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Plays of Difference Sophocles' Antigone: A New Version by Brendan Kennelly; Racine's Phaedra by Derek Mahon Review by: Des O'Rawe The Irish Review (1986-), No. 20, Ideas of Nationhood (Winter - Spring, 1997), pp. 143-146 Published by: Cork University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/29735845 . Accessed: 14/06/2014 15:43 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . Cork University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Irish Review (1986-). http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 195.78.108.163 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 15:43:15 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

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Plays of DifferenceSophocles' Antigone: A New Version by Brendan Kennelly; Racine's Phaedra by Derek MahonReview by: Des O'RaweThe Irish Review (1986-), No. 20, Ideas of Nationhood (Winter - Spring, 1997), pp. 143-146Published by: Cork University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/29735845 .

Accessed: 14/06/2014 15:43

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Cork University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Irish Review(1986-).

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 195.78.108.163 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 15:43:15 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

REVIEWS 143

Though lacking the tact and reined-in musicality of 'A Drink of Milk', 'The

Trout' or 'Small Secrets', they now seem to me in their eschewal of predeter? mined perspectives to be among the more authoritative productions of

Montague's career. Collected Poems bears witness to the grace of phrasing and

insistent sense of the actual, which mark John Montague's poetry at its best, and give it its place among the significant achievements of contemporary Irish writing.

PATRICK CROTTY

Plays of Difference

Brendan Kennelly. Sophocles' Antigone: A New Version. Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1996. ISBN 1 85224 365 3. Stg.?6.95 pbk.

Derek Mahon. Racine's Phaedra. Oldcastle: The Gallery Press, 1996. ISBN 1

85235 165 9. Stg. ?5.95 pbk.

Over the last decade or so contemporary Irish writers have been translating for the stage a range of commissioned and uncommissioned works from the

western literary canon. In so doing, these writers have sought to offer their

audiences new touchstones for the important political and social debates of

the day. In the tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides, in Chekhov's elegiac dramas of social disintegration or Lorca's dark world of sexual violence there

are, or so it would seem, myths appropriate for a post-nationalist, secular, neo-liberal Ireland. Obviously, this cultural phenomenon invites a few ques? tions. Have new approaches in translation theory, particularly those which

promote the play of difference over the pursuit of lexical and semantic equiv? alence, made it artistically legitimate for writers, or their 'patrons', to select

and adapt plays whenever the notion takes them? Has the preponderance of

poet-translators meant that many of these adaptations are insufficiently dra?

matic; too much concerned with textual, rather than theatrical, practice? Furthermore, is there not something particularly hazardous about attempting to incorporate Greek tragedy, for example, into a culture which regards the

theatre as a bourgeois citadel of entertainment and not, as was the case in clas?

sical Athens, as the conscience of the body politic; a catalyst for political

enlightenment inexorably bound to both the rational and the irrational

aspects of that society?

Despite describing his Antigone as a 'straight translation', Brendan

Kennelly has not been overly concerned with the task of writing a version of

this play which is linguistically faithful to the original. Kennelly's Antigone has been distilled from his readings of several different English translations.

This fact may partly account for his version's preoccupation with the rela?

tionship between language and power, 'the word' or 'Creon's word', for

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144 IRISH REVIEW

example, appears no fewer than fourteen times in the (short) first scene.

While this is possibly dramatically effective it is somewhat irritating for the

reader. What one hears distinctly throughout this translation is Kennelly's own iconoclastic and impish lyrical voice, as exemplified in his version of the

stasimon which precedes Antigone's 'last journey' to her execution:

Love, you are the object of our lives,

Love, you are the truest crime;

Love, you prove the obscenity of money,

Love, you are a waste of time.

Love, you live in the heart of a girl,

Love, you are the spittle on a man's lips,

Love, you are a suburban nightmare, The soiled lace-curtains from which a heart escapes.

Love, you help a child to grow up,

Love, you fill the eyes of a young bride; Whatever they say of you, O love,

You're always dying, yet never completely dead.

One might be forgiven for suggesting that Kennelly's talents might be better

suited to translating Aristophanes than Sophocles. Nonetheless, the chief

problem with this version of Antigone can be located in the poet's ambivalent

desire to be 'loyal' both to his 'understanding of the Greek world' and to his

'experience of life in Ireland'.

Kennelly's version of Sophocles' Antigone was written in the summer of

1984 and it was first performed in April 1986. As with his other Greek plays, versions of Euripides' Medea (1988) and The Trojan Women (1993), Kennelly

manipulates the text so that it speaks directly to his (imagined?) modern soci?

ety, particularly on the subject(ion) of women. As Anthony Roche has argued elsewhere, Kennelly's Antigone is a self-conscious response to the events of

1984; the Forum Report, the Criminal Justice Bill, the Kerry Babies case and

the Church's continued interference in political matters. Interestingly, at the same time as Kennelly was writing his Antigone, Don Taylor was directing another version of this play for a BBC-TV production which was broadcast in

autumn 1986. According to Taylor, the 'words being spoken in the rehearsal room exactly paralleled arguments about the miners' strike and the Sarah

Tisdall trial being rehearsed in the papers and on TV discussion pro?

grammes'. The essence of Antigone would therefore appear to be its adapt?

ability: 1984 also witnessed versions of this play by Tom Paulin and Aidan

Carl Mathews.

