices declares war on Thebes, the city is defended by her other brother Eteocles. Carson also induced me to pick George Steiner's Antigones off my shelf where it had languished for decades and read it straight through.It is all rather odd and seemingly random, which I find rather charming simply for the oddity of it all and how lovely it is as a book that is also a functional piece of art. She meets his autocracy with insolence, as if to say: this breed of extremism can only be met with extremes. Hand-inked text blocks—at times just one sentence set like a horizon on the page—are overlaid with vellum transparencies of artist Bianca Stone’s abstract illustrations.

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. Repito que no soy una experta en la materia, aunque no creo que a los expertos le importe mucho todo esto, al fin y al cabo, he aquí este libro. Both die and their uncle Creon declares that Eteocles shall receive a proper burial, while Polynices, a traitor, must lie unburied, to be eaten by birds and dogs. The language of the translation is vivid, even racy, and will certainly engage a modern audience, though there are some mis-steps, or things which may or may not be mis-steps: for instance, Antigone's address to Ismene as "O one and only head of my sister . As part of her monologue, Eurydike asks ‘what is a nick’ giving the chance of interactions with the mute character.Carson’s protagonist is more audacious and irreverent than her Sophoklean predecessor, defiant to the point of seeming mad.