Translations from The Colosian

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During the years when the first starships were crawling out from Earth, I sat one night in an open-air theater under strange constellations, watching a performance of Antigone?

The title was different, of course. And the characters had different names. I didn’t understand the language, the playwright was somebody named Tyr, and Creon had fangs. For that matter, so did Antigone, and the guy sitting immediately to my right. But you can’t miss the stark cadence of that desperate drama. I'd have known it in Swahili. The old passions don’t change: even there, on that far world, where the Milky Way is only a point of light visible on clear nights; even there, reflected on the faces of a species that would have sent those early Hellenic audiences screaming into the woods, I knew them. Inexorably, while Harvey Klein and I watched through the narrow slits of our masks, the tragedy played itself out. And if I’d had any doubts about the nature of the creatures among whom I was spending the evening, they dissipated during the performance. The spectators held their breath in the right places, and gasped and trembled on cue. When it was over, they filed out thoroughly subdued, some surreptitiously wiping their eyes. They had been a damned good audience, and I admired them, fangs, fur, snouts, and all.

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