[F]irst of all, we are going to discuss Heidegger's "translation" and "interpretation" of the stasimon {choral song} from Antigone—the one that opens with the famous words polla ta deina. His "translation" horrendously violates Sophocles' text. It supports and depends upon an "interpretation" that, as almost always in Heidegger, is but a projection of Heidegger's own schemata. It may be true that, by themselves, these schemata can push the often lazy reader to reflect on ancient texts and can "stimulate" her in a fruitful way. In this precise case, however, they lead to an artificial and frail construction that, all the while presenting Sophoclean man as an incarnation of Heideggerian Dasein, is characterized to an incredible and monstrous degree (like everything Heidegger writes about the Greeks) by a systematic ignorance of the city, of politics, of democracy, and of their central position in Greek creation. The inevitable result of this ignorance is obviously a twisted "understanding" of Greek philosophy, which is indissociably connected with the city and with democracy, even when it is hostile to them. Even Plato, and especially Plato, is not only unthinkable and impossible without the democratic city but quite simply incomprehensible as a philosopher without his persistent struggle against democracy. That is something the National-Socialist Heidegger (1933-1945) is neither willing nor able to see.
In his arbitrariness, Heidegger goes so far as to combine an alteration in the text's obvious punctuation with a setting aside of the very words that would show the absurdity of this alteration. Thus, for example, from lines 360-361 of the stasimon from Antigone, pantoporos; aporos ep' ouden erchetai to mellon, "capable of going everywhere, of going through everything, of finding the answers to everything, he advances toward nothing of what is to come without having some resource," he reads—in a shameless violation of the text—pantoporos aporos, ep' ouden erchetai, so as to translate "Everywhere on the road having experience, inexpert with no way out, he gets nowhere." And in order to grant a superficial plausibility to his translation, Heidegger is obliged to omit surreptitiously the words to mellon {the future, what is to come}.