Jigs in victory. Summon the home spearmen!’
And the Elders tore off the victory wreaths from their foreheads
And they broke their Bacchic staffs and covered the body
Up with wreaths and masks, ‘Woe to us!’ loudly exclaiming.
Then the ruler remembered his next son, Haemon, the younger –
Commander of the home spearmen – and now to placate him
Hastened away forthwith to grant Antigone pardon.
But the Elders regrouped, their brazen dishes resounding
Drumming to waken the town from its lethal victory junket.
Hollow the brazen alarm interrupted the dances to Bacchus
Till the triumphant strut gave way to a timorous scurry.
Threading her way through the crowds a childish messenger, youngest
Of those maids who had taken Antigone off, now addressed them:
‘Dead and done with is Haemon, bleeding there by his own hand!
Seeing Antigone entombed, seeing her hanged there
Straight he fell on his sword, ignoring the pleas of his father.’
Led by Antigone’s maids then came to the Elders their awesome
Leader. And in his hands he carried a blood-spattered garment.
‘Dead and done with is Haemon. Dead and done with is Thebes.
Since she has failed me she lies now as food for the vultures!’
And to the Elders he showed the bloodstained cloak of the son who
Would not yield him the sword. And anxious now, and pathetic –
Never to learn, he who had led so many went stumbling
Off to the stricken city once more. But behind him the Elders
Followed their leader still, this time to death and destruction.
[Poems and Songs from the Plays, pp. 189-96; cf. BFA 25, pp.91-159, the Antigonemodell, where this text appears as captions to the scene photographs of the 1948 production. And see note above.]
NOTES ON THE ADAPTATION, 1951
I
Sophocles’ Antigone is one of the greatest works of Western literature. But the question arises whether it is still intelligible to audiences living their lives according to quite different ideas. Mankind, in the view of the ancients, is delivered up more or less blindly to the mercy of Fate. Men have no power over Fate. In his reworking of the play B.B. has replaced that idea with the opinion that mankind’s fate is mankind itself. This is a very large alteration which the ancient drama could only bear because, at bottom, it is an entirely realistic text that, with a great deal of practical human insight and political experience, gives shape to a real event whose story the dramatist had inherited, namely the fall of the ruling house of Oedipus. It founders in a savage war of conquest during which such savageries become necessary also against its own people that the part of the ruling house which is in sympathy with the people revolts. This so weakens the house that the enemy, the victims of aggression, are victorious. The tyrant who, to deal with the revolt at home, needs a speedy victory, drives his troops into battle prematurely. Shattered by mutinies, they can no longer withstand the enemy fighting - men, women and children - in the defence of their homeland. Antigone rebels against the tyrant Creon, and the great morality of her act consists in this: that, moved by a deep humanity, in an act of open resistance, she does not hesitate to put her own people in danger of being defeated in a war of aggression.
2
Further alterations of the ancient tragedy consist, for example, in the following:
Thebes’ war with Argos is presented realistically. The mineral wealth of Argos is its objective. But this wealth furnishes the people of Argos too with excellent spears. When the struggle becomes very hard indeed and lasts far longer than Creon had calculated, he exerts too strict a discipline on his men and mutinies ensue. Creon has to wage war abroad and at home, and he loses.
The seer Tiresias, who in the original drama shares the gods’ gift of prescience, in the reworking is a good observer and for that reason capable of foretelling certain things.
The choruses likewise have been reworked, and new ideas are introduced there also. These choruses, like several other passages in the drama, will scarcely be able to be fully understood at one hearing. Parts of the choruses sound like riddles asking to be solved. But the excellent thing about them is that, with a little studying, they give out ever more beauties. It was not the intention in the reworking simply to remove this difficulty, for overcoming it gives such pleasure – particularly since the work Antigone was fortunate enough to have as its translator one of the greatest shapers of the German language, Hölderlin.
First chorus (pp. 17-18)
Human beings, monstrously great when they subjugate Nature, become great monsters when they subjugate their fellow men.
