Antígona by José Watanabe

"Cristina Pérez Diaz's translation and remarkable essays analyze José Watanabe’s Antígona, as distinct from its original performance by Teresa Ralli of the Peruvian theatre group Yuyachkani, to offer a rich interpretation of this unique theatrical collaboration." - Helene P. Foley, Claire Tow Professor of Classics, Barnard College, Columbia University

"Pérez Díaz's impassioned essays array a dizzying spectrum of political and cultural referents, while her translation follows Watanabe's lead in constructing a timeless Sophoclean world that foregoes explicit reference to anything local, in our place and time, or his: the battle against a culture of oblivion exists everywhere and never ends."- Esther Allen, Baruch College, City University of New York

"Cristina Pérez Díaz’s beautiful translation of José Watanabe’s Antígona brings this modern classic of Latin American theater to an English audience for the first time. This volume offers a critical introduction to this poignant play; written in the aftermath of Peru’s long civil conflict (1980–2000), it thematizes the country’s process of truth and reconciliation, thus engaging enduring themes of memory and politics that have characterized Latin American theater of the past fifty years. Watanabe’s play was created in collaboration with Peru’s premiere theater company, Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani; Cristina Pérez Díaz demonstrates how this version of the classic Antigone story thus engages complex dynamics of adaptation and embodiment. This critical edition of the play is a most welcome addition to scholarship on Latin American theater, and will be of interest to students and scholars in the field as well as readers of contemporary drama." - Jill Lane, New York University

"Cristina Pérez Díaz’s critical edition of José Watanabe’s Antígona is quite simply a fantastic accomplishment. In addition to its excellent translation, which will make Watanabe’s text available to Anglophone audiences for the first time, the edition’s accompanying materials are noteworthy contributions the study of Antigone and its reception." - New England Classical Journal

"..what Pérez Díaz’s accented translation of Watanabe’s text offers us is a beautiful, anti-assimilationist, undomesticated, and unbelonging experience in “postcolonial languaging.” - Bryn Mawr Classical Review

“Cristina Pérez Díaz's book offers an important contribution to artistic and academic approaches to Latin American re-imaginings of Sophocles' Greek classic… 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.” - Leticia Robles-Moreno, Latin American Theatre Review

"P.D. displays mastery of theoretical approaches to adaptation, reception and performance studies, and of the history of performative and literary engagements with Sophocles’ Antigone in Latin America and elsewhere, as the rich endnotes and the wide-ranging and up-to-date bibliography substantiate... This book does great service to the text of Watanabe, which now becomes, for the first time, fully available to an English reading public. It will not fail to leave its imprint in classical reception studies. The thoughtful essays...do a truly remarkable job in their sensitive, delicate interpretation of this great work of literary art, genuinely adding to the readers’ appreciation and understanding." - The Classical Review