Greek Poets On Their Homeland
Rough, but a mother of men, and the sweetest of lands to me.
Homer, Odyssey ix.27.
PSALM AND MOSAICFOR A SPRINGTIME IN ATHENS
Odysseas Elytis, translated by Nanos Valaoritis
Spring violet fragment
Spring down of a dove
Spring multicoloured dust
On the open books and papers
A warm little breeze was blowing
With gupsies it caught up
Like
Kites
In the air
And birds trying out their new rudders
...................................................................
Along a wire that flashed with fire
On a streetcorner with Caryatids
A tram
Screeched by
The sun in the empty terrain scraped with tongs
The nettles and the snail-marked grass....
TEMPTATIONDionysios Solomos, translated by Rae Dalven
Love dances with yellow-haired April;
it is nature's good, sweet season,
and in the swelling shadows enfolding dew and musk
are langorous bird songs yet unheard.
Clear, sweet, graceful waters
pour into the musk-scented abyss,
taking its musk and leaving its freshness,
all revealing the wealth of their source to the sun,
darting here, there, like nightingales.
So too life gushes forth on earth, and sky and wave.
But on the waters of the lake, white and still,
still as far as the eye can see and clear to the depths,
the butterfly which makes its fragrant bed within the heart
of the wild lily, sports with is small strange shadow.
"Lovely dreamer, tell me what you have seen this night?"
"A night full of wonder, a night sown with magic!
No movement on earth or skies or seas,
not even as much as the bee makes near the tiny flower.
Around something motionless, whitening in the lake,
only the full moon moved
and a graceful girl rises clothed in its light."
OUR LANDYannis Ritsos, translated by Edmund Keeley
We climbed the hill to look over our land:
fields poor and few, stones, olive trees.
Vineyards head toward the sea. Beside the plow
a small fire smoulders. We shaped the old man's clothes
into a scarecrow against the ravens. Our days
are making their way toward a little bread and great sunshine.
Under the poplars a straw hat beams.
The rooster on the fence. The cow in yellow.
How did we manage to put our house and our life in order
with a hand made of stone? Up on the lintel
there's soot from the Easter candles, year by year:
tiny black crosses marked there by the dead
returning from the Resurrection Service. This land is much loved
with patience and dignity. Every night, out of the drywell,
the statues emerge cautiously and climb the trees.
LIFE IMMOVABLECostis Palamas, translated by Philip Sherrard
...."In the sun-glad nakedness
of the Athenian day
If you should imagine
Something beast like unclothed,
Something like a leafless
No shade conferring tree,
An unchiselled marble,
A body slender, lean,
Something bare, uncovered,
In the open space
Which but two eyes of flame
Show to be alive;
Something which from the satyrs
Descends, and is wild,
And its voice is silver,
Do not flee; it is I,
The satyr. Like the olive tree
I am rooted here,
And with my pipe's refrain
I make the breezes faint.
I play and see! there mate,
Worship and are worshipped,
I play and see! there dance
Man, element,beast."
MYTHICAL STORY (MYTHISTORHMA)
George Seferis, translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard
Our country is enclosed, all mountains
which have the low sky for a roof day and night.
We have no rivers, we have no wells, we have no springs,
only a few cisterns--and these empty--which echo and which we worship.
A sound stagnant, hollow, the same as our loneliness
the same as our love, the same as our bodies.
We find it strange that once we were able to build
our houses, huts, and sheepfolds.
And our marriages, the cool coronals and the fingers
become enigmas inexplicable to our soul.
How were our children born, how did they grow?
Our country is enclosed. The two black
Symplegades enclose it. When we go down
to the harbours on Sunday to breath
we see, alight in the sunset,
the broken timbers of voyages unfinished
bodies that no longer know how to love.
Page Design, Poets' Portraits, Artwork by Anna
Mavromatis,
Copyright � 1996 . All rights reserved.
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