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Should Sophocles be in the author list of this book?
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Jasmine
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Mar 11, 2020 02:35AM
Carson's Antigonick is a very loose translation of the renowned Antigone (Please read the description of the book here on GR). Should Sophocles be listed as the primary author?
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Adapted works are always listed by the adapter and not the creator, that's GR policy.That said you haven't linked the edition in question.
Gosh, where was my mind! I thought I attached the book in the topic. Here we go: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1....Antigonick is not an adaptation, but a translation. This is expressly stated on the publisher (New Directions) site: https://www.ndbooks.com/book/antigoni...
Other sources such as the Guardian review the book as a translation too: https://www.theguardian.com/books/201....
Definitely an adapted work, and of course the adapter would be working from a translation. "Antigonick is a translation of Sophokle's Antigone only in the loosest sense – with significant changes and metatextual additions to the original, an extra character, and illustrations with interpretations left open to the reader, it could easily be considered a different work altogether."
Basically that is what an adapted work is all about, they take the essence of a work and change and manipulate it.
So no Sophocles shouldn't be the primary author of this work.
The problem is that the translation Carson worked from is her own. She's a professor of Classics who "teaches ancient Greek for a living[sic]".I found out a few things when doing the research on her.
1) Apparently, Antigonick is part of her tragedy-in-translation project; it is the fourth installment.
2) The current description of the book on GR was the result of a thread in this group back in 2018, where a user who has read it provided it and you used it, after separating Antigonick from Antigone. Please keep in mind that the said user was only asking for it to be separated, whereas I'm asking for advice on whether Sophocles should be mentioned as an author.
Here's the link to that thread for your convinience: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/....
Things of note concerning Antigonick
From Observer: https://observer.com/2012/05/a-matter...
The poet Anne Carson’s translation of Antigone is retitled Antigonick (New Directions, 180 pp., $24.95), as in “nick of time,” suggesting that the play is all about timing.
That Ms. Carson defers the play’s beginning in order to make room for this Laurel and Hardy routine once again brings to mind timing: in a play with perfect pacing, where every action falls into place down to the second—and especially in a translation that has cut out all the fat in order to magnify this fateful accuracy (this version moves so fast, Ms. Carson rarely uses punctuation, as though she does not have time for such embellishment)—it is as if all the tragedy of the play could be blamed on this small and ultimately pointless exchange.
But also:
Ms. Carson’s adaptation is filled with such moments of self-conscious comedy.
From California Poetics: http://www.californiapoetics.org/revi...
..., Antigonick [by Carson] combines them in a new way. The result is her most compelling book of translation yet (scholars may argue about whether it can be categorized as “translation” at all, but readers of poetry will enjoy it regardless).
For more than a decade, Carson has been on a mission to make translating dead Greek poets into a sexy, trendy act through translations that often have at least as much Carson in them as they do Aristophanes, Sophocles, or Euripides. Although Electra (Oxford UP, 2001) was her first book-length translation of tragedy, it was with If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, published in stunning full color by Knopf in 2002, that she began to gain serious attention for her translation work.
From Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...
"how is a Greek chorus like a lawyer?" ask the chorus in Anne Carson's latest work, a translation of Sophocles' Antigone.
The strangest thing about these lines is their power; even as Carson's translation teeters toward incomprehensibility, it conveys the compression of the ancient Greek, the fraught meaning of deinon (both "terrible" and "wondrous").
All of the writers of the articles I cited above have clearly given Antigonick a very thorough read, just like the reader who kindly came up with its GR description.
But please make no mistake. I'm completely on board with the opinion that it shouldn't be combined with Antigone at all. I picked up the book just after posting the thread–which pushed others out of the queue of my priority reading list. And yes, I agree Antigonick is a work of its own, in and of itself. Nonetheless, I'd still argue Sophocles should be listed the primary author, since both Anne Carson and the publisher(s) of her book market it as a translation rather than an adaptation.
IMO Sophocles should be listed as a secondary author only.
Jasmine wrote: "Please keep in mind that the said user was only asking for it to be separated, where as I'm asking for advice on whether Sophocles should be mentioned as an author.". Sophocles is listed as the secondary author. He did not write the work, Carson wrote it - it is an adaption.
Read the librarian manual again. And I'm just happy Sophocles's got to be in the author list. Thank you both very much indeed, Sandra and lethe :DHave a good one.
