Editor's note:
The following is the opening of Ted Hughes’s translation of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, which he completed before his death on October 29.
Watchman:
You Gods in Heaven—
You have watched me here on this tower
All night, every night for twelve months
Thirteen moons—
Tethered on the roof of this palace
Like a dog.
It is time to release me.
I’ve stared long enough into this darkness
For what never emerges.
I’m tired of the constellations—
That glittering parade of lofty rulers
Night after night a little bit earlier
Withholding the thing I wait for—
Slow as torture.
And the moon, coming and going—
Wearisome, like watching the sea
From a death-bed. Like watching the tide
In its prison yard, with its two turns
In out in out.
I’m sick of the heavens, sick of the darkness.
The one light I wait for never comes.
Maybe it never will come—
A beacon-flare that leaps from peak to peak
Bringing the news from Troy—
“Victory! After ten years, Victory!”
The one word that Clytemnestra prays for.
Queen Clytemnestra—who wears
A man’s heart in a woman’s breast,
A man’s dreadful will in the scabbard of her body
Like a polished blade. A hidden blade.
Clytemnestra reigns over fear.
I get up sodden with dew.
I walk about, to shift my aches.
I lie down—the aches harden worse,
No dreams. No sleep. Only fear—
Fear like a solid lump of indigestion
Here, high in my belly—a seething.
Singing’s good for fear
But when I try to sing—weeping comes.
I weep. There’s no keeping it down.
Everything’s changed in this palace.
The old days,
The rightful King, order, safety, splendor
A splendor that lifted the heart—
All gone.
You Gods
Release me.
Let that flame come leaping out of the East
To release me.
This Issue
December 3, 1998