EXCERPT FROM

© KONSTANTINOS BOURAS

THE «AFTERWARDS»

OF TRAGEDY

Athens 2000

[a monologue]

SOPHOCLES

ON THE ROOF OF THE WORLD

Because death is only the beginning.

Living an outrageous freedom

I withdrew to live in nests of storks

in quest of the ineffable.

When I awoke I was collecting wedding rings

in the bumps of the streets, among dry leaves.

An African counterfeit ring.

…And the oar dry wood

far from the lapping

of the waves.

The vespers bells are chiming. I like this time of the day when I’m out of the silk sheet of chronotope, a minute, insignificant simulacrum in the color of fire. My descendants took me to church so that I could hear once more the moans of Solomon who’s trying to rinse his sins away in a sea of sounds. I am ahead of time. My contemporaries extolled me. They placed me on the highest point of the stage structure in the theater of Dionysus and forgot me there. But at night someone walks and makes the boards creak. Orestes, Electra, hideous Clitemnestra and Agamemnon who’s swaying in the fatal bathroom like a fish…

One would say all is ready so that everything can start from the beginning again. So Oedipus will set off to Corinth in order to know himself and face his own destiny.

Oedipus. But what is this person whose name I’m using as if it were a mask? Particularly intelligent he is not, really. He can solve the enigma of the Sphinx because it is a simple one, for dim-witted guys. But he is the only one who dares manage his own freedom the way he can. Fear of freedom. Is this the reason why we go to the theater? To see what happens to those who lose themselves and give up to the flow of life, that will drag them to the great ocean…

©Translation by Mauro Giachetti