Abstract

In the beginning was the citation: The Antigone of Sophocles. Adapted for the stage from Hölderlin’s translation. By attributing Antigone to a single author, the title encloses every word that follows within a pair of invisible quotation marks. Even Brecht’s interpolations, those amendments and sections of newly-added dialogue which allow one to speak of “Brecht’s Antigone” as a play in its own right, 2 will have been indirect quotations from the master script, paraphrastic marginalia to an urtext twice removed. The title thus disables in advance the charge of plagiarism which had been leveled against him in the past on account of his selfprofessed laxness in matters of intellectual property. 3 Since its 1948 premiere in the Swiss town of Chur, The Antigone of Sophocles has never found its way into the Brecht canon, even though the case could be made that it is no more derivative, no less authentically Brechtian a production than, say, The Threepenny Opera. 4 One need look no further than the title to understand why. It defines Brecht’s task, not as one of rewriting Antigone, in a manner akin to Jean Anouilh’s famous wartime production in Paris, but of reciting it for the modern stage. Anouilh had retold the story in a racy, colloquial speech that paid little heed to the letter of Sophocles’ drama, preferring to treat the text of the tragedy as the dispensable vehicle for the mythic narrative at its core. 5 Brecht’s title, by contrast, announces his intention to decontextualize and recontextualize – to re-site – words that already have a history of their own, and so to establish, through that act of selective translation, a continuity with the time and place of recital