Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Gjertrud Schnackenberg was born in Tacoma, Washington, in 1953. Her awards include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rome Prize in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the American Academy in Berlin, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She has been a Christensen Visiting Fellow at St. Catherine's College, Oxford, and a Visiting Scholar at the Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanites. The Throne of Labdacus received the 2001 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry, and Heavenly Questions received the 2011 Griffin International Prize for Poetry.

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The Throne of Labdacus

Farrar Straus Giroux

Chapter One

THE GOD
TUNES THE
STRINGS

The first warning passing through Thebes?
As small a sound

As a housefly alighting from Persia
And stamping its foot on a mound

Where the palace once was;
As small as a moth chewing thread

In the tyrant's robe;
As small as the cresting of red

In the rim of an injured eye; as small
As the sound of a human conceived?

The god in Delphi,
Mouthing the words;

Then the god begins tuning the strings
With the squeak of the wooden pegs

Rotating in their holes,
As if he were setting the tragic text

To the music of houseflies.
A resinous skreak being dragged

Through too-small peg holes,
A sound that signifies

The god's unwillingness to speak;
Recalcitrance; unease the god can't quell

At the first oracle: Flee from birth. At which a string
Shudders inaudibly, a premonition

That even the god will be frightened, leaning above
The premiere of Oedipus,

The god frightened
By the self-blinding?and a story,

The meaning of which nobody knows,
Or whose meaning is that nobody knows,

Though once upon a time
The god of poetry

Told the whole story of Oedipus
In one flashing sentence,

In the time it takes for the heart to beat once?
The prophecy he gave to Oedipus

While Oedipus gazed at the god
With uninjured eyes?

A story like a Sphinx-dictated riddle
Even the god can't solve,

A story sent to the god
By Faceless Necessity

Who had held a clay tablet up
To the bandaged eyes

Of a Bound Man
Playing his harp with his feet,

The most archaic tablet
Merely a copy of a still more archaic tablet,

The long-broken, unrecoverable original
First sent to him, the earliest tablet

With a story about a nameless foundling
Lost on the mountainside of his own life,

Written, not in Greek, but in the language
Of the gods,

Continues...

Excerpted from The Throne of Labdacusby Gjertrud Schnackenberg Copyright © 2001 by Gjertrud Schnackenberg. Excerpted by permission.
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