Anne Carson

Poet and translator Anne Carson talks with Tania Ketenjian about her two versions of Sophocles' Antigone, the Greek idea of "withness", and what it was like to be asked to translate a play she was already proud of for a second time. Recorded in 2015 for BAM's podcast Beyond Antigone.

TRANSCRIPT:

Anne Carson:
On my computer, everything I come up with to think or say about this play goes into a file called Pile of Antigone, partly a pun because pile is a synonym for pyre, that is, funeral pyre, that is what Antigone is trying to transact for her brother, but also pile to imply a degree of resignation towards the sheer mass of thoughts, moods, theories, and contradictions That this play engenders in the mind of any reader or viewer. It is a text that does not finish with you, nor you with it. Somewhere in a letter, Kafka says, we are in a holding pattern around the truth. It is a play that shakes itself apart when you look at it.

The categories move or change, the definitions fail, the people end up in the wrong place. Antigone is always in the wrong place. I'm a strange new kind of in-between thing, aren't I? She says of herself, just before her final exit. This strange question that is not a question evokes the entire monstrously mixed-up sexual history of her family, yet it also has profound political implications. For in-between thing, Antigone uses the Greek word metoikos, a technical political term in 5th century Greek for a person permitted to live in the city of Athens although lacking Athenian citizenship. Resident alien, we would say nowadays. But Antigone is not using the term technically.

She means it as a metaphor. For her own weird relegation by Creon to a place underground that is exactly like a tomb, except she is not dead. She will be stranded there in what Hannah Arendt calls bare life, or what Judith Butler calls a permanent elsewhere, which turns out to be a state of life worse than death. When Creon sentences her to this non-location, To this living death, to this in-between condition neither sacred nor profane, neither legal nor illegal, neither criminal nor redeemable, he invents the concentration camp. It is a region where the force of law without law can exercise its power. It is an action that rids the tyrant of his enemy but does not contaminate him with her killing.

It is a state of exception that marks the limit of moral sense by making nonsense of moral sense. We are familiar with this nonsense today under the name of Guantanamo. But I'm a translator, not a political analyst, so let's look at a particular issue of translation that arises at several places in the text and which might give us a better understanding of the interaction between the 2 main characters, Antigone and Creon. It is a question of hygiene. The ancient Greeks did not like mixture. They thought it unhygienic. Dirt, in the ancient definition, is matter out of place. The poached egg on your plate at breakfast is not dirt.

The poached egg on the floor of the British Museum is dirt. Dirt is matter that has crossed a boundary it ought not to have crossed. Dirt confounds categories and mixes up form. Its name in Greek is miasma, whose basic sense is defilement or impairment of the integrity of a thing. Throughout the play, Creon makes clear his preference for Unimpaired integrities, pure categories. He talks in terms of friend/enemy, patriot/traitor, winner/loser, good/bad, us/them. The final scene of the play forces him to recognize the confusion and intermingling of all these categories, to see his own boundaries penetrated by everything bad. His recognition is expressed in the language of dirt.

As he holds his son's dead body in his arms, he asks, O filth of death, who can clean you out? And a few lines later, standing over the body of his wife, he says, Now I am perfectly blended with pain. It is Aristotle's dictum that a tragic plot is most effective when the recognition and the reversal happen at one blow. Certainly that happens here. But let us probe a little deeper into the effectiveness of Creon's recognition which is also a reversal. The word he uses at line 1311 for perfectly blended with pain is a compound of the basic verb to mix and the prefix sun, S-U-N, meaning with.

This verb is meant to remind us of all the horrific comminglings that made the House of Oedipus famous, and of which Antigone is a product. But more importantly, it reminds us that Antigone herself was the champion of withness, from the beginning of the play until her death. Her defiant announcement to Creon, I am someone born to share in love, not hatred, contains two verbs that begin with this same prefix, the withness prefix: sun-ekthein, to hate with, and sun-philein, to love with. Withness is Antigone's morality, Antigone's desire, Antigone's disaster. She begins the play yearning to join her brother in the grave. She says, one day we will lie together in the grave, he and I, side by side.