However, it could be argued that ideologically indulgent adaptations do more harm than good. Sophocles' Antigone, after all, dramatises the conflict

between the state and the individual, it does not pretend to resolve it. If it

'rehearses' anything it is the tragic conflict between past and present, duty

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REVIEWS 145

and responsibility. Antigone is the old world of kinship, curses and cosmic

forces, while Creon represents the new order, with its veneration of rational?

ity and the rule of law. While various speeches, particularly those of Creon,

may draw on the structures and metaphors of the political rhetoric of the day,

they never become the ancient equivalent of a party political broadcast.

Translating Racine's Ph?dre has, on the other hand, presented Derek Mahon

with an opportunity to mingle his knowledge of classical tragedy with his

love of French literature. (In addition to his version of Euripides' the Bacchae, Mahon has also adapted Moli?re's The School for Husbands, a Field Day pro? duction which he entitled High Time (1984), and its companion piece The

School for Wives (1989)). Racine's main source for his Ph?dre was Euripides'

Hippolytus, a play which Brian Friel used as a template for Living Quarters (subtitled 'after Hippolytus') and which Tony Harrison adapted to great effect

in his Phaedra Britannica. Mahon's version, while seeking to be poetically faithful to Racine, accentuates certain structural and metaphorical elements.

By placing 'images of Artemis and Aphrodite to left and right', Mahon's play

gestures towards Euripides rather than Racine, who sought to minimise the

role of the gods in his tragedy. In so doing, Mahon relieves the original of some of its seventeenth-century moralism and supposedly Jansenist baggage,

thereby focusing our attention on the play's central theme, the conflict

between chastity and desire. Mahon has replaced Racine's five acts, punctu? ated by short scenes, with a less cumbersome two act structure. This is par?

ticularly effective in his rendering of the original Act V, which comprised seven scenes. Mahon has also dispensed with the Neo-classical convention of

referring to the gods by their Roman names and he has edited out a number

of references - 'des cruels Pallantides', for example - which might mean little

to a contemporary audience. A number of important speeches have been

lightly pruned. The dialogue between Phaedra and Oenone, when the former

reveals her 'violent' desire for Hippolytus, for example, has been reshaped to

allow for a more effective deployment of t?tram?tre couplets. Mahon's com?

mitment to versification has also entailed the inclusion of some vernacular

words and phrases which are rarely obtrusive: 'What wickedness I'm guilty of, I Know; / nor am I one of your brazen creatures who, / relaxed in happy

promiscuity, pass / through a censorious world as bold as brass'. However, his attempts to augment the play's psychological realism by employing terms

familiar to anyone living in our 'psycho-analysed' society (Phaedra talks of

'denial , her 'anorexic ghost' and the 'sadistic whim'of the gods, while

Theseus, at one point, refers to Hippolytus' 'uncontrollable libido') are less

successful.

Where Mahon's version of this play is particularly impressive, and where

it outshines the blank-verse translations of Kenneth Muir and John Cairncross, is in its preservation of Racine's masterful use of understatement

and irony. The subtle repetition of words, the symmetrised imagery, the fate?

ful significance of each glance and gesture are expertly rendered to evoke the

essence of the 'Racinian huis clos'. In this regard, Mahon displays not only a

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146 IRISH REVIEW

sound understanding of theatrical practice but also a healthy scepticism towards the use of these plays as propaganda. It is a relief to discover in

Racine's Phaedra that the audience has not been seduced into pondering quo? tidian political and social issues at the expense of contemplating the possibil?

ity that rationality and irrationality, like Artemis and Aphrodite, are sides of

the same coin.

DES O'RAWE

Out of Context

Louis MacNeice.Tfe Strings Are False: An Unfinished Autobiography. London:

Faber and Faber, reissued 1996.

Jon Stallworthy. Louis MacNeice, London: Faber and Faber, issued in paper? back 1996.

Jon Stallworthy's scrupulous, painstaking, sensitive yet finally unsatisfying

biography of Louis MacNeice appeared to general acclaim in 1995. One of his

principal sources was, of course, the poet's own unfinished autobiographical account of his Irish childhood, English education and young manhood in

Birmingham and London in the years before the Second World War, The

Strings Are False. MacNeice did not choose to publish this in his lifetime, so its

posthumous appearance depended on the good judgement of his friend and

literary executor E.R. Dodds, who prepared the typescript for its publication in 1965, two years after the poet's comparatively early death in his mid-fifties.

The publication of the two books together now allows us to consider in a

more precise way than was attempted in the early reviews of Stallworthy's work, how biographical material was deployed in his book, and to what pur?

poses.

Stallworthy, as any biographer would have been, was happy to find in

MacNeice's account of his origins, much matter for his own narrative. A good deal of the grist for his biographical mill is to be found in the poet's brilliant,

imagistic, intensely inward recollection of a childhood of bourgeois privilege and psychological trauma. Stallworthy augments the poet's prose account of

this formative Irish upbringing with his own thorough researches into the

family background. He wisely attends, too, to MacNeice's sister, who has left

both a published and an unpublished memoir, to fill out the disturbing nar?

rative the poet undertook in the early years of the Second World War. The

effect of setting MacNeice's artfully constructed, compulsively subjective,

autobiography in a more socially contextualised ambiance of Irish middle

class Anglicanism in the North of Ireland, in the period before partition, is to

make the poet's memories of childhood seem a product of private demons first encountered in that childhood and not as merely symptomatic of an indi

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