Free The Physics of Sorrow by Translated from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel Georgi Gospodinov Page A

array.
    Itys (Ityl)—the young son of the Thracian king Tereus, killed by his mother and aunt and served up as a meal to the unsuspecting father. Ovid recounts this in the sixth book of his Metamorphoses in lurid detail: the child trustingly embracing the murderess, the blow of thesword, some of the warm body boiled up in pots, other parts roasted on hissing spits . . . And in the end the feasting Tereus “gorged himself with flesh of his own flesh.”
    There’s more . . . The story of the child Pelops, Tantalus’s son, who was hacked to pieces by his father, stewed up, and offered to the gods. And only grief-stricken Demeter ate part of his shoulder in her melancholy haze.
    Here, too, figures that murky story with Lycaon, the king of Arcadia, who served up his grandson Arcas to Zeus in order to test him.
    You won’t find the youths and maidens devoured by the Minotaur in this list—I don’t believe in that part of the myth. Besides, bulls are herbivores.
    P. S.
    And one wacky echo in modern times.
    It’s an ordinary baking pan, large, with indelible traces of endless use. The rice has been washed and lightly steamed, amid the white—little balls of black pepper. You can clearly see that the stove has been switched on, the oven door is open, and two hands are carrying the tray toward it. There’s just one unusual detail—that’s no chicken or turkey on top of the rice, but a baby, naked and alive. I almost said raw. It’s lying on its back, its arms and legs in the air. It is clearly only a few days old and weighs no more than a middling turkey.
    I own this photo (black and white) and the story, bought as a package deal. The woman who received this photo in the mail just about fainted. “Here is your new grandson. Isn’t he sweet?” Theletter was from her daughter in Canada, who had sent the first photo of the long-awaited baby. Back when she was little, they used to teasingly tell her: “you’re so sweet, I’m going to eat you up. With rice, with rice . . .” It was a family saying. And now, twenty years later, the daughter had decided to literalize the joke.
    A myth, deboned, mocked, yet still scary.
    T HE V OICE OF THE M INOTAUR
    The defendant has the floor.
    Silence.
    Does the defendant have anything to say in his own defense, or does he prefer to remain silent?
    The Minotaur’s voice has not been preserved anywhere in all of recorded antiquity. He doesn’t speak, others speak for him. There where everything animate and inanimate refuses to shut up, where the voices of gods and mere mortals, of wood nymphs and heroes, of crafty Odysseuses and naïve Cyclops are constantly swarming, where even the despised Centaurs have the right to speak, only one remains silent. The Minotaur. No voice, no sound, no whimper or threat, nothing anywhere. Not even in the hexameter of Homer, that Minotaur among poets, who in the long nights of his blindness wandered through the labyrinths of history. Nor in Ovid, the exile, who knew very well the fate of an outcast, nor in Vergil, nor in Pliny the Elder, nor in Aeschylus, Euripides, or Sophocles . . . no one gives voice to, no one preserves the voice of the Minotaur. It’s easy to feel sorry for Icarus, it’s easy to sympathize with Theseus, with Ariadne, even with old King Minos . . . No one pities the Minotaur.
    Does the defendant have anything to say? Otherwise . . .
    He does. Why shouldn’t he be worthy of the heroic hexameter?
    T HE M INOTAUR’S S PEECH IN H IS O WN D EFENSE ( A FRAGMENT )
            Some words I have for you o’er which so long I’ve mused
            In night’s embrace, O Minos, Hades’ judge most cruel
            My tongue has longed to say just once: O father mine!
            Yet I discern your scorn and swallow back my cries .
            Forsooth! The truth outshines your deepest, darkest fears
            Your blood I share—a freak by birth, my lineage’s clear .
            Your father’s likeness