Second chorus (pp. 27-8)
Warning to the despot not to rule too harshly. Those violently robbed of their human dignity rise up and overthrow their oppressors. The Chorus cite as an example the sons of Lachmeus who suffered monstrous wretchedness, even abandoning their womenfolk to a foreign enemy. But they rose up when Pelias struck them, albeit lightly, with a staff, and killed him. The seed of destruction has long been growing in the house of Oedipus, the exhaustion of the oppressed has a limit (it may end). But the fall of the ruling house will drag down many with it (the Chorus mean themselves).
Third chorus (pp. 33-4)
This is a paean to Bacchus, the god of the pleasures of the flesh. His power over human beings is great. Even in war he gets his way. He causes disorder in families, so irresistible is his beckoning to enjoyment. Through him human beings lose all self-control. He even induces them to bow beneath the yoke in the hope of future joys. The wish for pleasure follows the thin-walled ships even into the perils of the high seas. The god mixes the races in outbreaks of joy. But he is unwarlike and a friend of fellowship and understanding.
Fourth chorus (pp. 37-8)
On her way to the place of execution Antigone has scolded the Elders for failing to resist the tyrant and has prophesied that the city will meet with a terrible end. Now the Chorus point out accusingly that she too for a long time put up with injustice. She ate bread baked in servitude, she sat comfortably in the shade of the strongholds of oppression. Only when the violence dealt out by the house of Oedipus rebounded on that house did she awake.
Fifth chorus (pp. 48-9)
The Thebans at the moment of their fall again invoke their patron deity Bacchus. They confess that they have sinned against the peaceful god of joy.
3
Reworkings of this kind are not uncommon in literature. Goethe reworked Euripides’ Iphigenia; Kleist, Molière’s Amphitryon. These reworkings do not prevent our enjoying the originals. In the not too distant future, when aesthetic taste and the historical understanding have been properly schooled, such enjoyment will be possible for the broad mass of the population too.
[BFA 24, pp.350-3. Brecht wrote this text, and the ‘New Prologue’ below, for the first production in Germany, in Greiz, 18 November 1951.]
NEW PROLOGUE TO ‘ANTIGONE’, 1951
On stage come the actors playing Antigone, Creon and the seer Tiresias. Standing between the others, the actor playing Tiresias addresses the audience:
Friends, the high language
May be strange to you
In the poem from thousands of years ago
That we have learned our parts in here. Unknown
To you is the poem’s story that was to the listeners then
Closely familiar. Therefore permit us
To introduce it to you. This is Antigone
Princess of the house of Oedipus. And this
Creon, her uncle and tyrant of the city of Thebes. I am
Tiresias, the seer. This man
Is waging a war against distant Argos, for plunder. This woman
Counters his inhumanity and he destroys her.
But his war, that now has the name of an inhuman war
Colla
pses on him. Just and unbending
Not heeding her tyrannised country’s sacrifices
She ended it. We beg you
Search in your own hearts and minds for similar deeds
In the recent past or for the absence
Of any such deeds. And now
You will see us and the other actors
Entering in turn the small space of the play
Where formerly among
The skulls of the sacrificial beasts of a barbarous cult
In very ancient times humanity
Stood up tall.
The actors step back and the others too come on stage.
[BFA 8, p.242. In Greiz this was susbstituted for the Prelude of 1948, with which we have prefaced the main text of the play.]
Editorial Notes
Hans Curjel, offering Brecht the use of his theatre in Chur in November 1947, suggested several works that might be suitable to stage; and among them Sophocles’ Antigone, which Brecht chose, having been drawn to it already. Caspar Neher recommended Hölderlin’s translation as their working text. It was available in the fifth volume of Hellingrath’s critical edition of Holderlin’s works (1913), but had also been published separately and more recently by the Seldwyla Verlag, in Bern. Doubtless Brecht used this edition. But he must have gone elsewhere - perhaps to Hellingrath - for the lines he inserts into Antigone from Hölderlin’s translations of Pindar’s Pythian 1 and Pythian 4 (see below). And the two lines quoted in the 1947 Foreword (above), as though from Hólderlin’s Antigone, are not in fact from there but from some other, and rather more conventional, version.
