Latin Américan Antígonas: An Anthology of Seven Translated Plays

This collection is the first translated anthology of Latin American plays that engage the ancient character of Antigone, her legend, and/or Sophocles' version. The seven plays in this anthology are neither rewritings nor adaptations, but rather vernacular Antígonas that absorb a fragment, or a scene, or a dialogue, or some lines of the Sophoclean tragedy into local dramatic forms responding to local political urgency. Each of the plays in the anthology belongs in the existing corpus of more than seventy Latin American Antígonas the author has compiled and represents an example of how the myth has been “cannibalized” in neo-colonial contexts in a given period and country. The work presents each play with an introduction that locates it in the larger corpus, giving information about the playwright, the play's historical specificity and the linguistic particularities that presented problems for translation. The anthology offers ways to read Creole texts that absorb the Greek classical tradition in neocolonial contexts without deracinating them from their material conditions of production. By historicizing each translated play, the anthology shows how Antígona tells stories of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Latin America. Thus far, only five of seventy Antígona vernaculars had been translated into English. This anthology aims at expanding Anglophone audiences' knowledge of Latin America's engagement with classical Greek antiquity. The anthology consists of Haitian Félix Morisseau-Leroy's Antigòn an Kreyòl / Antigòn (Haiti, 1953), written in Haitian Creole; Brazilian Jorge Andrade's Pedreira das almas / Soul quarry (Brazil, 1969), written in Portuguese; and five more plays written in Spanish: José Watanabe's Antígona (Perú, 2000); Daniel Fermani's Trans-Antígona-Sexual (Argentina, 2000); Argentine Jorge Huertas's Antígonas: Linaje de Hembras / Antígonas: A Female Lineage (Argentina, 2001); Mexican Perla de la Rosa's Antígonas: las voces que incendian el desierto/ Antígonas: the voices that set the desert on fire (Mexico, 2004); and Colombian Carlos Satizábal's Antígonas: Tribunal de mujeres / Antígonas: A Women's Tribunal (Colombia. 2014).

Moira Fradinger is Professor of Comparative Literature at Yale University. She holds a Licenciatura in Psychology from the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina, and an MA in Women and Development from the Institute of Social Studies in The Netherlands. She works on the cultural and intellectual histories of Latin America and Europe, classical reception studies, psychoanalytic theory and medical humanities. Her current projects are on Latin American film, Critical Sleep Studies, and Psychoanalysis.