Free Oedipus the King by Sophocles, Evangelinus Apostolides Sophocles

land,
he towered against its threat.
I've called you my king since that time,
1380 honoring you mightily, my Oedipus,
who wield the might of Thebes.
But now!nobody's story
has the sorrow of yours.
O my Oedipus, this is your fame:
the welcome of one harbor was enough
for you, both child and father, when your plow
drove through the room where women love.
How can the furrow your father plowed
not have screamed before now, at you, doomed man?
1390 Time, who sees all, caught you
living a life you never willed.
Time damns this marriage which is
no marriage, where the fathered child
fathered children himself.
O son of Laius, I wish
I'd never seen you. I fill my lungs
to cry with all my power,
to speak the truth in my heart:
you gave me once new breath,
1400 Oedipus, but now you pour
darkness through my eyes.
(Enter Servant from the palace.)
SERVANT Masters, always the most honored men in our land,
what crushing deeds you will see and hear!
whose sorrow you must bear, if you still feel
a born Theban's love for the House of Labdacus.
I don't think rivers could wash the evil
out of this house, not the Danube or the Phasis,

     

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it hides so much suffering, which is now
coming to light. But what happened inside
1410 was not involuntary evil, it was willed.
The griefs that hurt us worst are those
we think we've chosen for ourselves.
LEADER What we already knew made us suffer.
Do you want to add more?
SERVANT It is brief news to give or hear.
Our royal lady Jocasta's dead.
LEADER That pitiable woman. How did she die?
SERVANT She killed herself. You will be spared the worst
because you weren't there to see it.
1420 But you will hear exactly as I can
tell it, what that wretched woman suffered.
She came raging through the courtyard
straight for her marriage bed, the fists
of both her hands clenched in her hair.
Once in, she slammed the doors shut, calling out
to Laius, so long dead, remembering
the living seed of long ago, who killed Laius,
the mother living on to breed with her son
more ruined children.
1430 She grieved for the bed
where she had loved, and given birth
to all those doubled lives
husband fathered by husband,
children sired by her child.
From here on I don't know how she died,
because Oedipus burst in shouting,
taking our eyes from her misery.
We watched him, stunned, as he plowed through us
feverishly asking each man for his spear,
1440 demanding his wife who was not a wife,
but the twice-mothering earth
out of whom he and his children came.
He was raving, but some divine hand
drove him toward his wifenone of us near him did.
With a savage yell, as though guided there,
he lunged at the double doors, and wrenching
hollow bolts from their sockets,
he broke through into the room. There we saw her,
the woman above us, hanging by her neck,

     

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1450 twisting there in a noose of tangled cords.
He saw her, anguish roaring from deep inside him,
he reached and loosened the noose that held her.
When the poor lifeless woman was laid on the ground,
this was the terror we saw now: he pulled
the long pins of hammered gold from her gown,
these pins he raised and punched into his eyes
back through the sockets, shouting these words:
''Eyes, now you will never see
the evil I suffered and the evil I caused.
1460 Now you will see blackness! Not those lives
you should never have seen, not those yearned-for
faces you so long failed to know."
While he sang these tortured words,
not once, but many times his raised hands
struck his eyes. And the blood kept coming,
drenching his beard and cheeks, not a few wet drops
a black storm of bloody hail lashed his face.
What this man and this woman did
broke so much evil loose, that evil joins
1470 the whole of both their lives in grief.
The happiness they once knew was real
but now that happiness is ruin,
screaming, death, disgrace. Each misery
we have a name for has come here.
LEADER Has his grief eased at all?
SERVANT He shouts for someone to open the doorbolts:
"Show this