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Sophocles' Antigone | |||
1998 • 0-941051-25-0 • paper • 116 pages • 5 ½ x 8 ½ • $9.95 English translation, with introduction, notes, and interpretative essay. A new and provocative translation by an outstanding scholar. | About the Author | Table of Contents | Preface | Review | | |||
Description This text is available from Focus in an three play edition, Sophocles: The Theban Plays, that includes King Oidipous and Oidipous at Colunus.
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Ruby Blondell is Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Washington, Seattle. She is the author of "Helping Friends and Harming Enemies: A Study in Sophocles and Greek Ethics" (Cambridge 1989) and of articles on Greek literature and philosophy.
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Preface
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Sophocles’ Antigone has been translated countless times. This new translation is aimed at all those, especially students and teachers, who wish to work with an English version that closely follows the Greek original. I have tried to remain reasonably faithful to Greek idiom and metaphor, to translate words important for the meaning of the play consistently, and sometimes to retain the original word order, verse and sentence structure. The original meters have inevitably been sacrificed, but I have used a kind of six-beat iambic line for the iambic (spoken) portion of the drama, and tried to retain an approximately anapestic rhythm for Sophocles’ anapests (which are printed in italics). I have not used any formal metrical scheme for the lyrics, which are simply rendered in short lines and indented. (In a few lyric passages the line numbers of the Greek are inconsistent with the number of lines in the text, for reasons of colometry; I have altered the number of lines in the translation in order to avoid confusing the reader.) Despite this attempt to retain some of the rhythmic sense of the original, my first priorities have usually been accuracy and consistency. This approach sometimes leads to awkward moments, but I hope they will be outweighed by its benefits. Though many aspects of the original have been lost, as they must be in any translation, I believe, and hope the reader will agree, that much of the poetry of meaning is best communicated in this way. The spellings of Greek names attempt to retain some of the benefits of both comfort and defamiliarization. For the most part I have used traditional English spelling for the names of historical persons and places (e.g. Aeschylus, Athens), but transliterated mythological names in so far as this accords with modern English pronunciation (e.g. Kreon, Polyneices). The explanatory notes are aimed at those approaching this play, and perhaps ancient Greek culture, for the first time. They provide factual information on such matters as mythology, geography and unfamiliar cultural practices, together with clarification of obscure phrases and some interpretive pointers. There are no stage directions in ancient Greek texts. Those provided in the translation are based on indications in the dialogue, and are intended to clarify the stage action for the modern reader. A fuller discussion of important background material concerning the poet, his theater and the myth of Oedipus and his family is contained in the Introduction. The translation is followed by an Interpretive Essay, to be read after the play, together with some suggestions for further reading.
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In her new translation of Antigone, Ruby Blondell demonstrates an unswerving sense of what the general reader needs to know in order not only to understand Sophocles, but to relish him as well… My own students have found that this edition not only makes the Antigone accessible, but also helps them understand why it continues to fascinate, to disturb, and to grip its readers century by century. -- John T. Kirby, Comparative Literature, Purdue University
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Sophocles' Antigone 
