Milli mála - 01.01.2011, Page 85

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makes her so admirable, but her unwillingness to concede to
tyranny. Yet, individual interpretations hardly matter. In David
Hop kins’ recent version, illustrated by Tom Kurzansku, Antigone
is somewhere between a punk and an emo with jaggedly cut dark
hair and a pierced nose, inside an Athenian setting that evokes the
atmosphere and some of the images of Frank Miller’s Sin City.19
Like Sophocles, Hopkins allows Creon to relent and order the
burial of Polyneices only to discover that the catastrophe is already
underway and his son and his wife are now dead. The visual irony
of Kurzansku’s artwork reminds us that Antigone, having failed to
provide a tomb for her brother, is herself entombed. Indeed, this
joint effort reveals a close proximity to Brecht’s Antigone, itself
derived from Hölderlin’s translation of Sophocles (1804), where the
imagery is that of excess. Where other translators, for example,
translate deinon as wondrous or formidabile, Hölderlin and Brecht
have ‘monstrous’. In contrast, Heaney’s rendition of the chorus’ ‘ode
to man’ resonates with Shakespeare’s ‘What a piece of work is
man’.
3. Dormancy, vestigiality, hybridity
This article covers only a few examples from the veritable hoard of
Antigones, but it does hope to show that elements, carried along in
various forms, may lay dormant for long periods of time before
spawning a slightly new breed. To use another analogy from biology,
this dormancy is not unlike that found in the life cycles of some
plants and insects that undergo long periods of apparent inactivity
before reviving, either as a result of an inbuilt trigger or by an
external factor.20 I do not wish to suggest that there was anything
‘organic’ about the dormancy and reappearance of tragic drama, but
many have speculated as to why the conditions for its composition
and performance vanished so suddenly with the demise of imperial
19 David Hopkins and Tom Kurzanski, Antigone, Canada: Silent Devil Inc., 2006.
20 In some extraordinary cases, such as that of the mountain ash that sheds its seeds during forest
fires, the parent form literally self-immolates in order to ensure the survival of its future progeny.
In the case of the Magicicada, a type of cicida, its 13- or 17-year long life cycle allows the nymphs
to remain underground and safe from predators.
MARTIN S. REGAL