ANTÍGONA:
The snake has only one head, Creonte.
My sister Ismene is blameless. Her boldest thoughts
don’t go past
her shy gaze.
You say I broke your law.
Do you, a mortal, expect to prevail
over the unwritten but unbreakable laws
of the gods?
They alone hold power over the bodies of the dead.
Remember: they alone.
I know it well,
Polinices came to ravage our country and Etéocles
defended it.
But now, dead, Hades grants them equal rights.
As you see,
I’ve preferred to obey the gods not your arrogant
whim.
To die for such a cause is profit, and it doesn’t hurt me.
That my own mother’s son remained unburied
would hurt me. Keep calling him an enemy
until your last day,
I was born to love, not to share hatred.
Perhaps you might think there’s a din of madness in my words,
but no, the tune is in your ears.
Do you know that many Thebans would raise these same
words,
would cry them loudly through streets and squares,
if fear were not shutting their mouths?
May the gods will, Creonte,
that the privilege to dispense orders with impunity as it
pleases you
does not last long,
and bring a quick end to the pleasure you take in hearing
only the multitudinous,
indignant
silence.
*
XII
NARRADORA:
We should not assume much harshness in the heart of the king.
Surely he defeated countless doubts before sanctioning
the young woman,
who vowed love to his son
and is so near of blood.
Antígona, what a beautiful and arrogant prey you are! The escort
of sentinels
does not trouble your steady and magnificent
gait.
You go looking without longing
at faces in the windows, trees, lanes, a glister of sun
in a latch, and a thousand other details that for you are final.
They don’t take you to the gallows, to a swift coming end like the flight
of an arrow or the blow of an axe, no:
Creonte has appointed a death for the memory of all,
a death
people will comment on like this:
If he punishes his kin thus, what should other foes
expect?
You go, Antígona, to a death longer and more perverse.
Amid the rocks in the mountain
there are deep and capricious caves. Into one of them you’ll be
cast
and shut with wide boards.
It will be your prison
while endless hours prolong your hunger and thirst and
darkness,
then it will be a secret and immense tomb, for not only the cave
will harbor you,
but the entire mountain.
*
XIII
ANTÍGONA:
Darkness splits my body from its reality.
I am
only when I feel my skin or touch the tough stone of the cavern.
I don’t know if I speak when I speak, perhaps these words
only hover
mute inside my head.
This
and death
I should pay in these times of perverse turmoils.
Piety, which of old was virtue, now condemns me
and extends the woes of my family.
The old men say that an ancient curse weighed upon my father
and mother,
and misfortunes, like the waves of the sea, will continue to break
anew, from one generation to the other.
And then, from here, though you can’t hear me, old men, I
remind you
of a law from Olympus
which says
that nothing great sets foot in the life of men
without a curse.
If peace is that great thing, I am the curse, the wayward wave
breaking and dying from inside this cavern.
I’m sorry for you, beloved Hemón. We were a woman
and a man dreaming
of bridal ceremonies, of banquets, and a bed.
Someone else will be my groom now, he will come from darkness,
and I will feast on this air,
and I’ll sleep on this stone—on that last day, it’ll seem to me
of feathers.
*
XIV
NARRADORA:
Since the crack of dawn
Hemón drifts, back and forth
going nowhere,
stopping only to look at the mountain where Antígona
slowly burns.
What has happened in my country
that eyes so young look with so much sorrow?
Last night Hemón had an imprudent dream:
He saw himself dead in a trice,
by a golden arrow fired from a sympathetic
god,
and thus pierced and finished
he entered the cave in dreams, to look among the shadows
for the betrothed shadow of his lover.
Dawn’s light made him realize he was dreaming, and he hated the light.
He stood up and walked adrift all the same
to tread on grass, on stone, or gravel.
A question ripened in his mind as he wandered:
How far should the love for a father go? Should we pay
that debt of birth
even with the silent acceptance of his injustice?
