Tundraco's Daily Living Guide to Book Reviews
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Tundraco's Daily Living Guide to Book Reviews |
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The Burial at Thebes A Version of Sophocles' Antigone By Seamus Heaney Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2005) ISBN 10: 0374530076 ISBN 13: 978-0374530075 |
Reviewed by Israel Drazin - February 9, 2010
Seamus Heaney won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995. He rewrites the fifth century Greek Sophocles' masterpiece Antigone in very readable modern English poetry. The story focuses on the never resolved conflict between a person's rights and the needs of the state. Antigone, the daughter of Oedipus, hears that the king refuses to bury one of her brothers because the king feels that he was treacherous. She expresses her disagreement and the king contemns her to death. The book can be read easily even by people unfamiliar with Greek tragedies. People should know Sophocles' story because it is an interesting drama and because modern writers and film-makers have repeatedly copied its theme with sometimes very little variations.
Dr. Israel Drazin is the author of fifteen books, including a series of five volumes on the Aramaic translation of the Hebrew Bible, which he co-authors with Rabbi Dr. Stanley M. Wagner, and a series of four books on the twelfth century philosopher Moses Maimonides, the latest being Maimonides: Reason Above All, published by Gefen Publishing House, www.gefenpublishing.com. The Orthodox Union (OU) publishes daily samples of the Targum books on www.ouradio.org
