The Burial at Thebes - Softcover

Seamus Heaney

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0571223621 ISBN 13: 9780571223626

Publisher: Faber & Faber, 2005

Synopsis

Commissioned to mark the centenary of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 2004, "The Burial at Thebes" is Seamus Heaney's verse translation of Sophocles' great tragedy, "Antigone" - whose eponymous heroine is one of the most sharply individualized and compelling figures in western drama.

About this title

About the Author

Seamus Heaney was born in County Derry in Northern Ireland. Death of a Naturalist, his first collection of poems, appeared in 1966, and was followed by poetry, criticism and translations which established him as the leading poet of his generation. In 1995 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, and twice won the Whitbread Book of the Year, for The Spirit Level (1996) and Beowulf (1999). Stepping Stones, a book of interviews conducted by Dennis O'Driscoll, appeared in 2008; Human Chain, his last volume of poems, was awarded the 2010 Forward Prize for Best Collection. He died in 2013. His translation of Virgil's Aeneid Book VI was published posthumously in 2016 to critical acclaim.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* There are many translations of Sophocles' Antigone but few with the understated power and spare beauty of Irish Nobel laureate Heaney's version. He has given the play a new title, The Burial at Thebes, that recalls both Antigone's punishment--to be walled up in a cave-- and the crime for which she is punished. He remains faithful to the letter and the spirit of the play, following the structure of Sophocles' fine storytelling beat-by-beat even as he finds words to make this classic story of conflict between an inflexible autocrat and an intransigent rebel legible to modern readers. Reading Heaney's achievement, it is hard not to think of the ongoing eye-for-an-eye-for-an-eye-for-an-eye debacle unfolding in Iraq. Written in a muscular but lively style, the translation, like Heaney's best poetry, finds music in the language of the streets and reveals the raw, primal power in the most carefully constructed rhetorical tropes. This is hardly surprising. In 1990 Heaney wrote The Cure at Troy, a translation of Sophocles' Philoctetes, for the Irish Field Day theater company, and met with great critical acclaim. His fine, new translation makes one wish he would don a translator's hat more often. Jack Helbig
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Edition details

• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0571223621
• ISBN 13: 9780571223626
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 64