Antigone: Sophocles' art, Hölderlin's insight PDF
Preview Antigone: Sophocles' art, Hölderlin's insight
ANTIGONE Sophocles’ Art, Hölderlin’s Insight ANTIGONE Sophocles’ Art, Hölderlin’s Insight Kathrin H. Rosenfield Published with the support of PRONEX/FAPERGS-CNPQ “Lógica-Ontologia-Ética” Brazil The Davies Group, Publishers Aurora, Colorado Copyright © 2010 Kathrin H. Rosenfield All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in an information retrieval system, or transcribed, in any form or by any means—electronic, digital, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the express written permission of the publisher, and the holder of copyright. Cover: Mark Rothko, Antigone, copyright © 1941, oil on canvas. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Gift of the Mark Rothko Foundation. By permission. Translated from the French by Charles B. Duff Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Rosenfield, Katharina Holzermayr. Antigone : Sophocles’ art, Holderlin’s insight / Kathrin H. Rosenfield. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-934542-22-4 (alk. paper) 1. Sophocles. Antigone. 2. Hölderlin, Friedrich, 1770-1843–Knowledge– Greek literature. 3. Antigone (Greek mythology) in literature. I. Title. PA4413.A7R67 2010 882’.01--dc22 2010012117 Printed in the United States of America Published 2009. The Davies Group Publishers, Aurora, CO 1234567890 iv Contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction to the American Edition ix Introduction to the French Edition xiii Chapter 1 Antigone—Young Girl or Queen? 1 Digression: Whose Antigone? A digression on Hölderlin’s approach to translation 23 Chapter 2 The War for Thebes in the Light of the Risen Sun 43 Chapter 3 Creon, and the Formidable Tricks of Man 63 Intermezzo: The Beauty of Antigone 87 Chapter 4 Creon, Antigone, Ismene: The Great Debates 99 Chapter 5 Friends and Foes: Haemon, Antigone, and Creon 121 Chapter 6 Tiresias, or “Pure Speech” 149 Chapter 7 Rhythm, Language, and Time in Hölderlin ’s Remarks on Antigone and Oedipus 171 Bibliography 191 Index 207 v vi Acknowledgments I would like to thank the Brazilian National Research Center, CNPq, for the financial and institutional support which has made it possible to write and publish this essay, as well as my colleagues at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul for all of their understanding and help. This book owes much to the exchange of thoughts and suggestions that occurred during the conferences, workshops and discussions with my colleagues, students and associated artists in the Nucleo Filosofia, Literatura, Arte (FILIA-PHILIA). I owe particular thanks to Lawrence Flores Pereira, whose Portuguese translation, both elegant and colloquial, contributed immensely to the success of the professional performance of the play in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 2004 and 2005. The idea that Greek tragedy may have achieved its power by establishing a relation between dialogues and episodes of song and dance led to immensely enriching discussions with the director, Luciano Alabarse, and the cast of more than forty actors, composers, musicians, dancers, choreographers, stage-designers… not to mention audiences in more than twenty-five sold-out performances. The author and the translator learned a lot from the experience during the rehearsals, which obliged us often to translate into gestures, tones, and all sorts of emotional or almost bodily intensities the textual suggestions that cannot be expressed adequately in words. In preparing for this book I was particularly fortunate to have studied in Paris at a time when Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal- Naquet were revolutionizing the study of Greek literature and culture, and when Jacques Derrida was opening up new and valuable critical perspectives on literature. They introduced me to new worlds, and to worlds within worlds. I am grateful beyond measure to their memory, and particularly grateful to Jacques Derrida and André Major for publishing this book in French. In the past ten years I vii Antigone have had the good fortune of lively contact with a wonderful array of scholars and critics in the United States. Pietro Pucci and Frederick Ahl at Cornell, Allan Shapiro, Matthew Roller and Richard Macksey at Johns Hopkins, Glenn Most at Chicago, and Thomas Pfau at Duke. They have given me the chance to test my approaches to Hölderlin and Sophocles, not only on them, but on their colleagues and students in very fruitful discussions and seminars. The American edition of this book has benefited greatly from their suggestions. Last but not least, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Neil Hertz and Charles Duff. Neil and Charlie believed in this book and devoted countless hours to the task of bringing it before the American public—Neil by opening the doors of American universities and championing the book with publishers, Charlie by translating the book entirely as a gift in friendship. It is a pleasure to acknowledge such friends. viii Introduction to the American Edition As I look back to the feelings and thoughts that provoked this little book ten years ago, I continue to wonder at the survival of a basic—and, I think, misguided—approach to Antigone and her tragedy. Somehow, in spite of the countless new approaches that literary critique has developed over the past century, we still read this play basically as Hegel did some two hundred years ago. Like Hegel, we see Antigone as a beautiful enactment highlighting the social and political tensions between the oikos and the polis.1 Consciously or unconsciously, however, we do more than this: we fit the story of tragic bravery into a mainly Christian pattern, casting Antigone as a martyr in accordance with the literary conventions of hagiography, and ignore Hegel’s genuine insights into tragedy and the ancient world. I began to think about Antigone because I was not satisfied with this simple and Christian approach to a drama that had always seemed to me complicated and pagan, and I began to write this book because I was excited to discover a very different and much more convincing view in the translations and critical remarks of Friedrich Hölderlin. But I gradually started realizing that I was doing an odd thing. Although Hölderlin is often considered the greatest lyric poet in the history of German literature, his translations from Sophocles have had either too bad or too enthusiastic reputations. From the time of their publication to the present day, readers have been startled by knotty thought and awkward diction, very different from the apparent clarity for which Sophocles has always been celebrated. And in spite of general praise, scholars of Greek and German literature paradoxically conclude that Hölderlin basically betrayed Sophocles’ spirit or intentions. Like Derrida, whose Glas makes us aware of the implicit psychological and erotic undercurrents in Hegel’s reading of Antigone, ix Antigone Hölderlin makes us aware of thrilling legal and psychological turns of the screw in Sophocles’ tricky text. Verse after verse, Hölderlin’s hints helped me to understand the more difficult and obscure Greek passages. Other translators have done a better job of harmonizing the hidden Greek dissonances under the (apparently) smooth elegant surface of Sophocles. But Hölderlin, again and again, got beneath the surface and touched the living heart of Sophoclean poetry, dissonance and all. This was the insight that made me return to Hölderlin’s weird translations in the late 1990s. Since then I have had the opportunity of testing his theories on stage, serving as dramaturge for a dynamic Brazilian production of Antigone that succeeded beyond anyone’s hopes. I had already cross-checked Hölderlin’s insights against the remarkable post-war scholarship, mostly French, that has brought the techniques of Anthropology and Structuralism to bear on ancient Greek literature, and I was delighted to see that his approaches pleased large audiences as much as they agreed with modern scholarly discoveries. What distinguishes great poets from other people? They see the world in images more surprising, they hear and give voice to sounds and expressions much denser than everyday understanding. To be sure, Hölderlin knew a remarkable amount about Greek history, but there was more: his sensitive insights into Greek poetry helped him to grasp (rather than understand) some very particular Greek details— mostly overlooked—in Antigone. Reading Sophocles with a poet’s eye, he saw a story much denser and more thrilling, much subtler and more ironic, than his contemporaries (and ours). Although Fifth-century Athens was very different from any modern world, the art of Sophocles has parallels in modern literature. Hölderlin himself is a good example of this; Robert Musil and Samuel Beckett are others; but more and more I come to think that the closest parallel may be Henry James, the master of unsettling suggestions. So often, James’ smiling figures have a disquieting potential to stir x
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