Saturday, October 22, 2022

Antigone Lecture and Line 572

    After watching the second micro lecture on Antigone something that I have learned was the entire debate centered on this one line: "O dearest Haemon, how your father dishonors you!" I found it interesting that the line is believed to have started off being Ismene's line since, after all, in this point in the play she is having an exchange with Creon that is called stichomythia which is most often between two characters. Which would not make sense for Antigone to intervene for a line. It would be breaking this stichomythia pattern. I read the articles about the debate and never really thought about the makings of these ancient literary texts. Despite all of our knowledge nowadays we can only still speculate about some aspects of Antigone since there was no one piece of this play written in its entirety. Scholars and translators have had to piece together the play from a multitude of different sources that often leads to misinterpretations. After so many different translations it can be hard to fully place together a play, especially since even the pieces of a play that were written down had mistakes and were almost guaranteed to misattribute a line. Being someone who has to translate such an ancient text also leaves you with some creative liberties because there is never really a perfect translation for certain words, especially ones from older languages. It made me realize the importance, when reading ancient writings, of looking through different interpretations of the writings because they all might have some difference and in that difference there could be an entire story just like the one behind line 572.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Wk. 10: Pachinko Lessons

  After finishing Pachinko I think one of the main reasons that Min Jin Lee wrote this novel was both to expose people do Korean history and...