•Why it earns a slot
Antigone is the foundational Western drama of conscience against state power, and this 1910 Finnish verse translation by Kaarlo Koskimies — the third edition, revised with scholarly care — made Sophocles' argument about divine versus human law directly accessible to Finnish readers for the first time in their own literary language.
After the brothers Eteocles and Polyneices kill each other fighting over Thebes, the new ruler Creon decrees that Polyneices shall lie unburied as a traitor. Antigone defies the decree, insisting that the gods' unwritten laws of kinship and burial outrank any king's edict, and is condemned to be entombed alive. Her death triggers a chain of suicides — her betrothed Haemon and Creon's wife Eurydice — leaving Creon alone to suffer the consequences of his tyrannical pride.
This distillation is written from the freely available original, which is always the better read when you have the time: gutenberg.org.