Antigone, is that you?

#2. Which concept that Marvin Carlson defines – illustration, translation, fulfillment, or supplement — best describes  the Anne Carson  Antigonik and the Trajal Harrell Antigone Jr.?   Why?

When looking at the question that serves as a prompt for this blogpost I cannot help but feel that all of the options could be applicable to both pieces. The terms are seemingly relative to the audience’s own interpretation of the piece. As such, there may not be any single one that best describes any of the pieces. However one can try to argue for a specific one, which is what I will attempt to do here.

Anne Carson’s Antigonik is best described as a translation of Sophokles’s work into a modern day era. And this is speaking of the print itself, not the script as a possibility for a play. The text in the print has a certain theatricality to it, the words are separated in non-conventional ways, such as placing only one word in a page or scattering them throughout the page at times, which creates a type of “pacing” while reading the play that would otherwise not exist. The font resembles handwritten letters, which fills it with personality and an interesting aesthetic, which keeps it interesting, apart from introducing some rather odd illustrations throughout the book, which also keep the read being dynamic. The reason why this is a translation of Sophokles’s original work is not only because it is translated from ancient Greek to English, but because without all of this additional aesthetic supplement and the simplification of the text in a very humorous and perhaps even absurd way, the play may be lost to the general public of nowadays. I say this because in my experience, Greek drama which is translated with a focus of being loyal to the original text usually is dense and difficult to read, due to the heavy amount of references to their specific culture and the extremely long monologues that were product of having only one or two actors on the stage at a time. Antigonik is engaging on its own, just how the original Antigone might have been for the Ancient Greek audience. Therefore, it is a translation, which replaces the foreign and outdated type of text that existed originally by a humorous text and entertaining aesthetic geared towards helping a “Western” audience remain engaged. The only issue is that the original values of the play might have been “lost in translation” but because the ideas themselves are what is being translated in order to be kept relevant, I believe this was just an inevitable consequence.

Trajal Harrell Antigone Jr. features a performance of Antigone that many would probably not understand very well. Most of the performance involves two actors modeling back and forth and dancing in the vogue style, while eventually some words related to Antigone are thrown out in order to reassure the audience that the play is still the Antigone of Sophokles. I would like to argue that the Antigone Jr. is more of a translation. However, as opposed to Antigonik, the fact that Antigone Jr. is a performance instead of just a visual text forces it to translate to a modern audience by applying itself onto contemporary traditions, such as vogueing. Through the use of these contemporary techniques, alongside a brief retelling of the actual story and a mistake in the beginning that sort of “breaks the ice” among the audience, the performance creates a space where the audience is entertained and feels comfortable, much like how original Greek plays used to be. While the fact that the play is a tragedy or the values may not have been carried over as loyally either makes it even more clear that this is a different audience that perceives things differently. Ultimately it does not seem too far-fetched to speculate that the effect that Antigone Jr. has on the contemporary Western audience somewhat assimilates the effect of Sophokles’s play on an Ancient Greek audience.