Aeschylus

from the Agamemnon

WATCHMAN : I beg the gods to deliver me at last
from this hard watch I've kept now for a year
upon the palace roof of the Atreidae
dog-like, snout to paws, night after long
night, studying the congress of the stars,
the unignorable bright potentates
that bring down through the night sky to us here
below, the summer now, and now the winter,
eternal even as they wane and rise.

And here I am still watching for the sign,
the torch flame, flickering news from Troy,
the bright flare of her capture. These are my orders
straight from a woman's hope-stiffened heart that urges
like a man.
My bed is hard with restlessness
by night, and damp with dew by morning, and
no dream or sleep attends it, only fear,
fear that I might sleep, that my eyes be drawn
down into sleep, as if sleep were a sickness
I could cure by singing or humming, as I do,
from time to time, some little tune or other,
and yet the more I sing, the more I weep,
mourning out loud the troubles of this house
that excellence no longer orders now.
Come soon, deliverance from this weight of watching,
Come fire out of black night flashing toward me
the happy news I'm ever watching for.




Translated from the Greek by Alan Shapiro