Book 1 Part 4 

Preparing for A150 before the course starts: The Island

From Book 3, Cultural Encounters, Chapter 6 Seamus Heaney’s The Burial at Thebes, Resources, pp.221-2.

 

A Greek tragedy for our times

A sister defies the law to bury an outlawed brother denied burial by official decree. The king sees no humanity in her act, only betrayal. The chorus, society, looks on, compromised by the need to comply with a ruler intent on revenge.

Sounds familiar? Sounds contemporary? Of course it does: by such ruthlessness is power maintained. Or is it? The story is not a new one. The Greek tragedian Sophocles of Athens, who lived in the fifth century BC, wrote Antigone, the first of his Theban plays, as a study of conflict. Antigone mourns her dead brother and breaks the law. King Creon exceeds the dictates of power, a dangerous overreaching. His son, Haemon, instead of marrying Antigone, must reject his father; he chooses to die with his bride-to-be.

It is a chilling tale and a timeless one. Antigone’s dilemma is a fundamental issue of honour. The play remains a foundation text of European theatre. Brecht was drawn to it. As was Anouilh. The French playwright revisited the play for his version, which was performed in 1942 during the German occupation. Initially reacting to the drama as theatre, audiences were to slowly grasp that Creon, a plausible enough characterisation, personified Vichy compromise, while Antigone was none other than France at its most idealistic. The politics of Antigone would never be lost on an artist as politically alert as Seamus Heaney, the Nobel laureate in literature.

An autobiographical but never confessional writer, Heaney the poet – who has always remained a teacher in the most honourable and generous sense of the word – is at once direct and complex; his response to the political remains shrewdly subtle.

‘I taught Antigone to college students in a Belfast teacher-training college in 1963. I talked about it in relation to Aristotle and Greek tragedy. Five years later, in October 1968, I read Conor Cruise O’Brien in the Listener using Antigone to illuminate the conflict in Northern Ireland – the conflict that is within individuals as well as within the society. Antigone and her sister, Ismene, represent two opposing impulses that often co-exist: the impulse to protect and rebel and the impulse to conform for the sake of a quiet life. From that moment on Antigone was more than a piece of the academic syllabus: it was a lens that helped to inspect reality more clearly.’

[...]

Antigone is a play that has endured, while Antigone as a character continues to impress and inspire as a heroine of conscience as well as courage. And it is that conscience, even more than the courage, that has inspired other writers to observe her, and the play, again and again. [...]

Source: Eileen Battersby (2004) ‘A Greek tragedy for our times’, The Irish Times, 3 April (City Edition; Weekend), p. 55. 

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From Book 3, Cultural Encounters, Chapter 6 Seamus Heaney’s The Burial at Thebes, Resources, p.241.

Beginning to hope

Our amateur drama society made its yearly offering at Christmas. My thespian career, which had lain dormant since I played John Wilkes Booth while at Fort Hare, had a modest revival on Robben Island. Our productions were what might now be called minimalist: no stage, no scenery, no costumes. All we had was the text of the play.

I performed in only a few dramas, but I had one memorable role: that of Creon, the king of Thebes, in Sophocles’ Antigone. I had read some of the classic Greek plays in prison, and found them enormously elevating. What I took out of them was that character was measured by facing up to difficult situations and that a hero was a man who would not break down even under the most trying circumstances.

When Antigone was chosen as the play I volunteered my services, and was asked to play Creon, an elderly king fighting a civil war over the throne of his beloved city-state. At the outset, Creon is sincere and patriotic, and there is wisdom in his early speeches when he suggests that experience is the foundation of leadership and that obligations to the people take precedence over loyalty to an individual.

Of course you cannot know a man completely, his character, his principles, sense of judgement, not till he’s shown his colours, ruling the people, making laws. Experience, there’s the test.

But Creon deals with his enemies mercilessly. He has decreed that the body of Polynices, Antigone’s brother, who had rebelled against the city, does not deserve a proper burial. Antigone rebels, on the grounds that there is a higher law than that of the state. Creon will not listen to Antigone, neither does he listen to anyone but his own inner demons. His inflexibility and blindness ill become a leader, for a leader must temper justice with mercy. It was Antigone who symbolized our struggle; she was, in her own way, a freedom fighter, for she defied the law on the ground that it was unjust.

Source: Nelson Mandela (1994) Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela, London, Abacus, pp. 540–1.

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Book 1 Part 3 

Preparing for A150 before the course starts: Antigone

From Book 3, Cultural Encounters, Chapter 6 Seamus Heaney’s The Burial at Thebes (2004), pp.193-94, and p.196

Introduction

Heaney’s play is based on the ancient Greek tragedy Antigone, created by the Athenian dramatist Sophocles (c.496-406 BCE) in the fifth century BCE….Both Heaney’s and Sophocles’ plays are set in ancient Thebes (the Greek Thebes which is north-west of Athens, not the Egyptian Thebes, which is on the River Nile, near Luxor). The outline of the story, but not the details, is drawn from Greek myth….

The mythological story behind the play

Antigone’s opening speech refers to her and Ismene’s situation as daughters of Oedipus, and this theme gathers significance throughout the scene. Oedipus was the ruler of Thebes, the man who unwittingly killed his father and married his mother.

An ancient Greek audience would have been familiar with the mythical story of Oedipus and his family, so here Antigone only refers to it briefly… emphasising the continuity of suffering and catastrophe in the family.

…The formal conventions of Greek tragedy

The Chorus in Greek tragedy was a group of fifteen, which sang and danced and also linked episodes, rather like recitative in opera…In Greek drama the Chorus had a major part in the play. It usually combined a number of functions. As well as singing in elevated poetic language the Chorus interacted and discussed with the main characters and offered moral comment. It also usually represented a group affected by the main action of the play but not powerful enough to dominate it – in this case the Theban Elders.

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Summary of the play

If you have not read either Sophocles play, or Heaney’s version, you may find it helpful to read the following brief summary of the play’s action.

The sons of Oedipus, Eteocles and Polyneices, have killed each other in a battle over their inheritance. Since Eteocles died defending the city of Thebes, the new ruler Creon orders that he alone shall be accorded an honourable burial, while Polyneices’ corpse is left to rot outside the walls of the city. Their mourning sisters Antigone and Ismene discuss this decree, Antigone resolving to defy Creon and bury Polyneices, while Ismene advises caution. Creon arrives with the chorus and justifies his decision. A guard comes with the news that Polyneices’ body has been buried, and when he returns to the body, catches Antigone in the act of reburying her brother. Creon condemns her to death for disobeying the law, but she protests that she is obeying a higher law of religious observance and familial duty. Antigone is led away to be buried alive. Creon’s son Haemon, who was to marry Antigone, threatens that he will commit suicide if she should die. When the prophet Tiresias warns Creon that his tyranny will be punished, Creon rushes off to free Antigone. He arrives to find that Antigone has already hanged herself, and the desperate Haemon threatens his father then plunges his sword into himself. When Creon’s wife hears the news of the death of her son, she too commits suicide. Creon remains mourning and alone, the chorus hoping only that one may become wiser with age.

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Book 1 Part 1 

Preparing for A150 before the course starts: Approaches to translation

From Book 3, Cultural Encounters, 6.2 Translating Sophocles’ Antigone, p.207.

Approaches to translation

... [T]here is no rigid system of definition or classification of what a translation should be ... However, a very broad spectrum of approaches might include those summarised below.

Translation that attempts above all to be accurate, communicating the letter of the original. The emphasis is on understanding and communicating the original Greek and assumes that it has a settled meaning which can be transferred into another language.

Translation that concentrates on communicating the spirit of the original. This approach recognises that the idioms and cultural frameworks of ancient and modern are not congruent, but works on the basis that the sense and the ‘feel’ of the source text and context can be represented. The translator therefore also has to make judgements about what will be effective in the language of the target audience/readers.

Pragmatic translation, which places particular emphasis on the target language and culture and the purposes for which the translation is made.

You can see that there are overlaps between these approaches but that the emphasis shifts along a line from the primacy of the Greek source language to the primacy of the modern language and its users.
 

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 In Greek mythology, Antigone is the daughter of Oedipus and Jocasta, Oedipus' mother. The name has been suggested to mean "opposed to motherhood", "in place of a mother". It may also mean "against men" since men were dominant in the Ancient Greek family structure, and Antigone clearly defied masculine authority, or "anti-generative", from the root gonē, "that which generates" (related: gonos, "-gony"; seed, semen).[dubious – discuss]

Antigone is a tragedy by Sophocles written in or before 441 BC. Chronologically, it is the third of the three Theban plays but was written first. The play expands on the Theban legend that predated it and picks up where Aeschylus' Seven Against Thebes ends

*Wikipedia*

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