Rather than offering a separate commentary to explain her text, Carson gives her characters their own. Carson's translation plays delightfully with the idea that a work of art changes and accumulates meanings as it moves through time.

She later offers an overview of Antigone's childhood – "we got her the bike we got her a therapist". only add dimension to a work that does not need any support to be completely satisfying and intriguing. Carson also induced me to pick George Steiner's Antigones off my shelf where it had languished for decades and read it straight through. It shows how the book fits into the world and speaks to the society of the time, and how translating requires deciding on word choices that must navigate how you feel best respects the work while still acknowledging it as a piece being told in the present but written long in the past.I watched the BBC Four programme and actress Juliette Binoche undoubtedly gives a stupendous performance as Antigone.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Carson's translation makes a mockery of translations – that seems to be half its point, the other being a kind of aesthetic experiment that I found irritating throughout. A nick of time is the gap between your eyes, the gap between a prelapsarian nothingness and a memory-swollen nothingness. In his Antigone of Sophocles (in David Constantine's excellent translation), Brecht frames it in the context of World War II and Hitler's debacle (Creon is adapted from a tyrannical but nonetheless complicated figure in Sophocles into the mindless "Führer").This passage is good, but it still isn't an interpretation of the individual image: it's a reading of any image (especially one with an empty room, but any image could be construed the same way).

It is a cry of grief posed in question form, emphatic, handwritten, excessive and abbreviated and, in this sense, a measured scream that gives us some sense of who or what lives on when it is all too late. She later says "the nick is the time of the line itself, the scan of poetic meter," leaving the images aside. It is a very stylistic, aphoristic retelling of the tale for a contemporary audience, done in a radical style.Jean Carroll’s allegations that she had been sexually assaulted by Donald Trump were made public, I pulled Antigonick off the shelf. Sophokles' luminous and disturbing tragedy is here given an entirely fresh language and presentation. Particularly of the timing being too late and Kreon coming to ‘ wisdom’ just too late once everyone has died.

Her Antigone is up against a ruler who is not only blundering and brutal but misogynistic and crass. Because I studied Greek drama and history at school and university back in the 1980s, I find it hard to switch from spelling him Sophocles to Sophokles, as preferred these days. In contrast to Grief Lessons and Carson’s Oresteia translation, this one is far less literal, pulling in contemporary language and references to contemporary authors who have commented on Antigone.

This is where Carson’s work is best staged: in the uncanny gateway between the temporal and the timeless; in the nick between the world of powerboats and the sublime, terrifying realm of the dead and the still lively gods.