Antigone

by Sophocles, Paul Woodruff

Overview

Filled with passionate speeches and sensitive probing of moral and philosophical issues, this powerful drama reveals the grim fate that befalls the children of Oedipus. When Antigone, the daughter of Oedipus, chooses to obey the law of the gods rather than an unconscionable command from Creon, ruler of Thebes, she is condemned to death. How the gods take their revenge on Creon provides the gripping denouement to this compelling tragedy, still one of the most frequently performed of classical Greek dramas. Footnotes.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780872205710
Publisher:	Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.
Publication date:	09/15/2001
Series:	Hackett Classics
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	112
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Anne Carson is a MacArthur Fellow; she has received the Lannan Prize, the T.S Eliot Prize, the Pushcart Prize, the Griffin Poetry Prize (twice-awarded), and was an Anna-Maria Kellen Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, Germany. Anne is currently adapting The Bakkhai for the Almeida. Classic Stage Company in New York has produced Anne Carson's An Oresteia (a trilogy adapted from Aeschylus' Agamemnon, Sophokles' Electra and Euripides' Orestes) in repertory.

Table of Contents

IntroductionOn the TranslationAntigoneNotes on the TextAppendices1. The Date of Antigone2. The Myth of Antigone, to the End of the Fifth CenturyThe Transmission of the TextGlossarySuggestions for Further Reading

Editorial Reviews

A lucid, well-paced translation, natural enough sounding in the dialogue to make a good acting version, and remarkably successful in making the choruses clear, lyrical, and yet part of the dramatic movement. Woodruff's rendering of the choruses especially impresses me by the way he manages to render complex syntax and imagery of the original--often tangled and occasionally obscure in its allusiveness--into clear and genuinely poetic English. --Joseph Russo, Haverford College

When a play has been translated as many times as the Antigone, a new version has to have some remarkable qualities in order to merit attention. Happily, Woodruff's Antigone has just that. Most notably, his text is performable: when read aloud it displays real pace and force. . . . Of course, performability is often gained at the expense of what we might call 'faithfulness' to the original text--and in practical terms, this means that a performance translation rarely serves well as a teaching text. Woodruff, then, has pulled off a remarkable feat in that this edition will serve the teacher and student of Sophocles as well as it would the actor. The original line numbers are preserved and the text is seldom distorted: Woodruff is aware that the words used by Sophocles matter, and employs footnotes to good effect to explain points of linguistic and cultural interest in a concise and accessible way. The flavour of Sophocles' play is also preserved by the stage directions, which are envisaged in terms of the ancient rather than the modern stage. The choral odes--which are translated with particular clarity--are also marked and divided into strophes and antistrophes. What also sets the translation apart is the quality of the introduction and appendices, which are both well informed and address the reader in a direct way. Woodruff succeeds in being straightforward but not patronizing and whilst his target audience is presumably a student of A-level or university level, this edition would be a good starting point for any intelligent adult who wished to read the play. Woodruff frames scholarly debates in such a way as to invite reaction from the reader and to encourage informed debate. Notable, too, is that he strives to keep the text 'open': as well as presenting different scholarly views on the play, he even provides 'Endnotes' where he provides information on readings of the manuscripts, thus providing access to debates from which the student is normally excluded. As part of this project--and refreshingly in my view--he makes his own presence felt: he informs us as to his own views on the play and spells out his objectives as a translator, thus opening up yet another aspect of investigation and debate. This is a provocative edition of the Antigone, which fulfills many of its high ambitions. For me, the vibrancy of Woodruff's approach to the play shines through, giving us a text just waiting to be read aloud, discussed and debated. --James Robson, The Joint Association of Classical Teachers Review

From the Publisher

A lucid, well-paced translation, natural enough sounding in the dialogue to make a good acting version.

Joseph Russo

These two new additions to Oxford's "Greek Tragedy in New Translations" series only add to the luster of the previous releases. Each is firmly packed with insightful introductions, comprehensive and numbered notes, glossaries, and up-to-date bibliographies (the plays' texts take up about half of each volume). The collaboration of poet and scholar in each volume produces a language that is easy to read and easy to speak (compare, for instance, the Watchman's first lines in Shapiro and Burian's Agamemnon with those in Lattimore's 1947 translation). Each volume's introduction presents the play's action and themes with some detail. The translators' notes describe the linguistic twists and turns involved in rendering the text into a modern poetic language. Both volumes are enthusiastically recommended for academic libraries, theater groups, and theater departments.-Larry Schwartz, Minnesota State Univ., Moorhead Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

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