The impulse for this essay began when I read Garry Wills’s review of Seamus Heaney’s new translation of Antigone. Seizing on a comment in the translator’s afterward about the relation between George W. Bush and Creon, Wills vented considerable indignation at the oversimplified readings of this play in the twentieth century, in which various dictators have been aligned with Creon while Antigone has emerged as the heroine who dares to resist a totalitarian regime. The play Sophocles wrote, he argued, is not nearly so clear-cut.
All right, I remember thinking at the time, but what about the translation? Afterall Heaney is an excellent poet and a conscientious translator, as witnessed his translation of Beowulf. Early in his career, he did a Sophocles …show more content…
For one thing, Heaney was quite aware of the complexity Wills continuously bashed him for supposedly overlooking. After mentioning Bush and his attitude toward support of his Iraq policy, Heaney went on to assure that a more complicated account of the tragedy’s conflict was written.
Wills had to ignore this to launch his tirade. In his discussion of the play, he sites some choral passages that praise Antigone more firmly then the original text seems to warrant; but he is clearly searching for examples to bolster his prejudgment. Toward the end of his review, Wills does admit that Heaney’s version of the play has brilliant language and inventive moments. But by that time the damage has been done, most readers will have concluded that the Heaney translation is too distorted to be worth bothering with. These readers are encouraged to lie down and choose another book.
For my own part, at the time I was getting ready to sit in on a Sophocles seminar. I knew that would give me a chance not merely to re-read the plays I knew and admired along with the ones I didn’t, but to follow Sophocles’s chronology as far as we can conjecture it and see how he developed in his time and place as a playwright of enormous poetic skill and remarkable experimentation. It was more than I could find from
All right, I remember thinking at the time, but what about the translation? Afterall Heaney is an excellent poet and a conscientious translator, as witnessed his translation of Beowulf. Early in his career, he did a Sophocles …show more content…
For one thing, Heaney was quite aware of the complexity Wills continuously bashed him for supposedly overlooking. After mentioning Bush and his attitude toward support of his Iraq policy, Heaney went on to assure that a more complicated account of the tragedy’s conflict was written.
Wills had to ignore this to launch his tirade. In his discussion of the play, he sites some choral passages that praise Antigone more firmly then the original text seems to warrant; but he is clearly searching for examples to bolster his prejudgment. Toward the end of his review, Wills does admit that Heaney’s version of the play has brilliant language and inventive moments. But by that time the damage has been done, most readers will have concluded that the Heaney translation is too distorted to be worth bothering with. These readers are encouraged to lie down and choose another book.
For my own part, at the time I was getting ready to sit in on a Sophocles seminar. I knew that would give me a chance not merely to re-read the plays I knew and admired along with the ones I didn’t, but to follow Sophocles’s chronology as far as we can conjecture it and see how he developed in his time and place as a playwright of enormous poetic skill and remarkable experimentation. It was more than I could find from