Seamus Heaney, The Sunday Times, March 21 04

The invitation to translate Antigone for the Abbey Theatre in Dublin was an honour, but at first I wasn't sure whether to accept. How many Antigones could Irish theatre put up with? There had been Tom Paulin's The Riot Act, done for Field Day in the 1980s; and then last year a version by Conall Morrison that set the action in the Middle East. In between, Marianne McDonald, Brendan Kennelly and Aidan Carl Mathews had also been at work, so why start again?

One person who had not done a version was W B Yeats. Yeats had indeed made prose translations of Sophocles's other two Theban plays for performance at the Abbey, but he had not put his trademark upon this one. So to that extent at least, the road was open. But what gave me the poetic go-ahead was the sudden discovery of a note that connected the distressed heroine of Sophocles' tragedy in the 5thC BC and the author of the great 18thC lament known by its Irish title, its Irish title, Caoineadh Airt Ui Laoghaire.

Meanwhile, there was a third, more general consideration. Early in 2003, the situation that pertains in Sophocles's play was being re-enacted in our own world. Just as Creon forced the citizens of Thebes into an either/or situation in relation to Antigone, the Bush administration in the White House was using the same tactic to forward its argument for war on Iraq.

Creon puts it to the chorus in these terms: either you are a patriot, a loyal citizen and regard Antigone as an enemy of the state because she does honour to her traitor brother, or else you yourselves are traitorous because you stand up for a woman who has broken the law and defied my authority. And Bush was using a similar strategy, asking in effect: are you in favour of state security or are you not? If you don't support the eradication of this tyrant in Iraq and the threat he poses to the free world, you are on the wrong side in "the war on terror".

Still, although there was a meaningful political context for a new translation, what was missing was an immediate writerly urge. And then all of a sudden it arrived. Theme and tune coalesced. I remembered the opening lines of Eibhlin Dhubh Ni Chonaill's lament, an outburst of grief and anger from a woman whose husband had been cut down and left bleeding on the roadside in Co Cork, in much the same way as Polyneices was left outside the walls of Thebes, unburied, desecrated picked at by the crows.

It was the drive and pitch of the Irish verse that clinched it: in the three-beat line of Eibhlin Dhubh's keen I heard a note that the stricken Antigone might sound in the speedy, haunted opening movement of the play. In Frank O'Connor's translation this goes:
"My love and my delight,
The day I saw you first
Beside the market house
I had eyes for nothing else
And love for none but you.

I left my father's house
And ran away with you,
And that was no bad choice..."

Gradually then, this voice of a woman in mourning becomes the voice of a woman outraged, as she finds the body of her beloved lying beside a little furze bush, dead, without the last rites, without anyone close except "an old, old woman / And her cloak about you".

Because of the pitch of that voice, however, I made a connection between the wife traumatised by the death of her husband at the hands of the English soldiery in Carriganimma and the sister driven wild by the edict of a tyrant in Thebes; and through that connection I found the metre for the first dialogue between Antigone and Ismene:
"Ismene, quick, come here!
What's to become of us?"
Admittedly, there is nothing very distinct about this speech, but the three-beat lines established a tune. And with a first tune established, it was then easy enough to play variations, making the chorus, for example, speak a version of the four-beat, alliterating, Old English line:
"Glory be to brightness, to the gleaming sun,
Shining guardian of our seven gates,
Burn away the darkness, dawn on Thebes,
Dazzle the city you have saved from destruction."

This was an echo of the metre that Anglo-Saxon poets used for their grim old pagan wisdom and for their new Christian hymns of praise, and it therefore seemed right for a chorus whose function involves both the utterance of proverbial wisdom and the invocation of gods. Just as the traditional iambic pentameter, with its conventional tee-tum, tee-tum, teetum seemed right for Creon, who needs to hold the line in every sense, "to honour patriots in life and death".

Greek tragedy is as much musical score as it is dramatic script. I wanted to do a translation that actors could speak as plainly or intensely as the occasion demanded, but still keep faith with the ritual formality of the original. I was glad, therefore, to find corroboration for this effort in Yeats's sonnet. At the Abbey Theatre, where he expressed the conflicting demands placed upon his theatre as follows:
"When we are high and airy hundreds say
That if we hold that flight they'll leave the place,
While those same hundreds mock another day
Because we have made our art of common things"