Antígona by José Watanabe: A Bilingual Edition with Critical Essays by Cristina Pérez Díaz (review)

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• Antígona by José Watanabe: A Bilingual Edition with Critical Essays by Cristina Pérez Díaz
• Leticia Robles-Moreno

Pérez Díaz, Cristina. Antígona by José Watanabe: A Bilingual Edition with Critical Essays. Routledge, 2022. 172 pp.

Cristina Pérez Díaz's book offers an important contribution to artistic and academic approaches to Latin American re-imaginings of Sophocles' Greek classic. This is the first full-length English translation of Antígona, which Peruvian poet José [End Page 108] Watanabe wrote in collaboration with Teresa Ralli, founding member of the renowned Peruvian theatre collective Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani. In this version, Antigone's death, a consequence of Creon's tyrannical decree, is told through poems that draw from each character's perspective. One of these characters, the narrator, is Ismene, the sister who performs a belated funerary ritual for the brother who motivated Antigone's sacrifice. Pérez Díaz emphasizes the political project rooted in this Peruvian Antigone and its feminist connotations: "[Ismene] becomes an agent of change against an anti-politics of isolation in the post-war society" (126). Moreover, Pérez Díaz reflects upon the politics of translation, discussing her own cultural negotiations as a Puerto Rican, non-native English speaker who transits among Greek, Spanish, and English. Repositioning the linguistic imbalance that stems from colonial and neo-colonial projects, Pérez Díaz reclaims equal approximations to the act of translation. Her careful treatment of Watanabe's text is evident in the way she tries to convey his poetics—clear and down-to-earth, yet transcendental in his philosophic ruminations on the human condition—in the English version.

Pérez Díaz frames the side-by-side Spanish and English versions with two critical essays, the first one focused on the context of production and reception of Watanabe and Yuyachkani's Antígona. The second one offers an aesthetic reading of the script, relying heavily on literary theory, particularly Gerard Genette's Paratexts. While both essays offer valuable insights to readers not familiar with Latin American Antigones, their scope loses momentum due to the author's insistence on defending an aesthetic approach to the text rather than a historical-political one. Although Pérez Díaz correctly indicates the lack of critical studies on Watanabe's text, her theorization creates a false dichotomy between contexts of production/reception and literary aesthetics when they are particularly intertwined in the case of theatre practices. She consistently highlights the need to detach the text from its original context of emergence and performance in order to tap into "proliferations and displacements of meaning" (102). While this is a valuable premise on which to approach cultural products, her critical essays struggle with the particular nature of Watanabe's poems and with the interdisciplinary analytical lens that the study of theatre and performance requires. Pérez Díaz endeavors to differentiate Watanabe's poems from the play's collaborative development to "look at the literary operations, textures, through which Antígona grafts itself into contextual assemblages where geographical and political borders do not exhaust its meanings and doings" (104). This either/or approach clashes with the multidirectional and hybrid writing process of Antígona.

Despite this schism between the aesthetics of the text and the political force of its original staging, Pérez Díaz's book invites readers to reflect on how the experience of pleasure in reading the written text is also political, in tune with Watanabe's poetics. The best sections of Pérez Díaz's essays are close readings of Watanabe's poems, wherein Pérez Díaz explains how he intervenes in Sophocles' text with his own concerns about the limits of the flesh and the transcendence of death. Her study of [End Page 109] the redistribution of lines between Creon and Antigone, which signals an alignment with a subaltern position (109) and the feminist orientation towards the future that can be seen in Ismene (129) are beautiful moments in which Pérez Díaz reads Watanabe "beside" Sophocles, at the same time dialoguing with Eve Sedgwick's reparative readings (103). All and all, this translation and its accompanying essays...