Oedipus Tyrannus
Sophocles
Sophocles the plays and fragments, Part 1: The Oedipus Tyrannus. Jebb, Richard Claverhouse, Sir, translator. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1887.
- To a dread place, dire in men’s ears, dire in their sight.
- Oh horror of darkness that enfolds me, unspeakable visitant,
- resistless, sped by a wind too favorable! Oh, me! and once again, Oh, me! How my soul is pierced by the stab of these goads and by the memory of sorrows!
- No wonder that amidst these woes
- you mourn and bear a double pain.
- Ah, friend, you still are steadfast in your care for me, and still have patience to tend to the blind man! Ah, me!
- Your presence is not hidden from me—no, blind though I am, nevertheless I know your voice full well.
- Man of dread deeds, how could you quench your vision in this way? What divinity urged you on?
- It was Apollo, friends, Apollo who brought these troubles
- to pass, these terrible, terrible troubles. But the hand that struck my eyes was none other than my own, wretched that I am!
- Why should I see, when sight showed me nothing sweet?
- These things were just as you say.
- What, my friends, can I behold anymore, what can I love, what greeting can touch my ear with joy? Hurry, friends,
- lead me from the land, lead me from here, the utterly lost,
- the thrice-accursed, the mortal most hateful to the gods!
- Wretched alike for your fortune and for your understanding of it, would that I had never known you!
- Perish the man, whoever he was, who freed me in the past years from the cruel shackle on my feet—a thankless deed! Had I died then,
- I would not have been so sore a grief to my friends and to my own soul.
- I too would have had it thus.
- In this way I would not have come to shed my father’s blood, or been known among men as the husband of the woman from whom I was born.