Riusi sofoclei e allegorie politiche nell'Antígona di António Sérgio de Sousa

[Autom. eng. transl.] Sérgio was one of the most influential Portuguese intellectuals of the last century: a liberal-oriented politician, philosopher, economist and educationalist (according to one of the most frequent self-defining formulas), it was a sort of tutelary deity of the Portuguese Republic reborn from the 1974 Carnation Revolution In his exile in Paris, where he had been forced to take refuge because of his dissident activity against the military dictatorship in power in Portugal since May 28, 1926, he composed an interesting Antígona, in which he dramatically elaborated an interpretative model of the Portuguese society, caught in a crucial phase of its history, resorting to the archetypal forms of Greek theater. The representation that derives from it, critical and passionate at the same time, is one of the last free testimonies of Portugal in the imminence of the Salazarian Estado Novo. Ignored by the main comparativist syntheses before the recent monograph by José Vte. Bañuls Oller and Patricia Crespo Alcalá (Antígona (s): mito y personaje. A recorrido desde los orígenes, Bari, Levante, 2008), which on pp. 294-99 provide a brief summary of this, this drama represents the first twentieth-century rewrite, in the Spanish-Portuguese context, of a classical myth destined in the decades following a remarkable fortune: from it descend more or less directly to the other five Portuguese Twentieth-century Antigones (Júlio Dantas 1946, João de Castro Osório 1954, António Pedro 1957, Hélia Correia 1991; Eduarda Dionísio 1992), as well as, in some respects, the Catalan Antígona composed by Salvador Espriu some years after that of Sérgio (1939), and inspired since the advent of the Franco dictatorship. In addition to being an example of militant theater, with peculiar implications in the history of the classical tradition for the peculiar actualization in a political-sociological key of an ancient myth, Sérgio's Antígona is also noted for the presence of some dramatic solutions that will be found in similar form in successive rewrites of Antigone with a political approach (eg by Brecht), for the mixture of prose and verse in an attempt to reproduce the original form of Attic tragedy, as well as for the recourse to the technique of contamination between different literary genres, as in particular the theocritean pastoral idyll at the beginning of Act III, or, in the scenes of more accentuated didactic-philosophical connotations, the Platonic dialogues.