The Incest Taboo vs. the Divine Law in Sophocles’ Antigone: Comparing Fagles’s and Heaney’s Translations

Abstract

This essay compares Robert Fagles’s and Seamus Heaney’s English translations of Sophocles’ Antigone to examine how different understandings of an original Greek text can engender different versions of English translations. Fagles’s Antigone, first published by Penguin Books in 1984, is still widely read as a best selling version of Antigone, and Heaney’s version is famous for the translator’s renowned status as a Nobel Prize winner and his scholarly achievements in literature. What is at stake in Antigone is the conflict between Creon and Antigone concerning the burial of the dead body of Polynices, whose unpatriotic deed resulted in his death. Creon, as a King of Thebes, has to keep the human law, which should punish the traitor, while Antigone, as a sister and woman whose duty is to mourn for the dead of any Greek men in accordance with the divine law. Any translators should, first of all, understand Sophocles’ intentions in creating this story, which is obviously very hard, so as to reproduce the original Greek text to English version. After close analysis of the two English translations, I found that Fagles read incestuous relationship between Antigone and Polynices and translated the original text as such, while Heaney tried to clear any such problematic readings from his translations, which is in line with Hegel’s reading of Antigone. By providing the reasons for the different English translations of an original Greek text, this essay also aims to say that translations are new creations of translators and provide lens through which we can read one orignal text with different perspectives.