Hemón knows it’s a rebellious question, but he carries it in his gait
as he walks up to Creonte.
HEMÓN:
Being the son of a strongman is very strange.
I hear you saying the domestic words of a father
together with orders and laws of a king.
And I take it as a privilege not seeing you
like the high ruler who intimidates others.
I ask your permission to use this privilege
and tell you what I hear on the streets, among the shadows:
all the city cries for Antígona.
The modest citizens denounce the outrageous death
you are giving her. They say:
“Isn’t she, who didn’t stand for her brother being left
to the dogs,
more worthy of praise than punishment?”
Listen to them, father.
I should want for you a faultless wisdom, but
the gods
have not yet created such a man.
Don’t copy the hubristic man of the ten thousand talents
who when cracked
was vacuous.
Listen to the modest citizens, father.
Don’t think learning from them is a humiliation
Don’t make laws from your sole judgement, because a fatherland
cannot belong to a single man alone.
Listen to the gods as well. Look at the night
—in the starry silence
they are asking you not to forget or thrash their rights
upon the dead.
Listen to them all, father, and yield,
and revoke the cruel order, so that we can all celebrate peace,
and Antígona the light.
*
XV
NARRADORA:
The lively goats jump on the rocks
and mate,
unmindful that the cave inside the womb
of the sunlit mountain
is a perpetual prison, and tomb, and marriage bed.
The sacred eye of daylight does not penetrate that far
nor the cries of friends and relatives. In that silence,
death, laborious, enfolds the girl
in a dense cocoon of shadows.
ANTÍGONA:
I wanted to be the just gravedigger,
and to be put in a grave is the prize I’ve received.
Dear father,
dear mother,
brothers, Etéocles and Polinices, I can already feel the touch
of your hands,
you stretch them out from the other world.
I’ll die without Hymeneal songs
or the warmth of a husband,
never raising children. I’ve been but a daughter and a pleasing
sister,
receive me as such.
Mine is a curious death. My young body
does not suffer a fatal or cruel disease,
nor do I await the impossible blow of a blind sword
to kill me spattering my blood.
I waste away slowly: at the same time
I consume life,
it enters me
and grows
the sweet abandonment we call death.
*
XVI
NARRADORA:
A stranger passing by Thebes
would see a town in order, a king ruling
and a people who work calmly.
He would not see the turbulence under the still water.
Who would tell him
that a young woman dies for her piety?
Who would inform him
that the young man who leaves the palace full of anger would peel off his skin,
if he could thus cease from being the son of the king?
And now we must suspect the secret torrents
will be worse,
for here comes Tiresias, the old seer: a bad sign
is his heavy walking, not with age but the weight
of his prophecies.
The gods gifted Tiresias with a paradox:
they made him blind so that he could see farther,
and thus he goes, entrusting his steps to a guide, towards Creonte.
TIRESIAS:
You could swear, king, that your throne stands on a vast pedestal
of marble.
I see it on the edge of an abyss.
Listen:
Things are happening that point to fear.
The thousand birds of my tree, joyfull birds,
were driven off by large raptors full of anger
who turned the tree into a battleground
where they brandished their claws to cruelly bleed one another.
As I couldn’t understand that violence, perhaps
an omen of a future one,
I rushed to offer sacrifices on the altar. I placed the customary offerings
on the fire, fresh humerus of sheep and ox, and
small gallbladders
everything anointed with fat as to fuel the fire,
but, oh, the fire did not raise its tongues
and the melted fat dripped over the ember making a great smoke
and the bile
sprinkled the dark, poisonous air.
Tell me, Creonte, why did the gods reject my sacrifice?
And it is the same on all the altars, house after house
like a plague. Birds and dogs approach the fires,
as if following an order,
and pack them with scraps from Polinices’ corpse.
Is my art of prophecy really necessary to interpret such
signs?
You defied the gods, but all Thebes pays for your insolence.
I take my leave asking you to stop pricking the corpse.
Bury it.
