Anne Carson’s new translation of Antigone is a real mess.1 She has taken one of the most moving plays of the classical world—still charged with pathos despite its remoteness in custom and dramaturgy—and updated it like a new Honda. The Greek tragedies present a problem for modern readers; and translations often don’t help, either mummifying the original, as if the ancients were best viewed in glass vitrines, or throwing the berobed actors into mufti and pretending that all the bloodletting occurred during the Jazz Age.
Carson wants to drag the drama into the page, an idea lovely in theory but loopy in practice. She has hand-lettered the translation herself, with a pen nib apparently used to pry open beer bottles. The result possesses a neurotic energy, as if the very letters, all caps, squirmed with feeling. The stuttering punctuation is an afterthought, if it’s a thought at all. Overlaying most of the text pages are translucent, slightly childish drawings by the illustrator Bianca Stone. The effect is like a graphic novel on crack.
Still, the interplay between drawing and veiled text is more striking than I would have imagined—if Blake had no eye for art or ear for verse, he might have produced something like this. The play rises up through the sketches like the ghost of history, a palimpsest only teasingly visible. Sometimes the drawings take their prompts from the dialogue—mostly they’re irrelevant. (Members of the chorus, one wearing a Star Trekuniform, have cement
