José Watanabe’s Antigona and Anne Carson’s Antigonick: The Power of the Powerless

Abstract

Ancient Greek theater is a considerable and an outstanding form of art of which heritage inspires generations, and of which realm surpasses amusement to politics and religion, especially the works of playwrights such as Sophocles. An explicitly renowned example of the influence of Sophocles, Greek theater, and Greek mythology is their entities as the source on which Sigmund Freud rests to develop a universal human psycho- sexual theory, the basis of which is the Oedipus myth. In addition to Oedipus, Sophocles’ Oedipus’ daughter, Antigone, constructs the inspiration for robustly ongoing proliferated reception and adaptation of Sophocles’ Antigone across languages, cultures, and interpretations. In fact, Sophocles’ Antigone and its numerous adaptations manifest the ‘productivity’ of texts assimilating and transmuting one another. They constitute a myriad of versions of which a couple of years’ production (1978-1979) is called the years of ‘Antigone- fever’. Sophocles’ Antigone is a play that centralizes the question of civil disobedience of Antigone’s character, the daughter of Oedipus, against Creon’s rules. Jose Watanabe’s Antigona is a script written in joining the creative members of the Peruvian experimental theater “Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani,” who, long before cooperating with Watanabe, relied on a Spanish translation script of the Sophoclean one. In addition, the text that is compared to Watanabe’s in this paper is Antigonick, Anne Carson’s translation of Sophocles’ Antigone, renowned as exceptional translation. Watanabe and Carson have generated adaptation and translation of Sophocles’ Antigone, redacting their texts in the same genre of poetry, and generating more associations and layers of meanings by suggesting interexts that are highly significant.