CHORUS: [sings, melody La Comtessa de Dia: A chanter de so qu'eu no volria]
Without my faith in heaven I could not live,
without believing there are gods who care,
who from their far untroubled home still give
some meaning to this pain that everywhere
rules over this uncaring chaos, life;
through all its random wounds the gods must weave
some pattern we may see if we believe.
I will not beg the gods for wealth or fame,
but for a heart unstained by bitterness;
to live unthreatened by the praise or blame
which both lead mighty houses to distress,
to bring to each day's dawning such a mind
as will enable me to live that day,
and let tomorrow bring what grief it may.
Yet how may I keep faith now I have seen
the noblest house of Hellas brought so low?
O mountain meadow cloaked in leafy green,
O Virgin Lady of the Silver Bow
and coastal course-way where you are enshrined,
your most devoted lover will no more
rejoice in beauties of your woods and shore.
No more his chariot wheels will trace the ground
along the endless ocean's fringe of sand;
no more, no more the songful lyre will sound
within his father's hall by his skilled hand,
and girls with secret dreams to be the wife
who teaches such a man what love can be,
are weeping for a dream they'll never see.
O ruined prince, O vanished purity:
how can the gods allow such things to be?
[Enter Old Man]
CHORUS: But here's the aged serving man who left
with Hippolytos. His face reflects disaster.
[enter Old Man]
OLD MAN: My ladies, where's the king? Where can I find
King Theseus? Is he in his palace here?
Please tell me where. I must speak to the king.
[Enter Theseus from the palace]
CHORUS: The king is here, just coming from his palace.
OLD MAN: Your majesty, the news I bring is bad:
bad for you, bad for the citizens
of Athens, bad for all of us in Trozen.
THESEUS: What is it? Does still more catastrophe
renew the anguish of my neighboring towns?
OLD MAN: Hippolytos is gone, or as good as gone:
he sees this light, but his life hangs by a thread.
THESEUS: And how? He can't already have earned revenge
for soiling some other man's spouse, as he soiled his father's.
OLD MAN: No stranger's hand, but his own chariot team
has killed him before he could leave, that, and the curse
you called down on him from your father Poseidon.
THESEUS: O gods! O Lord Poseidon! Then you are
my father: you've granted me my prayer.
How did he fall? What trap did Justice spring
for the beast who dared defile his father's bed?
OLD MAN: We'd gone along the ocean-beaten shore
and stopped to give his mares a combing down,
not a dry eye among us, since we'd heard
our poor young lord had been expelled forever
from country, home, and friends, by your decree.
And then Hippolytos came himself, all tears,
and joined us there, and with him a mournful throng
of friends, retainers, people he'd grown up with,
but he finally braced himself, and in a steady
voice said, "This is pointless. I must obey
my father's command, and all our tears won't change it.
Servants, harness the horses. I have no home."
So all of us hurry then to yoke the team,
and faster than it takes to tell, his mares
were hitched up to the chariot where he stood
and he snatches up the reins and jumps right in
landing instinctively in a driver's stance;
and the last thing that he does before departing
is to look up at the brightness of the sky
and pray, "May Zeus the Lord of Justice blast
and wither my life if I'm an evil man,
and may he lead my father to the truth
after I'm dead, if not while I still live."
Then he whips up the horses, all at once.
The chariot leapt, we servants followed along,
the horses' harness clinking at our shoulders,
and we started down the road towards Epidaurus.
We were striking out into the desert scrub
across the border, where the track turns in
to skirt the cliffs that fringe the Saronic sea,
when a huge rumbling roar, like Zeus's thunder,
but underground, resounds in our very bones.
The horses' ears and heads strain toward the sky,
and an uncontrollable panic takes us all,
so horrible was that sound. And we look back
to the ocean-beaten coast, and what we see
goes past all telling: a wave reared up to heaven,
so tall it blots the coastline from our eyes
and covers the cliff-bound headland with its surge.
It swelled and swelled more hugely, then it crashed,
spewing up towering columns of ocean foam,
as it runs toward the chariot on the shore.
And then from out of this huge, this monstrous tide,
there came a huge, a monstrous bull; its bellowing
roar made all the land around us shake
and left us numb with terror standing there
to see a sight too terrible to look at.
Our master's horses bolt, but instantly
he leans his whole body back on the reins
to curb them in – he surely knew his horses –
like a man strains at oar aboard a ship.
But the horses champ down on their steel-forged bits
and carry him helplessly along: their driver,
harness, chariot might as well be air
for all they heeded them. And when he tries
to steer them desperately to softer ground,
that bull appears in front and heads them off,
making the chariot team veer off in panic,
but when they blindly rush towards the rocks,
it herds them silently along that course,
until it trips them up and makes them stumble,
crashing the chariot wheels against the stones,
and then the chariot explodes in parts:
wheels, axles, linchpins tossed high in a whirl,
and our master's broken arms and legs get tangled
in the reins that wrap him round too tight to move.
His skull gets smashed against the rocks, his flesh
is scoured along his body, and he screams,
"I fed you in my stables with my own hands,
and you've destroyed me. O my father's curse!
Can't any of you save a man worth saving?"
I wish we could have. We were all too slow.
When finally, god knows how, he'd worked himself
free of the tangled reins, he fell to earth,
the breath of life poised hesitant on his lips.
The horses and that horrid monstrous bull
had somehow vanished into the stony scrub.
My king, I know I'm just a household slave,
but I'll say this, and I don't care who hears:
I'll never believe your son did what you charged,
not even if every woman in the world
should go and hang herself, and if they first
chopped down whole forests for wood to make the tablets
for writing down their accusations in.
He was sincere, and innocent, and pure.
CHORUS: And now unhappiness has been perfected.
There can be no reversal of this doom.
THESEUS: My hatred for this man prompts satisfaction,
and yet he is my son, a family tie
which reverence demands receive respect.
Between the two, there's nothing I can feel.
OLD MAN: What is your will, my lord? To bring him to you?
Or what do you bid us do with your poor son?
We wait your orders. If you'll take my advice,
you'll show some pity to him in his pain.
THESEUS: Well, bring him here, this villain of denial,
and we'll see for ourselves how he explains
away this manifest punishment from the gods.
CHORUS: [sings, to melody of A Virgen mut groriosa by Alfonso X,
solemnly and rather slowly:]
Aphrodite, born of ocean,
empress over every mind,
power that gives all life its motion,
queen of gods and human kind,
soaring through the heaven's splendor
with your fluttering golden child,
endless source of all the tender
frenzy of the love-beguiled,
you are laughter, love, enjoyer,
you are light and hope and womb,
you are slayer and destroyer,
you are night and death and tomb.
--
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Jon Corelis www.geocities.com/jgcorelis/
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