And her final lament brings her to a tragic recognition, which is also a reversal, in that passage we considered earlier: I'm a strange new kind of in-between thing, aren't I? Not at home with the living nor with the dead. This may be the crux of Antigone's understanding of herself, that withness reversed is nowhere. Translation cannot convey the complex interactions of this metaphorical system or the inevitability of the catastrophe to which it leads. Antigone and Creon stand opposed to one another, instinctually, in the very morphology of their language, in the very grain of the way they think and speak. Sophoclean tragedy has this quality of tidiness, That can be terrifying.

He tucks in every stray thread. Or rather, he makes it seem that each of these threads was already woven into the same net. Why did anyone ever think they could escape? The end.

Tania Ketenjian:
That was beautiful. Thank you so much. I looked up Antigone on, you know, online, obviously. You go to Wikipedia, and it says, well, these are the main themes. And I thought, that's such a general term, because someone else, like, for someone like you, who's so intimate with the work, would see maybe a completely different list of themes.

Anne Carson:
Yes. Or you'd see them as interesting because of the way they're interlaced, not because of the way they're, you know, separated out as a list. That's what I was saying at the end, just about that metaphor of withness, that it's something that runs through the play in different bits of the language, and it isn't exactly, you know, one simple lesson about life that you derive from that. It's this complex, inevitable pattern that people just slide into without meaning to be destroyed by it.

Tania Ketenjian:
Much, much like life, I suppose.

Anne Carson:
I guess, yeah. It is how things just go on and kind of snarl around you. It's not ever so clear as in a summary of themes.

Tania Ketenjian:
I imagine that that must have made, made it quite interesting to translate because of that, because of that— nonlinear may not be the right term, but the fact that it's not about a list, but it's about the way these things intertwine.

Anne Carson:
Yes, exactly. And that's all the more true in Sophocles' way of using language because he's a deeply metaphorical thinker. So to him, the various concepts of the play are one interlaced system that can come out in the nuances of different words. And once those words are translated into another language, the nuances are not necessarily clear because we don't use the same connections between those words. So it gets very difficult to convey in translation. Yeah.

Tania Ketenjian:
So I wanted to just talk about translation. I've done a bit of translation. This was a long time ago when I was in college, but it was French poetry, Blaise Cendrars and René Char. But when I was—

Anne Carson:
They're hard.

Tania Ketenjian:
They're

Anne Carson:
hard.

Tania Ketenjian:
I can promise you I did not do very well. It's challenging to feel like you've done a good job because, you know, on the one hand, you want to stay true to the author, but you inevitably change the text, and you tap into something more— well, contemporary, as we were talking about earlier, but also something within yourself. And I wondered, while you were translating Antigone, what parts of yourself as a writer and as a thinker did you kind of have to get into?

Anne Carson:
I think, for me, it wasn't so much the content of the play, because actually it was an assignment. I translated it because a director wanted to produce a version of Antigone. So I did it as a commission, and I addressed myself more to the way Sophocles uses grammar and syntax and words which is what's unusual about him. And I honestly didn't think through the meaning of the play. I think actually, in translating, it's better not to, at least at first. It's better to stay on the level of the mechanics and make the surface work, and then go inside it and see if you've also captured—

the inner machinery. I don't know why, but that's my instinct, that if I didn't think firstly about the grammar and the syntax, I would be lost. But I've always been very fond of grammar and syntax in themselves. It's just a nerd thing. Before there were nerds, there was grammar.

Tania Ketenjian:
Well, it's— what's lovely about grammar and syntax It just deepens language, and it's this other— it really adds so much to language. It can make it so much richer. Because sometimes it's so hard to put what you think or what you feel into words, just plain words. So grammar and syntax give you this other opportunity to do that.

