ANTIGONE 4

 

Creon:

Can’t you see?

If a man could wail his own dirge before he dies,

he’d never finish.

 

To the guards: Take her away, quickly!

Wall her up in the tomb, you have your orders.

Abandon her there, alone, and let her choose

death or a buried life with a good roof for shelter.

As for myself, my hands are clean. This young girl–

dead or alive, she will be stripped off her rights,

her stranger’s rights, here in the world above.

 

Antigone:

O tomb, my bridal-bed–my house, my prison

cut in the hollow rock, my everlasting watch!

I’ll soon be there, soon embrace my own,

the great growing family of our dead

Persephone has received among her ghosts.

 

I,

the last of them all, the most reviled by far,

go down before my destined time’s run out.

But still I go, cherishing one good hope:

my arrival may be dear to father,

dear to you, my mother,

dear to you, my loving brother, Eteocles–

When you died I washed you with my hands,

I dressed you all, I poured the sacred cups

across your tombs. But now, Polynices,

because I laid your body out as well,

this, this is my reward. Nevertheless

I honored you–the decent will admit it–

well and wisely too.

 

Never, I tell you.

if I had been the mother of children

or if my husband died, exposed and rotting–

I’d never have taken this ordeal upon myself,

never defied our people’s will. What law,

you ask, do I satisfy with what I say?

A husband dead, there might have been another.

A child by another too, if I had lost the first.

But mother and father both lost in the halls of Death,

no brother could ever spring to light again.

For this law alone I held you first in honor.

For this, Creon, the king, judges me a criminal

guilty of dreadful outrage, my dear brother!

And now he leads me off, a captive in his hands,

with no part in the bridal-song, the bridal-bed,

denied all the joys of marriage, raising children–

deserted so by loved ones, struck by fate,

I descend alive to the caverns of the dead.

What law of the mighty gods have I transgressed?

Why look to the heavens any more, tormented as I am?

Whom to call, what comrades now? Just think,

my reverence only brands me for irreverence!

Very well: if this is the pleasure of the gods,

once I suffer I will know that I was wrong.

But if these men are wrong, let them suffer

nothing worse than they mete out to me–

these masters of injustice!