Hólderlin’s Antigone (more or less adapted) had been staged a dozen times before Brecht took it on, and most recently (earlier in 1947) in Basel and Zurich. And in 1949 it would be performed in Salzburg, entire and unaltered, as an opera by Carl Orff. So Brecht’s choice of that text, though bold, was by no means unprecedented or eccentric.
The Antigone story itself, because of the issue it treats - individual conscience in revolt against the power and the interests of the state - will always be more or less present in a nation’s mind. The times themselves, whenever they press very urgently, seem to demand that it be taken up again. So Holderlin, translating and writing on the play in 1803, thought it enacted the struggle of a new order, which would be lively and republican, against the old, which was petrified and autocratic. Anouilh’s Antigone, written (1942) and staged (1944) in occupied Paris, was in Brecht’s day another proof of the story’s enduring topicality. And no doubt it was that potential which first attracted him. Perennially topical, Antigone could in 1947 be made very obviously so. In his draft of a Foreword (1947) and in the Prelude, set in Berlin in April 1945, which he wrote for the first performance in 1948, he confidently asserts the contemporary relevance of his text. But soon after that performance, whilst working on the Antigone-Model (1948-9) and before staging the play again in Greiz in 1951, he backed off from such categorical assertions. For Greiz he replaced the 1948 Prelude with a single speech in which the actor playing Tiresias urges the audience to search in their own hearts and minds ‘for similar deeds/ In the recent past or for the absence/ Of any such deeds’ - but no more than that.
Antigone’s story, always topical in a general way, resisted being harnessed to Brecht’s particular politics. If German audiences thought of any deeds similar to hers, it would be Stauffenberg’s in July 1944; and of him and his colleagues Brecht disapproved. He might have wished to honour resistance where, in his view, it had most needed to be: in Germany’s proletariat. But for that sort of resistance, as Brecht’s adaptation makes abundantly clear, Antigone was no model at all. She, like the Elders, is complicit in the ruling class. She does not act against Creon until her own immediate interests are violated. True, she then widens her revolt into one against the war, but not in the wish to shift power from the tyrant to his people. Brecht can and does ‘rationalise’ the story, removing from it all notions of fate and predestination. But in the end the chief topicality of the subject for him is Creon’s crazed violence: the degree of violence necessary to fight an unjust war and control the home population whilst doing so. Creon, like Hitler, learning nothing, drags down the state - which in his view has failed him - in his own catastrophe. The uncertainty over how Antigone could best, most topically, be applied results in an adaptation which, for all its power, is in that respect - political applicability - muddled and unsatisfactory. But that failure is more than made up for by success in an endeavour that interested Brecht far more: the theatrical and, as the chief agent of that, the linguistic.
Hólderlin’s translation is extraordinary. Disfigured by misprints, riddled with philological errors, radically unconventional in spirit and practice, it excited only ridicule on its first appearance, together with Oedipus, in 1804. Public taste and comprehension were more than a century even beginning to catch up. We now see that it is a radically enlivening translation because it goes to the roots of language, word by word, phrase by phrase, cleaving close. And in so doing it estranges the mother tongue.
Brecht delighted in Hölderlin’s Antigone. Coming back after fourteen years into German-speaking territory he savoured the achievement of a master of the German language. He heard things in the translation that seemed to him familiar - Swabian intonations and turns of phrase and, as he called them, Latinisms - but chiefly what he appreciated in Hölderlin and what he needed for his own purposes was strangeness, estrangement. The German language and a canonical text had been radically estranged. He took over about half of Hölderlin’s text into his own, often word for word, often also skilfully and pointedly adapting it. And in the rest of the play, departing from Hölderlin, he homogenised his own language with that highly idiosyncratic base. He does not, as he did in Saint Joan of the Stockyards or Arturo Ui, ironise or parody the verse, tone and diction of a canonical text. He recognised that after Hölderlin’s treatment of it no false pieties still adhered there. Already radically reanimated, its native potency carried over undiminished, the text, far from being a thing to parody, could serve his most serious and contemporary purposes by virtue of its very self. Everything he wanted to say, he could say, either in the given language of the translation or in his own homogenised to it. The whole makes no concessions to a modern audience’s powers of comprehension. Indeed, in his Notes on the Adaptation 1951 he signals the difficulty of the text as a great virtue. It repays our involvement, he says, we can learn from it. He offers elucidations of the very difficult choruses; but one of them, the famous ‘Monstrous, a lot…’ actually resists the interpretation he lays on it. And his own interpolations in that mode, particularly when amalgamated with dense strains of language already there, likewise puzzle and resist. There can be no doubt that Brecht intended this effect.
