There’s a sense of things being wrapped up, a kind of childishness in his seesaw of words: “Late to learn O yes I am/late too late O then O then …” He blames the chorus for bringing him the awful news. Rather, he abdicates, shifting into third person: “Take Kreon away/he no more exists than someone who does not exist. She later offers an overview of Antigone's childhood – "we got her the bike we got her a therapist". She later says "the nick is the time of the line itself, the scan of poetic meter," leaving the images aside. It is an unhappy reflection on some contemporary literary culture, and on how the art world presents itself, that a translation as radical and eloquent as Carson's can be marred by such an irresponsibly chosen, poorly executed, effectively random series of pictures, and almost no one notices.

I see the GR reviews admiring passages like these but wonder whether most of them read Sophocles or adaptations like the one by Brecht. Sophokles’ luminous and disturbing tragedy is here given an entirely fresh language and presentation: it will provoke poetry readers, classical scholars, theatre people and comic-book aficionados. The story itself moves at a fast pace—especially considering major events happen in passing of character dialogue I suspect this is one you’d want some general familiarity with the original tale before reading—and constantly cuts directly to the heart of matters with little adornment. Her testament that “I am born for love not hatred” is a response to his “Enemy is always enemy, alive or dead. Readers who are not familiar with ancient Greek texts will most likely feel a bit alienated by all this, but unfamiliarity is, perhaps, the point.

Antigonick is her first attempt at making translation into a combined visual and textual experience: it will provoke poetry readers, classical scholars, theatre people and comic-book aficionados.

Her poetry is expressionistic (you see this in Antigonick), shot through with a spiritual turbulence and an almost violent sensitivity to experience, and the barbed edges of her lines can send shocks through you.Other fun plays on words is Antigone mentioning she is lonely inside herself, poking at her fate of being sealed alone inside a cave. Some words are translated directly, some are paraphrased, but it’s all still there, yet it’s different.

Even her beloved sister Ismene remarks, “You are a person in love with the impossible … although you go without your mind.He does not seem to hold himself fully accountable for the vast devastation his actions have unleashed, the human cost of his unjust wield of power. By leaving us with Nick, still measuring, Carson inverts the traditional Sophoklean notion that it is better to learn, as Kreon does, even too late. But she knows that "spectral domesticity" isn't a satisfying reading, and in any case it wouldn't be supported by the other pictures. Such light-handed scholarship is characteristic of Carson, a poet interested in those moments when precedents can't be found and normal translations fail: "Now I could dig up those case histories, tell you about Danaos and Lykourgus and the songs of Phineas," they continue: "it wouldn't help you / it didn't help me / it's Friday afternoon / there goes Antigone to be buried alive.

But Antigone evenly counters: “Actually no they all think like me / but you’ve nailed their tongues to the floor. I was startled then by the harrowing dystopia Anne Carson had conjured to depict ancient Greece; how at odds it seemed with our twenty-first-century America, how removed. Following one of Carson’s most personal and emotional works, Nox, which is a recreation of her scrapbook dealing with the death of her brother, Carson released Antigonick which revisits the grief over the death of a brother.

Nick comes to bear many meanings, such as a broken off piece of statue or the phrase ‘ nick of time,’ and Carson observes the story of Antigone as one very much about timing. She’s quite explicit in the foreword: “dear Antigone, / I take it as the task of the translator / to forbid that you should ever lose your screams”. Particularly of the timing being too late and Kreon coming to ‘ wisdom’ just too late once everyone has died.