Anne Carson:
And it is what— I mean, the grammar of languages is what makes them different from one another and essentially untranslatable into one another. So it's where— it's the edge where the greatest challenge is. But you can look up actual words in a lexicon and find rough equivalents as far as the content goes. But for the way the words work together as a machinery, that's something that's unique to each language. And you have to not exactly replicate it, but make something equally exciting happen in your own language.

Tania Ketenjian:
So you must have been so intrigued by that initial translation that it inspired you to follow up by creating Antigonick.

Anne Carson:
No, I did Antigonick first and Antigone second. So Antigonick, which is my— well, originally, actually, it was a comic book. I wanted to make a comic book of Antigone. So I did a bunch of drawings. And then realized that if I wanted to actually make a comic book of Antigone, I'd have to do about 5,000 drawings. And I flagged at that prospect. And so enlisted Bianca Stone to make some drawings. And then I went back to what is my sort of province. I went back to translating the words. And I made that version, which is anachronistic and swiftly paced and has some— a sort of spare, speedy style to it.

And then subsequent to that, I was approached by the director, Ivo van Hove, to do an Antigone. And when I met with him, he said, I want to do Antigone. I said, great, I've already translated it. He said, yes, I know. I don't like that one. I want a new one. So originally, I was, of course, enraged and said, never, never would that happen, and went home. And then I thought about it, and it seemed like it would be maybe interesting to just go at it from a whole different place. So I got it out again and started. And that's the second one, then. That's the one that has the name Antigone.

Tania Ketenjian:
It reminds me of when musicians have to create or end up creating 2 versions of their same song, and maybe a really well-known song. And I just think how hard it must be to get the original song out of their head and create something new.

Anne Carson:
It's not the original song so much, it's the original ego that goes with the song, because you're so pleased when you've made something, and then somebody says, yes, well, but it could be better. And it's hard to believe that at first. But I don't know what it's like for musicians, but for this purpose, it actually, I think, was better, I think the second one is, in some ways, better. At least it communicates to a wider audience, I think, than the spare, weird one that I did first. The Belgian director, Ivo van Hove, he didn't want it speedy. He wanted it large and substantial, and especially he wanted Creon's function in the story to be of equal weight with Antigone's.

So that it wasn't just Antigone's play. And I think that, when I went back to it and tried to do that, I found it really interesting to unfold Creon more.

Tania Ketenjian:
There's a real— I mean, I found, and I'm not sure if this is— if you feel this way, too, but when I was reading Antigonick, there's a real love for Antigone. I felt, from you as the translator. Is that so? I mean, how do you feel about her as a person, as a character?

Anne Carson:
Yeah. I don't know if I feel a connection to her personally. I think if I did have one, it went into the drawings I did when I first wanted to make a comic book. The drawings— drawing has— you have a different affection for things that you draw than for things that you write. And the writing, I think, in the writing of both translations, I moved back to a more impersonal level of interaction with her as a character, a name on a page. I didn't have a real sense of her, I wouldn't know whether she's dark or fair. When I did the drawings, they were pencil— they were, you know, sketched black and white, so I didn't have to think about those sort of details. But I do find it hard to become personally attached to characters in translation in a play. Not sure why. I'm basically— I'm just a cold, brutal person, actually.

Tania Ketenjian:
That must be it.

Anne Carson:
It's grammar, it seems to me.

Tania Ketenjian:
It must be it.

Anne Carson:
Kind of lonely, you know? But translation, you have to keep yourself lonely. You can't really— well, you can't become Sophocles. That's an illusion, delusion. That's dangerous to stray into.

Tania Ketenjian:
So working with a director, is that a collaboration? Is it someone, you know, kind of directing you? I mean, no pun intended.

Anne Carson:
Or— I don't know. It depends on the person. Ivo van Hove is not that kind of director. He didn't interact a lot with me. He took the text after I'd redone it and He may have asked a few questions, and then I may have tinkered a bit, but then it was done. And he then went to work on it and invited me to the opening, which was in Luxembourg in February. So by then, he had made all his decisions about how it should look and sound and be. And he was kind of nervous about whether I would like it or not and greatly relieved when I did. And then he left town. So not a lot of interpersonal interaction there. But other directors work differently. Depends on them.

