Overview

Winner of the ASTR Translation Prize 2023. Winner of CAMWS' 2024 Bolchazy Pedagogy Award. This book brings to English readers, in its entirety for the first time, a translation of José Watanabe’s Antígona, accompanied by the original Spanish text and critical essays. The lack of availability in English has resulted in the absence of Antígona from important Anglophone studies devoted specifically to the reception of ancient Greek tragedy in the Americas. Pérez Díaz's translation fills this gap. The introduction provides the performative, political, and historical contexts in which the text was written in collaboration with the actress Teresa Ralli, from the Peruvian theater group Yuyachkani, who also originally performed it. Following the bilingual text, a critical essay provides an analysis of textual aspects of Antígona that have been disregarded, situating it in relation to Sophocles' Antigone and in conversation with relevant moments of the vast traditions of reception of the Greek tragedy. An appendix briefly surveys some notable productions of the play throughout Latin America. This comprehensive volume provides an invaluable resource for readers interested in José Watanabe's work, students and scholars working on classical reception and Latin American literature and theatre, as well as theatre practitioners.

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9780367713386

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Cristina Perez's translation and remarkable essays analyze Jose Watanabe's Antigona, as distinct from its original performance by Teresa Ralli of the Peruvian theatre group Yuyachkani, to offer a rich interpretation of this unique theatrical collaboration. - Helene P. Foley, Claire Tow Professor of Classics, Barnard College, Columbia University. In the impassioned essays that accompany her translation, Cristina Perez Diaz arrays a dizzying spectrum of elements: Third Theatre actress Teresa Ralli and Peru's Human Rights Commission, the Maoist terrorists of the Shining Path and the neoliberal politics of president Alberto Fujimori, the Japanese principles and poetics Jose Watanabe sought out from his father's culture and the previous Peruvian versions of Sophocles' play that had shaped local perceptions of it, with, alongside all of that, the sources she herself drew upon as translator-Anne Carson, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Edward Said, and others. At the center of all of that, her translation of Antigona follows Watanabe's lead in constructing a timeless Sophoclean world that foregoes explicit reference to anything particularly local and present, in our place and time, or his: the battle against a culture of oblivion exists everywhere and never ends. - Esther Allen, Baruch College, City University of New York.

Cristina Perez's translation and remarkable essays analyze Jose Watanabe's Antigona, as distinct from its original performance by Teresa Ralli of the Peruvian theatre group Yuyachkani, to offer a rich interpretation of this unique theatrical collaboration. - Helene P. Foley, Claire Tow Professor of Classics, Barnard College, Columbia University. Perez Diaz's impassioned essays array a dizzying spectrum of political and cultural referents, while her translation follows Watanabe's lead in constructing a timeless Sophoclean world that foregoes explicit reference to anything local, in our place and time, or his: the battle against a culture of oblivion exists everywhere and never ends. - Esther Allen, Baruch College, City University of New York.

Author Information

Cristina Pérez Díaz translates from Ancient Greek, Latin, and Spanish and is currently a Doctoral Candidate in Classics at Columbia University.

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