Table Of ContentANTIGONE
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
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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,
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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
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