dear Antigone:
your name in Greek means something like “against birth” or “instead of
being born”
what is there instead of being born?
it’s not that we want to understand everything
or even to understand anything
we want to understand something else
I keep returning to Brecht
who made you do the whole play with a door strapped to your back
a door can have diverse meanings
I stand outside your door
the odd thing is, you stand outside your door too
that door has no inside
or if it has an inside, you are the one person who cannot enter it
for the family who lives there, things have gone irretrievably wrong
to have a father who is also your brother
means having a mother who is your grandmother
a sister who is both your niece and your aunt
and another brother you love so much you want to lie down with him
“thigh to thigh in the grave”
or so you say glancingly early in the play
but no one mentions it again afterwards
oh you always exaggerate! my father used to tell me
and let’s footnote here Hegel calling Women “the eternal irony of the community”
how seriously can we take you?
are you “Antigone between two deaths” as Lacan puts it
or a parody of Kreon’s law and Kreon’s language — so Judith Butler
who also finds in you “the occasion for a new field of the human”?
then again, “an exemplar of masculine intellect and moral sense”
is George Eliot’s judgment, while to several modern scholars you
(perhaps predictably)
sound like a terrorist
and Žižek compares you triumphantly with Tito
the leader of Yugoslavia saying NO! to Stalin in 1942
speaking of the ’40s, you made a good impression on the Nazi high command
and simultaneously on the leaders of the French Resistance
when they all sat in the audience
of Jean Anouilh’s Antigone
opening night Paris 1944: I don’t know what color your eyes were
but I can imagine you rolling them now
let’s return to Brecht, maybe he got you best
to carry one’s own door will make a person
clumsy, tired and strange
on the other hand, it may come in useful
if you go places that don’t have an obvious way in, like normality
or an obvious way out, like the classic double bind
well that’s your problem
my problem is to get you and your problem
across into English from ancient Greek
all that lies hidden in these people, your people
crimes and horror and years together, a family, what we call a family
“one of my earliest memories,” wrote John Ashbery in New York magazine
1980,
“is of trying to peel off the wallpaper in my room,
not out of animosity
but because it seemed there must be something fascinating
behind its galleons and globes and telescopes”
this reminds me of Samuel Beckett who described in a letter
his own aspirations toward language
“to bore hole after hole in it until what cowers behind it seeps through”
dear Antigone: you also are someone keeping faith
with a deeply other organization that lies just beneath what we see or what
we say
to quote Kreon you are autonomos
a word made up of autos “self” and nomos “law”
autonomy sounds like a kind of freedom
but you aren’t interested in freedom
your plan
is to sew yourself into your own shroud using the tiniest of stitches
how to translate this?
I take inspiration from John Cage who, when asked
how he composed 4'33", answered
“I built it up gradually out of many small pieces of silence”
Antigone, you do not,
any more than John Cage, aspire to a condition of silence
you want us to listen to the sound of what happens
when everything normal/musical/careful/conventional or pious is taken away
oh sister and daughter of Oedipus,
who can be innocent in dealing with you
there was never a blank slate
we were always already anxious about you
perhaps you know that Ingeborg Bachmann poem
from the last years of her life that begins
“I lose my screams”
dear Antigone,
I take it as the task of the translator
to forbid that you should ever lose your screams