Tania Ketenjian:
So when you saw it in Luxembourg, what was it like for you to see what you had written being performed? You said you liked it.

Anne Carson:
Yeah, I was surprised to like it because, actually, I've done— I've attended lots of performances of Greek tragedy in my life, and they're usually pretty awful because people just scream. You know, they start off screaming, and then they have nowhere to go except more screaming and just kind of a horrible experience. But this was restrained and spare in the style of the first play that I did, and I really thought it worked. Emotionally, it worked. And the actors were all just fantastic, which is what makes the words be okay. You know, when they sound right in the voice of the person who has to say them, that's the test of whether it's a good line or not.

So it was a shock, kind of, To like it. I didn't expect to like it. But as I say, I think it worked theatrically and emotionally and as language.

Tania Ketenjian:
In what you read before the interview, I really was intrigued by the line that we— that I actually had you reread. I really was intrigued by, it is a region without law, by the metaphor that you made between what was created in Antigone and, you know, something like Guantanamo Bay. Could you speak a little bit more about that?

Anne Carson:
Yeah. It's an idea that's explored much more incisively by Judith Butler in various things she's written. And I think it's when I was reading her book on Antigone— it's called Antigone's Claim— that I came to think about this. But the place that Creon invents for Antigone to go to, which he calls a bridal chamber in the ground, is actually the ur-form of a concentration camp, because it's this place where she's supposed to stay alive because he can't officially kill her, and yet he doesn't want to be guilty of her death. So he says he's going to leave her there with just enough food to stay alive, and so avoid moral pollution for himself, but be quit of her as a problem.

And nobody can nowadays think about that situation without thinking Guantanamo, because those people are still there for years and years and they're people without a place to be. Not alive and not dead, but otherwise in what Judith Butler calls the permanent elsewhere. So I was very, very struck by that. And there's really nothing to do with it except say it. There it is. There's an image. We're enacting this image again, and it's still awfully wrong.

Tania Ketenjian:
Beautifully said. And I think such a great insight, or such— rather, such an important insight. Do you think that might be one of the reasons why this is resonating so much now? I mean, we had a performance here in San Fran— in the Bay Area of Antigonick, which was really well received. Yeah. Do you think it's because of those things that are going on currently within our culture and our world that this play is so, you know, so important right now?

Anne Carson:
I think that's part of it, yes, this situation of relegating people to places that aren't places, stateless, as they're called. Yes, it's partly that. There's also this other image that I didn't talk about in the introduction. I don't know what to say about it, but the issue of burial itself is something that's a little remote from modern sensibility, because we don't have the experience, many of us, of actually burying our dead and being intimately connected to that. ritual. But around the time I was translating this, there was a photograph on the New York Times, the front page of— it was during the Ebola crisis, the height of the Ebola crisis.

And it was a hospital where an Ebola patient was being— who had died— was being carried across a courtyard by 2 medical professionals wrapped up in the gear. And kneeling In the middle of the courtyard was a woman who was visibly throwing a handful of dirt on this body as it passed. And it just struck me all of a sudden what the significance of that is for Antigone, or for anybody who has that sort of relation to a dead loved one, that instinct to simply cover the body somehow with a layer of decency, even if it's only a handful of dust. So there is that other aspect of it, I think, that comes into our apprehension of the play, maybe not consciously, but at some level.

Tania Ketenjian:
I remember going to my first and I think only funeral in Jewish culture and— or religion— culture and religion. And you have to take a— you know, shovel up some dirt and pour it into the grave. And I remember thinking how hard that was.

Anne Carson:
Yes. It is hard because it's like saying, now they belong to the other place. But if you don't do that, then there's no— for them, there's no passage from this place to that. And that's the problem with her brother. He's stuck in between, like she gets stuck in between. Apparently, that doesn't work, to leave people in between.

