Derek Mahon: Chorus from Antigone

Length / Form Four, eight-line stanzas

Relationship to Classical text The poem begins with a more-or-less exact quotation from Jebbs' 1891 translation (R. C. Jebb, Sophocles. The Antigone of Sophocles. Edited with introduction and notes by Sir Richard Jebb. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1891), which Mahon also uses at the beginning of his much earlier poem 'Glengormley' (CP p.14). Mahon's poem stays true to the general sense of the source text but not to the specifics of its imagery and the language is contemporary in style, with occasional hints at an Irish setting (e.g. "in thicket and upland gorse"). Mahon switches the order of lines 354 to 364 with lines 365 to 375, so that he is able to include the latter section whilst concluding with the more dramatic line "only against/ death do we strive in vain"

Close translation of words/phrases/excerpts Prefaced: "from the Greek of Sophocles, 496-406 BC; the poem adapts lines 332-375 of Sophocles' Antigone.

Classical/post-Classical intertexts The Antigone occupies a prominent position in recent Irish literary tradition (for an overview see F. Macintosh, 'Irish Antigone and Burying the Dead', ch.4 in E. B. Mee and H. P. Foley, Antigone on the Contemporary World Stage, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Seamus Heaney's play Antigone, The Burial at Thebes, was performed and published in 2004 (London: Faber & Faber). Belfast-raised poet Tom Paulin's 'There are many wonders on this earth' is a reworking of the same chorus (Fivemiletown,  London: Faber and Faber,1987).

Comment The next poem in this publication is 'Chorus from Oedipus at Colonus', previously published as part of Mahon's 2005 play Oedipus (based on the text of Sophocles' King Oedipus and Oedipus at Colonus).