As the blind seer Teiresias warns: “Watch out Kreon / Watch out I see the future plunging toward you. Antigonick, which was published by New Directions, has little punctuation, and the pages are unnumbered. But somehow the grip of the original poem is still there, refracted and hollowed out and exposed from the beginning as pompous, hot-gas, baggy stuff.

It is a cry of grief posed in question form, emphatic, handwritten, excessive and abbreviated and, in this sense, a measured scream that gives us some sense of who or what lives on when it is all too late. This passage is good, but it still isn't an interpretation of the individual image: it's a reading of any image (especially one with an empty room, but any image could be construed the same way). I agree it is problematic to have Antigone say things like "BINGO," despite Carson's clear intention to speak to a contemporary reader.It's sad that the pictures, by Bianca Stone, don't try to either work with the text, or against it; it's sad Stone seems to think that this kind of freedom is both expressive and appropriate; it's sad that Carson chose this artist for the project: but worst of all is that reviewers, with almost no exceptions that I could find, think the images are interesting, good, and even profound. Hand-inked text blocks—at times just one sentence set like a horizon on the page—are overlaid with vellum transparencies of artist Bianca Stone’s abstract illustrations.

A timeless classic that is frighteningly relevant as ever: the dispute between religious and secular laws, authoritarianism and its depredation on culture and faith, and the perils any type of extremism brings.In his Antigone of Sophocles (in David Constantine's excellent translation), Brecht frames it in the context of World War II and Hitler's debacle (Creon is adapted from a tyrannical but nonetheless complicated figure in Sophocles into the mindless "Führer"). only add dimension to a work that does not need any support to be completely satisfying and intriguing. If the comic effect is unintentional, it's inept; if intentional, it's a joke few members of a contemporary audience are going to get. There are occasional grim felicities, but the effort still struck me as wilful and contrived, a knowing revenge on both Sophocles and his admirers. Antigone, the daughter of ill-fated Oidipus, whose brothers Eteokles and Polyneikes (Carson's own spellings), kill each other in battle, goes against her uncle Kreon's edict to leave Polyneikes unburied, knowingly inviting her punishment of death.

By leaving us with Nick, still measuring, Carson inverts the traditional Sophoklean notion that it is better to learn, as Kreon does, even too late. She is author of The Autobiography of Red, The Beauty of the Husband, Decreation, Economy of the Unlost, Eros the Bittersweet, Glass, Irony and God, Grief Lessons, If Not, Winter, Men in the Off Hours, Norma Jean Baker of Troy, Nox, Plainwater and Red Doc> . S. Eliot Prize, Plainwater: Essays and Poetry, and Glass, Irony and God, shortlisted for the Forward Prize.Carson remains connected at least tangentially to original meanings, but she adds further layers of meaning that come solely from the mind of Anne Carson, as a poet, and as a reader of Sophocles, and as a unique individual woman living in the 21st century. Everything I've read of hers- ( Autobiography of Red-Canada, Red Doc>, Nox, and now Antigonick-has been thought-provoking, fascinating, filled with language and images that are hauntingly beautiful. I enjoyed my reading experience, but honestly found parts of the translation took away from the language I liked in previous translations I have read of Antigone. It is an unhappy reflection on some contemporary literary culture, and on how the art world presents itself, that a translation as radical and eloquent as Carson's can be marred by such an irresponsibly chosen, poorly executed, effectively random series of pictures, and almost no one notices.