The most celebrated plays of ancient Athens--Sophocles's seven surviving works--in vivid and dynamic new translations. ANTIGONE, translated by award-winning poet Robert Bagg, is one of seven plays Harper Perennial has published as beautifully designed, stand-alone editions.
Powerfully portraying the clash between civic and familial duty--between morality and obedience--Antigone brings the Oedipus Cycle to a conclusion with the story of the tragic hero's eldest daughter Antigone, who courts her own death by defying the edict of Thebes's new ruler, her uncle Kreon, which forbids giving her dishonored brother a proper burial. This is Sophocles, vibrant and alive, for a new generation.
The sons of Oedipus have killed each other on the battlefield, but Thebes' new ruler, their uncle Kreon, decrees that only Eteokles will be granted a hero's burial; Polyneikes, who attacked his own city, is left to rot in dishonor. Their sister Antigone, enraged by the king's heartlessness, defies him by burying Polyneikes' body herself. That decision dooms her, and the consequences destroy Kreon's wife and son. A play that begins with a woman's defiance of a tyrant ends in the havoc caused by Eros, the god of love. A drama abounding with moral conundrums, Antigone is presented in an extraordinary new translation by Robert Bagg, modern in idiom while faithful to the original Greek. Ideally suited for reading, teaching, or performing, this is Sophocles for a new generation to discover and admire.
Sophocles was born at Colonus, just outside Athens, in 496 BC, and lived ninety years. His long life spanned the rise and decline of the Athenian Empire; he was a friend of Pericles, and though not an active politician he held several public offices, both military and civil. The leader of a literary circle and friend of Herodotus, he was interested in poetic theory as well as practice, and he wrote a prose treatise On the Chorus. He seems to have been content to spend all his life at Athens, and is said to have refused several invitations to royal courts.Sophocles first won a prize for tragic drama in 468, defeating the veteran Aeschylus. He wrote over a hundred plays for the Athenian theater, and is said to have come first in twenty-four contests. Only seven of his tragedies are now extant, these being Ajax, Antigone, Oedipus the King, Women of Trachis, Electra, Philoctetes, and the posthumous Oedipus at Colonus. A substantial part of The Searches, a satyr play, was recovered from papyri in Egypt in modern times. Fragments of other plays remain, showing that he drew on a wide range of themes; he also introduced the innovation of a third actor in his tragedies. He died in 406 BC.
Harper Perennial
Pub Date: August 07, 2012
0.5" H x 7.9" L x 5.2" W
160 pages
paperback