Alcestis
Euripides
Euripides. The Plays of Euripides, Translated into English Prose from the Text of Paley. Vol. I. Coleridge, Edward P., translator. London: George Bell and Sons, 1906.
- Nevermore to see thy dear wife face to face is grief indeed.
- Thy words have probed the sore place in my heart. What greater grief can come to man
- than the loss of a faithful wife? Would I had never married or shared with her my home! I envy those ’mongst men who have nor wife nor child. Theirs is but one life; to grieve for that is no excessive burden;
- but to see children fall ill and bridal beds emptied by death’s ravages is too much to bear, when one might go through life without wife or child.
- A fate we cannot cope with is come upon us.
- Woe is me!
- But thou to sorrow settest no limit.
- Ah! ah!
- ’Tis hard to bear, but still—
- Woe is me!
- Thou art not the first to lose—
- O! woe is me!
- A wife; misfortune takes a different shape for every man she plagues.
- O the weary sorrow! O the grief for dear ones dead and gone! Why didst thou hinder me from plung-ing into the gaping grave, there to lay me down and die with her, my peerless bride?
- Then would Hades for that one have gotten these two faithful souls at once, crossing the nether lake together.
- I had a kinsman once, within whose home died
- his only son, worthy of a father’s tears; yet in spite of that he bore his grief resignedly, childless though he was, his hair already turning grey, himself far on in years, upon
- life’s downward track.
- O house of mine, how can I enter thee? how can I live here, now that fortune turns against me? Ah me! How wide the gulf ’twixt then and now!
- Then with torches cut from Pelion’s pines, with marriage hymns I entered in, holding my dear wife’s hand; and at our back a crowd of friends with cheerful cries, singing the happy lot of my dead wife and me,