Let it be said you had the courage to rectify your mistake,
not that you were brave to kill a man already dead.
*
XVII
NARRADORA:
No one around. Creonte sits alone in the center
of the great hall.
He looks at himself in the mirror
and sees a vexed man drinking wine.
And no one around.
The wine comes from the royal vines,
but his thoughts fall into the glass and distort the drink.
And no one around.
CREONTE:
Who is not against me?
Hemón? My son, under the yoke of a woman?
Tiresias? The old seer, who blames me for the dead
altars,
unaware that the gods, fully sated, don’t want offerings
from cowards?
Who’s not shooting arrows at me?
Who wouldn’t trade me, were there a buyer?
But I’ll say it once again: No one
will bury Polinices under the earth,
not even if the eagles
tear apart his corpse and carry the scraps all the way up to the very throne of
Zeus.
*
XVIII
NARRADORA:
Tiresias, the old man with dead eyes,
turns his whole body into an enormous eye, to see not the things
of today
but tomorrow’s.
Last night he could not enter into sleep
only seeing the calamities
that time hastens to Thebes.
As soon as he felt the morning sun on his old skin,
he placed his hand on the guide’s shoulder
and set off onto the royal road. He carries premonitions,
awful deeds
he can’t contain in his mouth anymore.
TIRESIAS:
I’ve come to you once more, Creonte, to ask
for your humble silence,
that you hear how they come,
the Furies from Hades
and from the gods. They are closing in,
swift and vengeful, and you are the inescapable prey.
You, believing your swollen power enough to rule
in other realms,
retain Polinices in the world below,
when it belongs
like all dead, to the world above.
And playing the opposite game,
you keep Antígona in a cavern that is a dead person’s tomb
while she, though fainting, is still alive.
Last night, I received visions of your downfall. I tried
driving them away by moistening my forehead with fresh water,
but they came back, over and over. I saw
the terrible requital of the gods: of all men, they took
one born from your own being, the dearest.
Even now as I speak
I can smell a long scent of blood, coming ahead of time, maybe from
tomorrow.
Prevent, Creonte, the coming flight of the Furies, make them cease
their retaliation
and go back to their worlds. Let go of your blindness
—it’s worse than mine, not of flesh but
of arrogance—
and listen:
you know advice is greater when it averts the worst
of evils
and this counsel I’m lending you is among the greatest: bury the dead man
and free his faithful sister, without delay,
for every hour
the blood coming to you smells closer.
*
XIX
NARRADORA:
There is no worse torture than one’s own imagination,
and Antígona does not fade in my mind.
I see her waiting for an impossible drop of water to form
on the arid rock
and fall in her thirsty mouth,
or groping in that forbidding world for a bitter green
for her infinite hunger,
or muttering slow words, that her own voice
may accompany her,
while her body falls into a lethargy
folding forward like a wax figurine.
ANTÍGONA:
(She speaks absent-mindedly and plays with a silk ribbon she’s loosened from her waist twisting and untwisting it around her arm.)
I dreamed of dawn. How absurd,
I dreamed of dawn.
Perhaps dawn’s light falls on top of the mountain,
though it wouldn’t have the luminous quality of my dream.
The light I saw was different,
I wanted to enter it and dissolve in its nimble quality.
Oh, if only that were the road to step into Hades, and I
were a sudden light, a body withdrawn from this torture
long and perverse.
Oh, if only I could take that road, that quick gate, that short path.
*
XX
NARRADORA:
Early morning
the royal trumpets called the population to the gates
of the palace,
but the Thebans, once an all-obeying people, today
have come carrying reproach. They’ll cry out
that their altars remain useless, the fires
quenched
by Polinices’ scraps.
But Creonte has surprised them. He came out to the atrium
with a different countenance. No one knows if moved by reason or fear,
but he seems like a fisherman who loosened a hundred
knots
all night
and the next morning, satisfied and peaceful looks at his smooth rope.
A hundred knots all night, and no one knows if loosened
by reason or fear.
