Yeah, so feel like I've been translated.  How does this happen that this is just here.  I click on an e-mail and here it is.  Man. 

TheOldMole <[log in to unmask]> wrote: I'm enjoying every post.

Jon Corelis wrote:
> 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.
>
>
>   

-- 
Tad Richards
http://www.opus40.org/tadrichards/
http://opusforty.blogspot.com/


       
---------------------------------
Yahoo! oneSearch: Finally,  mobile search that gives answers, not web links.