Antigone - Couverture souple

"I highly recommend [Antigone]. Translators Reginald Gibbons and Charles Segal have done a good job in steering a reasonable course between a literal prose rendition and a poetic paraphrase. There is a very good detailed introduction to the play, an essay on the problems of translating it, a glossary of proper nouns, and three appendices about the date, the history of the myth, and how the play was transmitted. As a director, most valuable are the extensive notes that are found in the back of the book [and] stage blockings added to the texts by the editors."--Frank Behrens, Brattleboro Reformer

"These two new additions to Oxford's 'Greek Tragedy in New Translations' series only add to the luster of the previous releases. Each is firmly packed with insightful introductions, comprehensive and numbered notes, glossaries, and up-to-date bibliographies (the plays' texts take up about half of each volume). The collaboration of poet and scholar in each volume produces a language that is easy to read and easy to speak (compare, for instance, the Watchman's first lines in Shapiro and Burian's Agamemnon with those in Lattimore's 1947 translation). Each volume's introduction presents the play's action and themes with some detail. The translators' notes describe the linguistic twists and turns involved in rendering the text into a modern poetic language. Both volumes are enthusiastically recommended for academic libraries, theatre groups, and theatre departments."--Library Journal [starred review of Oresteia and Antigone]

"Sophocles' text is inexhaustibly actual. It is also, at many points, challenging and remote from us. The Gibbons-Segal translation, with its rich annotations, conveys both the difficulties and the formidable immediacy. The choral odes, so vital to Sophocles' purpose, have never been rendered with finer energy and insight. Across more than two thousand years, a great dark music sounds for us."--George Steiner, Churchill College, Cambridge

Excerpt from Sophocles Antigone

This edition of the Antigone is based upon Gustav Wolff's second edition, Leipzig, 1873.

In most cases where the text varies from his, the readings of the Laurentian Ms. (L) have been adopted in preference to those of inferior Mss. or to conjectures of Wolff and other editors. The reasons for these changes are given in the Appendix, which it is hoped furnishes sufficient material for an intelligent appreciation of the most important problems in the textual criticism of the play. For the purpose of facilitating comparison, the rejected readings of Wolff are placed at the foot of the text. Through lack of such an aid as the Facsimile of the Laurentian Codex, now in course of preparation, it has been necessary to take the variants of the Mss. at second or third hand, chiefly from the edition of Campbell.

The Commentary has been adapted to the needs of that large number of students who begin their study of Greek tragedy with this play.

The lyric parts have been arranged on the basis of the rhythmical scheme which has been borrowed from Schmidt's Rhythmic and Metric, translated by Professor John Williams White.

Material has been taken freely from the editions of Bellermann, Campbell, Nauck, Wecklein, and Dindorf.

The editor takes pleasure in expressing his grateful obligations to his colleague, Professor Elisha Jones, for the use of critical apparatus; and to his pupil, Mr. Walter Miller, A.M., for generous service in verifying references.

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