« Let me share with you the problem of untranslatability.
At line 943 of this play Antigone utters her final words as a living person and exits to her death. She has just sung her own funeral dirge, unusual girl that she is, and the dirge ends with her summary statement of what she did wrong, the reason why she is condemned to die. […]
“I was caught in an act of perfect piety.”
Her wording [eusebia] derives from Greek root seb-, which refers to the awe that radiates from gods to humans and is given back as worship.
Everything related to this root has fear in it. But eusebia is a fear that moves as devotion—a striving out of this world into another, and out of another world into this. A kind of permanent elsewhere located in human beings.
Now consider the English word “piety”. […] Our pieties are more a matter of protocol than dread. And where eusebia implies ritual action, “piety” represents a mood rather than a pressure to act.
Nonetheless, there we are. I could not find, I do not know, a different or a better translation. The actor who speaks line 943 on stage will evoke the permanent elsewhere of our longing for the love of gods by drawing it up from her own voice and being. »
— Anne Carson, translator’s note to Sophocles’ Antigone