Electra, Two Stasimons

Sophocles

Photograph by Laura Blight

Blackbook explication of the first stasimon of Sophocles’ Electra drafted in Krink K-70 in Reggio Emilia


Into the orchard (rhubarb) I am led by Ludovica

as an explanation that they are dust and
yet Vivian (childhood friend) held a code

we will buy a lion that we will dress and sell to a child
it demands to be fed with live horses

sugar spider angels but at least she backed me

pink light (so that the whole orchard got one light pink touch)

many fall into the hub trap
Ludovica balances on a curb and sang

and then somebody made that kind of drum sound

the revolution, the detailed aperçus
the rhubarb around us battered by drought

Ludovica drawing up to the holes in the plastic

he does not move forward or backward only OUTSIDE


*

Starling, starling, little repo pigeon
let’s hammer hammer or do a night drunk on the beach

far away from the image of everyone holding hands to reduce their agitation
everyone dispiritedly reminded of their strawberry-red aprons
their short hair cut inaccurately in the dispirited agitation of the dry season

let’s you and I attach ourselves to the strength in your face

when I was little I spent thirty years
collecting five cards expressive of just such strength of face


*

While holding my breath I’ve forgotten my promises
 
what are they doing in there
hammer hammer hammer hammer

they can slip into my feet
inhale into the ceiling and repeat this Nikola

Nikola I will not go out into the aisles

Ludovica I will not go out into the aisles


Blackbook explication of the third stasimon of Sophocles’ Electra drafted in Krink K-70 in Reggio Emilia


Vivian sleeping in the white sheets at the foot and
I step in it, my name column,
this time the elevator just goes back and forth between XX and XX forever,
either way, hiding their towel
with their towel Vivian cards the generator. I fill in
renewing their promise for an event that involves me
or a white-collar criminal the case built on an upper layer and a lower layer,
I’m at a loss how to use which, costume switch,
hold the racket as close as possible to the horizontal
one white sheep meets another and they seem to know who
holds the card. Gaucho, chambermaid, scam involving access to feces


*

Ludovica sleeping in the white sheets at the foot and
let’s do it later, secretly depose,
the two fuse together and we’re able to meet again
a place, ein Ort, oxy, also a fort
there is a flag we strip down because we have an interview and forgot
we’ll do the first interview by you drop your bill from your breast pocket
can’t find the note, crash to the other side,
Ludovica flat out won’t revoke the clause
cables serve the clause, the first hurdle is to follow them in reverse
posing as children mutely cross at contrarian parents
we smash and grab transparent partitions

translated from the Ancient Greek by Fortunato Salazar

For these versions of the stasimons, I owe a debt of gratitude to Christina Horst Roseman and her brilliant and entrancing masterwork, Pytheas of Massalia: On the Ocean, which so entranced me in the summer and fall of 2019 that—and another thanks is due here, to Hakai Magazine—in December I traveled to the Norwegian island tentatively identified as the actual Thule, the land at the ends of the Earth that the Greek explorer Pytheas discovered in the fourth century B.C.E., and from there I headed south to Marseille (birthplace of Pytheas) and then hopped east, following another Pythean route, to spend a few weeks with relatives outside Modena, which is where, in late December and early January, working from the extremely packable Teubner Sophocles—the only Greek text I’d brought along other than the fragments in Roseman—I drafted a batch of Electra explications and gave them their titles before flying back to Los Angeles on January 15.

Sophocles (c. 496–406 B.C.E.) was born in Kolonos, a village near Athens, to a wealthy armour manufacturer. When he was sixteen, he apparently led the choral dance in celebration around the trophy set up to commemorate the Greek victory at the Battle of Salamis, in which the fleet of the Persian Shahanshah Xerxes I was destroyed. He is supposed to have first competed in the tragic contest at the city Dionysia of 468 B.C.E., winning first prize and apparently defeating the established master Aeschylus, who left in high dudgeon to Sicily (though he continued to compete until his death in 456/5 B.C.E.). Sophocles was still competing as late as 406 B.C.E., when he brought out his chorus in mourning attire to mark the death the previous year of his other great rival Euripides. He himself died later the same year, just two years before Athens’ final defeat in the Peloponnesian War.

Fortunato Salazar lives in West Hollywood, CA, and Berlin, Germany. Recent translations are at The Brooklyn Rail/InTranslation and The Spectacle, with other recent writing at The Atlantic, Conjunctions, Tin House, PEN America, and elsewhere.