The difficulty - or, better, the linguistic strangeness - of Brecht’s Antigone not only does not facilitate but must actually hinder any easy application of the story to recent events. Instead, it serves another and for Brecht more important purpose: theatrical. The strangeness of the language - the archaisms, the nervous and contorted syntax, the densely allusive choruses and lyrical laments - all this acts defamiliarisingly, in the interests of Epic Theatre. The staging of Antigone (the making a model of it) was a thorough-going experiment in Epic Theatre. The text itself, the very language, is a prime agent in that experiment. Others are Neher’s set and, of course, epic acting, for which the Bridge Verses were written as an aid. In the Prelude 1948 the sisters frequently relate their actions, and in the play itself Brecht several times slightly alters Hölderlin’s text to produce the same effect; for example, in the ‘third-person’ exchanges between Antigone and Ismene. Brecht was reading Schiller, and having his own views confirmed by him: that theatre, to be effective, must insist on its status as art. Theatre that elides into the realities it seeks to present loses all leverage on them.
Brecht altered Sophocles’ plot as it suited him. For example, he made Haemon’s brother Megareus more im
portant, at least as a figure off-stage, and excised Eurydice, their mother. He changed the nature of the war being fought against Argos, and the manner and significance of the deaths of Eteocles and Polynices. Brecht’s Antigone speaks against the unjust war and in favour of some more humane polity. But whereas in Sophocles, and indeed in most versions of the story, Creon faces her with at least some claim to rightness in his point of view, in Brecht he is wholly in the wrong and does not see his error as he founders.
Brecht followed, cut, adapted and amplified Hölderlin’s text for his own direction. And he made some curious ‘foreign’ insertions into it too. Among the many exemplary instances offered by the Chorus is one of Brecht’s own invention: the fate of the sons of Lachmeus. He grafts them, unknown in Greek mythology, on to the established deeds of the bona fide hero Pelias. He fits in (pp.27, 29) three quotations from Hölderlin’s Pindar (an even more radical experiment than his Sophocles), adapting the second of them - an image of steering the ship of state - so that its sense becomes quite different in the new context. Much of the terrifying speech in which Creon describes the destruction of Argos (which has not happened, it will happen to Thebes) has its potent source in Goethe’s versifying (in 1816) of a prose version (1814) of an Arabic vengeance song by the sixth-century poet and brigand Taabbata Scharran. Goethe quotes it in the ‘Noten und Abhandlungen’ accompanying his West-Ostlicber Divan. Brecht borrows five of its stanzas, for his Creon. The perspective on war and atrocity thus opened up is dizzying. To the Greek myth of the wars of Argos and Thebes, in Sophocles’ treatment of that myth in the fifth century BC, in Hölderlin’s translation and interpretation of Sophocles during the Revolutionary Wars, he adds the East, as Goethe contemplated it, associating Tamburlaine and Napoleon, around the time of Waterloo; Brecht himself, in 1947, thinking of Stalingrad, the flattening of Germany, and unspeakable murder and carnage world-wide. Taabbata Scharran goes perfectly into Creon’s voice. All these additions, acts of montage, fit Hölderlin’s translation and increase its potent strangeness.
Collected Plays, Volume 4 (Bertolt Brecht: Plays, Poetry & Prose) 8 Page 25
