The Burial at Thebes: A Version of Sophocles' Antigone
*Starred Review* There are many translations of Sophocles'Antigonebut few with the understated power and spare beauty of Irish Nobel laureate Heaney's version. He has given the play a new title,The Burial at Thebes,that recalls both Antigone's punishment--to be walled up in a cave-- and the crime for which she is punished. He remains faithful to the letter and the spirit of the play, following the structure of Sophocles' fine storytelling beat-by-beat even as he finds words to make this classic story of conflict between an inflexible autocrat and an intransigent rebel legible to modern readers. Reading Heaney's achievement, it is hard not to think of the ongoing eye-for-an-eye-for-an-eye-for-an-eye debacle unfolding in Iraq. Written in a muscular but lively style, the translation, like Heaney's best poetry, finds music in the language of the streets and reveals the raw, primal power in the most carefully constructed rhetorical tropes. This is hardly surprising. In 1990 Heaney wroteThe Cure at Troy,a translation of Sophocles'Philoctetes,for the Irish Field Day theater company, and met with great critical acclaim. His fine, new translation makes one wish he would don a translator's hat more often.Jack HelbigCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.