Antigone Adapted: Sophocles' Antigone in Classic Drama and in Modern Adaptation, Translation and Transformation

This anthology focuses on a literary figure Sophocles Antigone who seems to have taken on a life independent of the play in which she was first featured: Antigone (441 B.C.) She has since appeared in numerous other plays, operas and films even in comic books and songs especially in the twentieth century: in the drama alone, we see her in works from Brecht and Hasenclever to Cocteau and Anouilh to Fugard and Heaney. Indeed, few narratives have been adapted for the stage as often as the legend of Antigone; each generation reinvents the myth to fit its own circumstances. In each reappearance, she bears the marks of the time that (re)produced her, and these manifestations of her character mutually modify each other. That is, while the character brings a known body of information to the new artistic situation, its place in that new context may well alter our understanding of the earlier appearances of Antigone as well. All the variations on the Antigone theme attest, each in its own way, to the immense vitality that has continued to inhabit this complex dramatic character over the centuries. At the center of Sophocles original play is a struggle to reconcile personal beliefs with the needs or dictates of society. At no time is such a struggle more relevant than in periods of war, so it is not surprising that new adaptations of Antigone cluster around periods of armed conflict, whether between nations or within a single nation itself: for example, Argentina in the seven-year grip of its Dirty War on its own people in Griselda Gambaro's Antigonia Furiosa (1986), and the Republic of Congo as it is torn by AIDS, political corruption, internecine hostility, and military oppression in Sylvain Bemba's Black Wedding Candles for Blessed Antigone (1988). In Antigone Adapted, the nations or territories in question are ones not typically featured in Western anthologies of drama: Puerto Rico, in the troubled possession of the United States, in Luis Rafael Sánchez's The Passion of Antígona Perez (1968); and Slovenia, under the iron yoke of both Tito and the Soviet Union, in Dominik Smole's Antigona (1959). These translations---of Smole's play and Sanchez's---have never before appeared in English in the West,and the Sophocles translation is also a new one; This book makes these plays available for the first time. Though these twentieth-century adaptations of Antigone differ widely in style and theme, they all have their ultimate source in Sophocles play. The text of the original is thus like a prism: turn it this way or that, and different colors shine through in each instance. The ancient war between Argo and Thebes has developed an archetypal quality in this age of international conflict an age in which our everyday lives are frequently disrupted by events on the global political stage as well as the local domestic one. TABLE OF CONTENTS I.Introduction: The Portable Antigone. II.Luis Rafael Sánchez: Life and Work. III.The Passion of Antígona Pérez (1968), by Luis Rafael Sánchez. IV.Dominik Smole: Life and Work. V.Antigona (1959), by Dominik Smole. VI.Antigone (441 B.C.), by Sophocles. VII.Bibliography: English-Language Tran