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The Burial at Thebes
The Burial at Thebes, by Nobel Prize-winner Seamus Heaney, is a new verse translation of Sophocles’ great classical tragedy Antigone.
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Commissioned to mark the centenary of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 2004, The Burial at Thebes is Seamus Heaney’s new verse translation of Sophocles’ great tragedy, Antigone – whose eponymous heroine is one of the most sharply individualized and compelling figures in Western drama. Faithful to the play’s time and place, The Burial at Thebes represents opposing voices as they enact the ancient conflict between family and state in a time of crisis, pitching the morality of private allegiance against that of public service.
Above all, The Burial at Thebes honours the sovereign urgency and grandeur of the Antigone, in which language speaks truth to power, then and now.
Seamus Heaney was born in County Derry in Northern Ireland. Death of a Naturalist, his first collection of poems, appeared in 1966, and was followed by poetry, criticism and translations which established him as the leading poet of his generation. In 1995 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, and twice won the Whitbread Book of the Year, for The Spirit…
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