Writer Will Aitken, poet and translator, Anne Carson, and AGO’s Director of Public Programming, Devyani Saltzman, talk about Aitken’s haunting 2018 genre-busting memoir, Antigone Undone, which chronicles the effects that Sophocles’ tragic and doomed character have on Aitken when he is deeply immersed in her story. Why do so many continue to find her a potent symbol of the plight of the strong woman in a misogynist society? What toll does stepping out onto the stage night after night, interpreting Antigone and her tragic fate, have on actress Juliette Binoche (who starred in a touring production of the play, translated by Carson and directed by Dutch theatre director Ivo van Hove)? And just what does collaboration mean when artists have strong feelings about how a work should be presented to modern audiences or readers today?
Books by Will Aitken
Antigone Undone: Juliette Binoche, Anne Carson, Ivo van Hove and the Art of Resistance
Books by Anne Carson (writer or translator)
Autobiography of Red: a Novel in Verse
Other Related Materials
Clouds of Sils Maria, a film by Olivier Assays starring Juliette Binoche
Certified Copy, a film by Abbas Kiarostami starring Juliette Binoche
Bleu, a film by Krzysztof Kieślowski starring Juliette Binoche
Live Mic: Best of TPL Conversations features curated discussions and interviews with some of today’s best-known and yet-to-be-known writers, thinkers and artists, recorded on stage at one of Toronto Public Library’s 100 branches.
Episodes are produced by Natalie Kertes, Jorge Amigo, and Gregory McCormick. Technical support by Michelle De Marco and George Panayotou. AV support by Jennifer Kasper and Mesfin Bayssassew. Marketing support by Tanya Oleksuik.
Music is by The Worst Pop Band Ever.
Live Mic: Best of TPL Conversations
S2E1 - Will Aitken’s Antigone Undone: When Art Skewers Us Through
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DS: Devyani Saltzman
WA: Will Aitken
AC: Anne Carson
Gregory: Welcome to Live Mic: Best of TPL Conversations produced by the Toronto Public Library. I’m Gregory McCormick.
Today’s episode is a conversation between author Will Aitken, poet and translator Anne Carson and AGO Programming Guru Devyani Saltzman.
TEASER: That's what... I mean, that's, I think, is the genius of Will's book is that it gives you a way of thinking into and out of this play from all different angles that he could find in the history of the reception, while watching him thinking through them at the same time, so you get a sort of human journey. I hate that word journey, but you know what I mean, a human journey [chuckle] through the thinking out of other people's thinking out of this work of art, which is kind of the best intellectual adventure we have.
Gregory: The conversation centres around Aitken’s book, Antigone Undone, which was short-listed for the Hillary Weston Writers Trust Prize for Non-Fiction in 2018. The book chronicles Aitken’s experience as he toured with Ivo Van Hove in his production of Antigone starring Juliette Binoche and translated by Anne Carson. In Aitken’s chronicle, he gives us a sense of both the power of Antigone and her frailty and how being so steeped in the tragic fate of Antigone as a character and as a woman had the power to nearly undo him. The jury of the Weston Prize said about Aitken’s book, “Antigone Undone is about what happens to us when supposedly dusty works of art don’t just resonate but skewer us straight through.”
This conversation was recorded live on stage at the Toronto Reference Library in May 2018.
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DS: It's an unusual thing to be ambushed by a 2500-year-old play. Tell us more.
WA: Yeah, well it was... I think it was... It came directly out of the intensity of watching the play five times in a row. And also that it had a lot to do with Anne's translation, because Ivo decided to do the play in modern dress, and then Anne's translation is the most colloquial, down-to-earth, accessible translation of a Greek tragedy that I've ever read. And so after the first couple of times it felt like the play was happening in real time, and the events were concurrent with our own as opposed to isolated millennia ago.
AC: Absolutely.
WA: And my skin started to break out, [chuckle] and it went downhill from there. After the premiere I went on to Amsterdam thinking I'd have a good old time, and instead could barely get out of my... The studio that I'd rented, and I was claustrophobic and agoraphobic at the same time, and it was... It got really, really horrible over the next few months, but then it got better.
DS: I wanna ask Anne what actually attracted you to translate Antigone? In Will's account, you speak of other Greek translations you've done as commissions or works that you've been approached to translate, but in this case it seems like a bit of a special project. Can you also tell us what is Antigonick, for those who may not know?
AC: Oh yeah, maybe... Yes, you wouldn't know that, Antigonick is a rendering I did of Sophocles's Antigone. What year was that? 2010 I think. Could've been '12. And I started to do it because I was doing some drawings of Antigone, and some of them came out... I was doing drawings of a Greek chorus with TV sets for heads, and that seemed to me somehow totally brilliant, and then it led me to think into what kind of drawings I wanted to make for the other characters, and then that led me to look at the text again. And then I started to translate it sort of in relation to the drawings but then apart from the drawings, and it turned into a thing which I called Antigonick because it's not exactly a translation, it's a version, let's say, of the original thing. But then Ivo van Hove didn't like that, and wanted me to do another one, so I had to start over. [chuckle]
AC: Well, Ivo van Hove doesn't really collaborate, he just takes over your thing and does it. [chuckle] So he didn't communicate very much with me when he was working with Juliette in the initial stages of rehearsing the script until he had this problem. And the problem was that Juliette, at a certain point in rehearsing, decided that the young girl character in the play and the young boy character in the play should have a romantic scene together, which isn't in Sophocles's concept in any way, but she thought would round out the thing and she likes playing romantic scenes. So Ivo van Hove said, "Yeah, okay," and then he wrote to me, emailed about that, and I said, "No, [chuckle] absolutely not in this world is that gonna happen." And so then we had to have a meeting, Juliette and Ivo and me, in New York, and my husband-collaborator Currie came along, and Will can attest that Currie can make anybody happy about anything, he's just the world's most essential people person. So he started talking to Juliette about her troubles with her mother and her sister, [chuckle] and soon enough we were able to nudge Juliette away from the idea of adding anything to Sophocles's play.