Tania Ketenjian:
Apparently not. Apparently not. But I love how strong she is and how determined she is to support him. I mean, it—

Anne Carson:
Yeah, she's very strong and very— I mean, strong enough to be confusing, because I think you never quite know, throughout the play, what her motive is. You never know why she buries the body twice, for example, which it seems that she does in the beginning. You never know why she insists to her sister that her sister publish the news of her having buried it the second time. She wants that celebrity, maybe? But that seems trivial. She wants something more than just doing it. She wants it known. And then she's always talking about her brother as if she's in love with him a little bit, and that's weird, too. Yeah.

Tania Ketenjian:
When you started reading your introduction, you know, the first reflections of the players is that it's confusing, that there's so many different emotions. And then you throw in political implications, as well, into the play— not you. Anne Carson throws in. But the play itself has political implications. Yeah. And so it is actually really, really confusing.

Anne Carson:
Yeah, I think that's the one thing that Sophocles is a master of, to put issues and problems of motivation into a play with space around them so that they're not finished thinking yet when you hear the words. And that's partly so that you, the audience, can keep thinking into them. And it's also, I think, because the actors need breathing room around the lines to make them be one thing or another. An actor— 2 actors aren't going to interpret lines the same way or act the character the same way. And he gives the space around it for that difference to happen and to work. work within the rest of the dramatization. It's something that not many playwrights know how to do.

Tania Ketenjian:
And how do you translate that kind of space? I mean, what I thought was so fantastic about Antigonick was that time, which is also space, became a character in and of itself.

Anne Carson:
Yes, Nick. I think that this goes back to what we were saying about that high-wire act, the finding a place to be impersonal-personal towards the characters, so that I don't, any more than Sophocles did, fill in the whole space of the words that a character says, but allow there to be a bit of air around it for nuance or interpretation or something. I think that's part of holding back from me thinking I know exactly what this says, ever.

Tania Ketenjian:
How about now? Do you, after having translated it, do you— and having lived with it for a while and having written 2 interpretations of it, 2 translations— do you feel like you know it?

Anne Carson:
No, you know, I think I could go back and do it a third way, different again. That's not because of anything in me; it's because Sophocles has that kind of deepness in what he thinks and what he does with language. There's always more room to go deeper in Sophocles. I'm not sure Why? But so far, that's true.

Tania Ketenjian:
When I was reading Antigonick and I moved through it so fluidly, I thought to myself— and I said this to my husband— I did read it, but I feel like it's the kind of text that you can read just like that, or you can actually sit with every single line because every single line is so rich in and of itself. And I guess that was— what I loved about that was because when learning about Sophocles, I understood that that was— you know, that it's very— it can be— you know, there are so many different interpretations and that there's a depth to it that leaves you always experiencing more.

Anne Carson:
Yes. I think— well, bless you for saying that about my lines. But it is true of Sophocles' lines, for me, so far, that you can always Go back, open the book anywhere, take a phrase or a line and think it— think into it in a different way than you did before. And it's not just because it's in ancient Greek or something historical like that. It's because of the way the thinking is. Not sure if we know how to do that anymore. I'm really not sure.

Tania Ketenjian:
You know, any work one writes and translates affects them. And how do you feel that having gone through this experience of translating and writing both these books based on the same play has ultimately affected you?

Anne Carson:
Hmm. Ultimately, I guess, I'd say I feel refreshed, partly because— mostly because of that experience of doing the one play, The Antigonick, feeling so invested in it and proud of it, pleased with it, and then having somebody say, nah, I don't like it at all, and doing it— finding a way to do it again. I think that's— it's like turning over a page in myself that I didn't think I could turn. So I kind of like that.Poet and translator Anne Carson talks with Tania Ketenjian about her two versions of Sophocles' Antigone, the Greek idea of "withness", and what it was like to be asked to translate a play she was already proud of for a second time. Recorded in 2015 for BAM's podcast Beyond Antigone.