THC: Do you have any recommendations for the students who are putting on “Antigonick” here at Harvard?

AC: no screaming

THC: Do you frequently encounter the question, "Why are the classics important?” and what is your response?

AC: usually in the form "how can we the Classics relevant to people today" and my thought is, how can we make ourselves relevant to them

THC: Do you find that the loss of classical knowledge in the general public affects how you write?

AC: yes, i need to explain more. explanation however is a deep and democratic thing, i can a lot from explaining things that seemed obvious

THC: To return briefly to “Antigonick”: in your version of the play, you depart fairly radically from Sophocles' text; however, in your translation of Sappho, your approach is very literal, even reflecting the spacing of individual words on the papyri fragments in your translation. Why the difference in treatment?

AC: i am never sure what anyone means by "literal"

but in fact the treatment of Sappho (spacing etc) is not any kind of replica of the original but a conceptual gesture toward the fact of fragmentation and the changing power of time

a translation is a folding of the original, a fold within a fold or unfolding to the following fold

i don't think Antigonick "departs" from the original so much as unfolds it in a way it hadn't been before

Hegel and Beckett are part of the original in the way that the inside of a fold is just the inside of the outside of the fold