AC: Nonetheless when we got to Luxembourg he had added it...
WA: Sneakily.
AC: As a video, a silent video thing in the background, [chuckle] so that's a... Well, collaboration takes different forms, let's say, [laughter] that's one form it takes.
WA: Yeah, and interestingly, Juliette said that it was the same with Ivo, he never talked to her about the role, he never talked to her about the play. And when he gives interviews he always talks about how important collaboration is. [chuckle] But she said all they did was rehearse, and he would tell her what she did wrong, and he expected her to remember that, and then they wouldn't do the scene again. And she comes from a French tradition where you rehearse eight hours a day, but Ivo rehearses like four hours a day, so I think that led to her feeling... And probably he wanted that, feeling insecure. And he did a number of other things to make her feel insecure, like putting her up against a British cast, [chuckle] but it worked for the play because Antigone is increasingly isolated throughout the play, and there are all these people working in a Royal Shakespeare Company format, and then Juliette's kind of flying free and improvising and unpredictable. So it led to a really great tension, but I don't know how easy it was for either the British actors or Juliette.
WA: I think the line that always sort of punches me in the face is, "Look at these men and what they're doing to me." And it seems... I don't want to oversell the relevance of the play, but it seems so much in...
DS: In the moment.
WA: Conjunction with what's been going on over the last year. At the same time, I think if you try to reduce Antigone to one... A single idea, for me, I find it impossible, that every time I look at her I have a different reaction to her, I have a different sense of... And I think when you look as well, like in the second portion of the book where I look at Hegel and Kierkegaard and all those people, is that each of them sees themselves in her.
DS: And Virginia Woolf?
WA: Yeah, Virginia Woolf. And it almost overrides who she is, but then you go back to the play and there she is in all her clarity, especially in Anne's translation, but also in all her incredible complexity because... We can hold her up as one of the first female rebels, but she was also a princess. She says openly in the play, "I'm concerned about my brother, he's royal blood, and he's a prince, and I will do this to him because you can't grow another brother," which is one of the great lines of Anne's translation. And on the other hand, she said, "Ooh, if it's a slave, I wouldn't turn a finger for a slave." So she's very protean, I think, and that's part of her fascination.
DS: So you can't put her on a pedestal when you talk about class and her views of her own privilege. She's a princess.
WA: Well, she's very much of her era, of her time.
DS: You're both obviously artists, but also essayists. This book is a really fascinating combination of essay/memoir. As you just alluded, there's three parts, there's the production, there's interviews, and then there's your historical references to other philosophers, thinkers, and writers who have been affected by Antigone. What do you think the role is of art reflecting art and the memoir-essay right now, and the importance of the essay, because they don't often sell as well as they should, and yet to reflect upon...
WA: God knows. [chuckle]
DS: What's being reflected upon is such a beautiful thing. So I'm just curious to your thoughts on the importance of the essay and works of art reflecting art.
WA: Would you like to answer?
AC: Well, the essay... Let's see. I love essays, I call everything an essay if I can, but editors change that because they want it to be categorizable in a book store as poetry or fiction or something. But it does seem to me the word just means an attempt, it's an attempt at thinking, and that's the primary task of putting pen to paper. That's what... That's, I think, is the genius of Will's book is that it gives you a way of thinking into and out of this play from all different angles that he could find in the history of the reception, while watching him thinking through them at the same time, so you get a sort of human journey. I hate that word journey, but you know what I mean, a human journey [chuckle] through the thinking out of other people's thinking out of this work of art, which is kind of the best intellectual adventure we have, isn't it?
WA: Yeah. [laughter]
AC: Yeah.
WA: Gosh.
AC: Should do more of them.
WA: And I've always liked the essay, but my problem with writing essays is I write them way too long. And so this was a chance to use the essay format, and actually say what I wanted to say, and end up with 180-some pages. And luckily I had a publisher [chuckle] already lined up, 'cause I bumped into an old friend who I knew as a publicist and then he headed... Suddenly was heading University of Regina Press. And it was right after I came back from from Luxembourg, and I was telling him about my depression, and my face, and [chuckle] all these kind of things. And I thought he was listening really empathetically, and then he...
[chuckle]
DS: He was...
WA: I finished, and he said, "That sounds like a book to me."
[laughter]
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Gregory: WILL AITKEN has written three novels – Realia, A Visit Home, Terre Haute – and one other non-fiction book, Death in Venice: A Queer Film Classic. Antigone Undone was published by the University of Regina Press in 2017. He lives in Montreal.
ANNE CARSON was born in Canada and now is Distinguished Poet-in-Residence at New York University. Her awards and honors include the Lannan Award, the Pushcart Prize, the Griffin Trust Award for Excellence in Poetry, and fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations.
DEVYANI SALTZMAN is the Director of Public Programming at the Art Gallery of Ontario.
Live Mic: Best of TPL Conversations is produced by Toronto Public Library.
This episode was produced by me with technical support from Michelle De Marco and George Panayotou with AV support from Jennifer Kasper and Mesfin Bayssassew. Marketing support from Tanya Oleksuik.
Music is by the Worst Pop Band Ever aka WPBE.
For all TPL podcasts and to listen to Live Mic Season One, visit tpl.ca/podcasts
I’m Gregory McCormick. Thanks for listening and we’ll be back soon with another episode of Live Mic: Best of TPL Conversations.