Lecture 2

One thing I learned from watching the lecture about the book history of Antigone is how long it took and what it went through to become the written version it is today. Neatline really helped me put it into perspective. The play went from being performed in Greece to being seen in ancient Egypt 500 years later to Florence, Italy in manuscript form, to finally being printed in Venice Italy in the 1500s. With this new perspective, I can understand why there are so many translations of the play because it is impossible for anyone to 100% knows the words said in the original play. 

What this changed for me inside the play itself is it made me think of the differences between translations and how these different translations could have changed my thoughts on scenes and characters. A great example would be the highly debated line of whether Ismene or Antigone told Creon that he is dishonoring his son. If Ismene said this line, then it would bring up a whole new aspect of her character such as her sexual past, which would also help me understand why Shamsie had Isma have an almost intimate relationship with Eamonn in her book. That line, if said by Antigone, would also be one of the rare times Antigone shows that she actually cares about Haemonn in the play as she does not really talk much about him. This one highly debated line that translations have different from one another can add a new dimension to a character or provide more evidence that a character has a certain trait or thinks/feels a certain way.

Comments

  1. Monique Cov.October 22, 2022 at 2:55 PM

    Hey Paulos! I completely agree with you. This play just spans through so many different centuries that it's so interesting to see how different translations differ from one another. I'd believe that I would have differing opinions and see characters differently in each of the translations and even the backgrounds behind the characters.

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  2. Jalen PaigeOctober 22, 2022 at 9:01 PM

    I also didn't realize the history of the text! It is important to recognize that what we see now is the text after it has been altered by many people throughout history. Something as little as changing the character that speaks a single line can radically alter the play, so how do we know what we have now is remotely close to what Sophocles wrote?

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  3. James MaddenOctober 22, 2022 at 9:42 PM

    Hey Paulos! I also wasn't familiar with the fact that the play has translations from different centuries. It's crazy to see how different every translation is from one another. I'd imagine that based on the different translations I would have very different interpretations of each text.

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  4. Griffin JonesOctober 23, 2022 at 9:50 PM

    I totally agree that the book history was much more complex and convoluted than I would have imagined. It fascinates and frustrates me that it was so difficult to get Sophocles's plays from ancient Greece to today and that the vast majority of them we will never get to read.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Noah English 11H BlogOctober 24, 2022 at 11:59 AM

    With the play going through so many geographical iterations (i.e. Greece, Egypt, Italy) it must have slowly been changed since its original performance. I wonder if any of these countries governments intentionally changed the play. Just as Athens shaped the play to be set in Thebes due to political reasons, I wonder if other governments/societies had similar influences.

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