Antigonick - Winner of the Criticos Prize

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He has been such a boorish strongman—sexist, brutal, rash—and his final realization comes so hard and fast that it feels less earned. Carson’s protagonist is more audacious and irreverent than her Sophoklean predecessor, defiant to the point of seeming mad. 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. Her testament that “I am born for love not hatred” is a response to his “Enemy is always enemy, alive or dead.

It dramatises its own eccentricity, evoking a portrait of the author in a state of distraction; the words of the translation are printed in handwriting (Carson's own), almost entirely without punctuation, in tiny capital letters that are both neat and a little frantic.

It's a riff, perhaps, on Judith Butler's investigation into what might have happened had Antigone, rather than Oedipus, been the point of departure for psychoanalysis. But of course there is hope look here comes hope / wandering in / to tickle your feet // Then you notice the soles are on fire. She is author of The Autobiography of Red, The Beauty of the Husband, Decreation, Economy of the Unlost, Eros the Bittersweet, Glass, Irony and God, Grief Lessons, If Not, Winter, Men in the Off Hours, Norma Jean Baker of Troy, Nox, Plainwater and Red Doc> . At the close of Sophokles’s Antigone, Kreon gains what every autocratic ruler lacks: regret and a piercing awareness of what he has failed to see and thus destroyed.

I first read Antigonick shortly after it was published seven years ago, in May 2012, halfway through the Obama administration. 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. Antigonick conveys the nonsensical results of most translations of ancient Greek – the banality of stichomythia, the lists of question-words, the improbable coinages. 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. I have always loved the ‘Antigone’ story both in Sophocles’ version, and in its many reincarnations such as the one by Anouilh during the Nazi occupation of France and the one by Seamus Heaney in ‘The Burial at Thebes’.

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. You are a person in love with the impossible,’ Ismene admonishes Antigone, pleading with her ‘ don’t cross the line…girls can’t force their way against men. With this work, I not only read reviews/essays but found a video of Anne Carson performing the work.

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). It captures, too, the rift between our everyday efforts to keep ourselves busy, and infinite tragedy: that raw nick between Tuesday and death. And we still stand observing it from the outside, words still don't have the privilege of its enunciation - only the mute, only the enmangled. Other fun plays on words is Antigone mentioning she is lonely inside herself, poking at her fate of being sealed alone inside a cave. When asked if she was the one who went against Creon's edict and buried her brother, Antigone replied, "Bingo!has an ineluctably comic effect for those who remember Housman's parody of Aeschylus ("O suitably-attired-in-leather-boots head of a traveler . Even the opening piece that introduces 'the task of the translator of Antigonick' contains lines and passages that I highlighted, phrases that seemed so new in the world. There’s a sense of things being wrapped up, a kind of childishness in his seesaw of words: “Late to learn O yes I am/late too late O then O then …” He blames the chorus for bringing him the awful news. She meets his autocracy with insolence, as if to say: this breed of extremism can only be met with extremes. Resolute, with no equivocation, she hurls toward martyrdom, which makes her, curiously, less martyr and more fury.