Victoria Bridges Moussaron (Université de Charles de Gaulle)
Abstract: Sophocles’ tragedy, “Antigone,” has been translated across times and cultures into Anouilh’s absurd, Brecht’s Nazi Germany, Heaney’s Dublin, Leroy’s Haitian Creole, its Greek dimension of “awe” becoming crainte/fear or unheimlich/the uncanny, always recounting the same “myth” of forgotten origins, the rite of an “urge to record…anguish,” raising Benjamin’s question: do we translate to say the “same” thing again?
Walcott has “translated” the rhythm of “Piers Plowman” in “The Schooner Flight,” Homer’s Odyssey into a play, but the articulation of the same and difference must be thought in terms of his conception of history: if linear “history is the nightmare I am trying to awaken from” (Joyce), “there is no history, only the history of emotion” wherein “the past and the present are piercingly fixed.” He would re-situate, would “articulate an encounter” (Bhabha) so as to “startle” subjugation. There is a politics to his poetics raising the question of how a metaphor moves us.
In “The Burial of Thebes,” the vehicle that Walcott uses, metaphora, literally “a bus,” is not the text so much as décor: the seal of the Dominican Republic, of Haiti’s “Manichean history,” military uniforms and Duvallier metropolitan suits - Creon now appears as a Caribbean dictator; titles: the Chorus is a “Cabinet” of Ministers: “Information,” “Culture,” “The Admiralty;” and a dancer, perhaps voodoo, re-introduced, who periodically figures the inexplicable. Décor, titles, a dancer, finally very little, as was true of Greek tragedies: “there can be virtue in depravation” (Nobel Address). It is then a question his drama’s poetics: the “amnesia” of the Middle Passage and the “valid” difference of the local, neither mimicry of the other Archipelago, nor just the “suspension of disbelief” (Ubersfeld), but an “enactment of remorse” felt anew, Yeats’ ephemeral, if you will, a re-presencing of timeless tragedy.
