For Anne Carson, an acclaimed classics scholar as well as a poet, the act of translation is like “a room, not exactly an unknown room, where one gropes for the light switch”. Like her last work Nox, Carson’s new version of Sophocles’s tragedy Antigone looks beyond the written word for illumination. But whereas Nox, a series of reimaginings of Catullus’s poem 101, was presented as a conceptual art work, a book-in-a-box encompassing sketches, collage, fragments of diaries and letters as well as scraps of written versions, Antigonick interweaves Carson’s complete translation with Bianca Stone’s occasional illustrations on transparent paper. As the reader turns the page, Stone’s desolate landscapes, ghostly, nightmarish figures and unsettling domestic scenes are overlaid over Carson’s hand-inked text like a visual palimpsest.
As ever in Carson’s playful, paradoxical verse, such devices offer as many questions as answers. Should the images be viewed as potential stage backdrops? Or do they present a second meta-text, a commentary running alongside the translation?
Carson, who worked as a commercial artist while completing her classical studies, understands the power of the non-literal. As she once said wryly of her radical versions of Catullus: “[They] bear about the same relation to translation as Francis Bacon’s paintings do to mug shots.”
Yet as well as her trademark intertextuality (Brecht, Hegel and Virginia Woolf flit through Antigonick) and deliberately jarring modernisms, Carson is a powerful interpreter of the lost and mysterious archaic world.
Her renderings of Sophocles’s complex choruses seem to rise out of an ancient primeval consciousness to crystallise in the present:
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Many terribly quiet customers exist but none more terribly quiet than Man:
his footsteps pass so perilously soft across the sea in marble winter, up the stiff blue waves and every Tuesday down he grinds the unastonishable earth with horse and shatter.
As so often in her poetry, Carson’s version represents a reading and a writing; it enacts not only the text but its reception. The central conflict between Antigone and Kreon, between state and family, as Antigone wants to bury her traitor brother, and Kreon, as King, forbids it, is reduced to single phrases scattered across the page; Kreon’s “verbs for today” are “adjudicate”, “legislate” or “capitalize”, whereas Antigone’s nouns include “autonomous” and “autarchic”. And as Kreon exhorts an impatient Antigone “let’s split/ hairs a while longer”, Carson encapsulates the entire thrust of Greek tragedy in six words.
Carson’s modernising might seem discordant and her multi-dimensional framing impenetrable. But such transformations derive from a deep knowledge of, and empathy with, her source. The block capitals and lack of punctuation she employs in Antigonick echo the appearance of Greek text on papyrus. Antigonick questions what it means to translate Greek drama. Should such versions be approached as a work of theatre or as lines on the page? For Carson, her uncompromising solutions are “little kidnaps in the dark”, a trail of softly glowing lamps that mark the way through the centuries and out of the shadows.
Antigonick (Sophokles), translated by Anne Carson, Bloodaxe Books, 112pp, £15. To buy this book for £13.50, visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop or call 0845 2712134