Commissioned by Ireland's Abbey Theatre, Seamus Heaney translates Sophocles' 5th Century B.C.E. play Antigone into a timeless commentary on individual rights vs. security

Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux

Publication Date: 2004

ISBN 9780374117214

Antigone Buries Polyneices against King Creon’s Orders

Antigone is one of only seven of Sophocles' plays that survived the fall of Athens to Sparta in 404 B.C.E., two years after Sophocles’ death at age 90. This short Greek tragedy, neatly translated by Irish playwright Seamus Heaney in 2004's The Burial at Thebes, features a wise Greek chorus that interacts with the actors and even intercedes at one point late in the drama.

Two brothers, Eteocles and Polyneices, die during Thebes’ civil war, Eteocles fighting on the side of Creon, King of Thebes, and Polyneices fighting against Creon. Creon prohibits the burial of enemy Polyneices, leaving his body to be eaten by carrion.

Antigone, sister of Polyneices, brazenly buries her brother anyway, despite the protests of sister Ismene, who has had enough of death. Ismene also fears, rightly, that King Creon may punish her as well, by mere familial association with the rebellious Antigone.

“What are Creon’s rights / When it comes to me and mine?” Antigone asks Ismene.

Creon’s response is summed up in the statement “Personal loyalty always must give way / To patriotic duty,” and he arrests Antigone and sentences her to death by being trapped in a cave whose mouth has been sealed with rocks.

However, the fact that Antigone is betrothed to King Creon’s son, Haemon, rapidly leads to Creon’s undoing.

A Macabre Cascade of Tragedies Follows Antigone’s Suicide

Haemon opens the cave, discovering that Antigone has hanged herself. He then commits suicide, too.

King Creon’s wife, Euridice, inconsolable over the loss of her son, kills herself, cursing her husband until her last breath.

Creon learns his lesson the hard way, and too late. Though Thebes still shows outward order, and though Creon is still king, he is a broken man, bereft of his wife and son. The Greek chorus amplifies the moral to the story: “Those who overbear will be brought to grief / Fate will flail them on its winnowing floor / And in due season teach them to be wise.”

Heaney’s translation is deceptively spare, like the Bach etudes that appear so simple on the page, but prove their complexity when the pianist tries them out for the first time. Though the play runs less than 100 pages, it definitely packs a wallop.

Winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize for Literature, Seamus Heaney was born in County Derry in Northern Ireland in 1939. His father came from the Gaelic past of cattle herding, and his mother from Industrial Revolution era Ulster. According to the Nobel Foundation, Heaney considers his heritage to have informed an inner tension that he taps in his poetry and play writing.

As an adult, Heaney moved to the Irish Republic where he has lived for over 25 years, teaching one semester annually in the United States at Harvard University.

Other Works by Seamus Heaney

In addition to The Burial at Thebes, Heaney also wrote a translation of Sophocles’ Philoctetes titled The Cure at Troy, which was produced by the Irish touring theater company Field Day in 1990.

Seamus Heaney is a member of Aosdana, the Irish academy of artists and writers, and is a Foreign Member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1996, Heaney was made a Commandeur de L'Ordre des Arts et Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture.