Anne Carson translator of Antigone

performance and translation of a scream

Abstract

Anne Carson is currently one of the foremost poet, essayist, dramatist, and translator in the English language, nevertheless, the precision of these terms becomes foggy when confronted with the author’s process of merging and disarticulating literary limits. These procedures mark Carson as one who thinks the literary from the perspective of translation, understanding it as the possibility of allowing two distinct realities to be simultaneously visible, creating an ambiguous plane which cannot exist, yet is presented and performed before us. Within this view, I propose to analyze Carson’s translation of Sophokles’s Antigone, titled Antigonick, as a linguistic artifact, a score for performing a language act, for the realization of the scream we call Antigone. I shall base this on the idea of a translative multiplicity as read in Borges, Cassin, and Ricoeur, in which translation can be understood as a praise of multiplicity, as a way of moving between boundaries, always heading towards differences. This is present in Carson’s attempt to translate something distinct – silence – in a distinct manner – catastrophe –, of seeking another possibility for language that departs from everyday discursively, giving voice to a fury against cliché, and having as her paradigm the ololyga, an ancient Greek women’s ritual scream, and the idea of women as the one who confounds boundaries, one who pollutes, who moves that which she touches with her voice. In all, based on Carson’s conceptions, I argument that translation and performance are privileged modes for thinking the world, in its multiplicity, and its differences.