Notes from Source: Antigonick seems, furthermore, to function as an answer to H.D.’s call for a classical scholarship that challenges itself to dethrone verbal comprehension as the pinnacle of the discipline. […]H.D. invites us to do something with and to Greek: I know that we need scholars to decipher and interpret the Greek, but we also need: poets and mystics and children to re-discover this Hellenic world, to see through the words; the word being but the outline, the architectural structure of that door or window, through which we are all free, scholar and unlettered alike, to pass.8 The authorial presence of a scholar, a mystic, and a child can all be felt in Antigonick, for as we flip through the pages – pushing and peering through their semi-transparency, we too, as H.D. commands, “see through the words”. […]I use Erika Fischer-Lichte’s notion of the sparagmotic act of restaging classical drama to characterise Antigonick as a simultaneously dismembered and re-membered text, thus rendering the book itself a spectral presence. Due to the temporal and cultural distance between current reception projects and their ancient counterparts, Fischer- Lichte suggests, the staging process is troubled by the fact that the ancient text “is accessible not as a whole but only in its single parts and pieces”.64 This challenge remains particularly applicable to Antigonick both on the level of translation, as well as with regard to the unique readerly performance that the material features of the book enable. […]the source text is haunting to the translator in its spectral absence, and the translated or staged tragedy appears to its audience as a dismembered and re-membered corpus: “The performance can be no more than a sewing together of parts of a contemporary spectator’s clothes – sewing and sewing and sewing and never coming to an end”.65 Antigonick displays a hyperawareness of itself as a reconstructed body, making a spectral and strange presence out of its necessary absence. […]the text’s spectral presences and absences call upon each other and trouble one other in a game of mutual excavation and ghostly occupation, illuminating the dynamic and discursive haunting that emerges from Sophocles’ Antigone and Carson’s Antigonick. 1.

Further Notes: Place: Patras Publisher: Prof. Dr. Stavros Tsitsiridis