Sophocles (c. 497/6 – winter 406/5 BC) is one of three ancient Greek tragedians whose plays have survived. His first plays were written later than those of Aeschylus, and earlier than or contemporary with those of Euripides. Only seven out of over a hundred have survived in a complete form: Ajax, Antigone, The Women of Trachis, Oedipus the King, Electra, Philoctetes and Oedipus at Colonus. The best-known of these feature Oedipus and also Antigone in what are called the Theban plays, although each play originally formed part of an entirely different tetralogy.

Brendan Kennelly’s version of Antigone was first performed at the the Peacock Theatre, the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, on 28 April 1986. The text was first published in book form by Bloodaxe in 1996. The Irish Times called it ‘probably the most substantial Irish drama since W.B. Yeats was writing’, and it became a set text on the Irish Leaving Certificate syllabus. It is now available from Bloodaxe in Kennelly’s compilation When Then Is Now: Three Greek Tragedies (2006), which also includes his versions of Medea and The Trojan Women by Euripides.

Another version of Antigone published by Bloodaxe is Anne Carson's Antigonick (2012), a comic book presentation produced in collaboration with Bianca Stone and Robert Currie, Carson's first attempt at making translation into a combined visual and textual experience. 

The German poet Friedrich Hölderlin worked on his strange versions of Sophocles during the winter of 1803-04. His versions of Oedipus Rex and Antigone (he worked at but never finished Oedipus at Colonus and Ajax) came out in the spring of 1804 and were taken, by the learned, as conclusive proof of his insanity. In his translations of Hölderlin’s translations, David Constantine sought to create an equivalent English for these extraordinary German recreations of Sophocles’ classic Greek verse plays, carrying as much of their strangeness as possible into his English. His edition, Hölderlin’s Sophocles: Oedipus and Antigone, was published by Bloodaxe in 2001, These double translations, links in literature from land to land and from age to age, demonstrate the vitality of ancient and modern poetic tradition. Carl Orff used Hölderlin’s texts for his operas Antigonae (1949) and Oedipus der Tyrann (1959), with the producers of recent DVDs of Orff's operas later choosing to use Constantine’s texts for their English subtitles.