Greek Poets

Good and Evil

Nanos Valaoritis
Greek
b. 1921

 

The first tree I ever made love to
Took me in its branches with tender care
It hugged me until I could hardly breathe
– Your mother’s milke was not so sweet –
It said in a low rustle after we had finished
I woke up astonished at the clarity of my thought
Exhilarated by a strange feeling of relief

The tree had become a woman
Standing at the foot of my bed
Leafing me with gentle strokes
Pushing her roots over my body
Help Help I cried unable to move as in a nightmare
And then she fell over me
Trying to suck the blood out of my breast
Trying to lap up my body out of a tin plate
Placed in front of a dog’s kennel

I swam desperately trying to get out of reach
Her tongue was getting closer and closer
When a strong breath blew me off the ledge of the plate
I started to fall towards the ground
Which turned out to be her lips
While layers and layers of flesh went past me
And I could read their different shades of meaning
As if they had been the lines of a text

The Day of Easter

In honor of Easter Sunday, we present this work named for the holiday.

Dionysius Solomos
Greek
1798 – 1857

 

The last cool star of dawn was
foretelling the brightest sunshine;
no cloud, no drift of mist was travelling
across any part of the sky.
Coming from there, the breeze
blew so sweetly across the face,
so gently, that it seemed
to whisper to the depths of the heart:
‘Life is sweet and death is darkness.’

‘Christ is Risen!’ Young and old, maidens,
everyone, little and great, prepare!
Inside the laurel-covered churches,
gather in the light of joy!
Open your arms and with them offer peace,
that the icons of the saints may see.
Embrace and kiss other sweetly, lip on lip,
let friend and foe proclaim, ‘Christ is Risen!’

Laurels are placed on every tomb,
beautiful babes are held in mothers’ arms,
the choristers sing sweetly
as they come before the icons.
Bright is the silver, bright is the gold,
under the light of the Easter candles.
Each face alights before the holy candles,
that Christians bear in hand.

The Capital 1980

In honor of Greek Independence Day, we present this work by one of modern Greece’s finest poets.

Melissanthi
Greek
1910 – 1991

 

I take my diving suit and drift around
in the aquarium of the city.
Its streets all teem with divers of murky waters:
bodies of the drowned that sway,
hooked onto fishing lines
hinder the traffic.

Avid eyes lie in wait,
lie in ambush at ev’ry step:
merchandise cheap, sordid bait,
and the prey is trapped with ease.

At the central crossings
the concentration of plankton
is pushed towards the gaping entrances
of supermarkets.
The gaping mouths of voracious cetaceans
washed up in crucial areas of the capital:
enormous mammals which regurgitate
the incoming and outgoing shoal.

In the rush hour the tidal wave is swelling
the continuous perpetual tumult
from the insatiable appetite
of the crowd:
The menace which grows,
the cracked and empty jar,
the invisible black hole
which gulps down the galaxy

fragments

While little of the poet’s work survives, and very little context is known, we have made an effort to piece these fragments together in a manner that may be interpreted as cohesive if the reader chooses.

Sappho
Greek
c. 630 B.C. – c. 570 B.C.

Pain penetrates

Me drop
by drop

You may forget but

Let me tell you
this: someone in
some future time
will think of us

Before they were mothers

Leto and Niobe
had been the most
devoted of friends

If you are squeamish

Don’t prod the
beach rubble

Experience shows us

Wealth unchaperoned
by Virtue is never
an innocuous neighbor

We know this much

Death is an evil;
we have the gods’
word for it; they too
would die if death
were a good thing

Heartaches of the Lagoon

Kostis Palamas
Greek
1859 – 1943

My early unforgettable years I lived them
Close to the sea,
There by the shallow and calm sea,
There by the open and boundless sea.

And every time that my budding, early life
Comes back to me,
And I see the dreams and hear the voices
Of my early life there by the sea,

You, oh my heart, feel the same old yearning:
If I could live again,
Close to the shallow and calm sea,
There by the open and boundless sea.

Was it really my destiny, was it my fortune,
I haven’t met another
A sea within me as shallow as a lake,
And like an ocean boundless and big.

And, lo! In my sleep a dream brought her
Close again to me,
The same there shallow and calm sea,
The same there boundless and open sea.

Yet, thrice be alas! A grief was poisoning me,
A powerful grief,
A grief that you did not lighten, my dream
Of my great early love, my home by the sea.

What storm, I wonder, was raging in me,
And what whirlwind,
That couldn’t put it to rest, or lull it to sleep
My wonderful dream of my home by the sea.

A grief that is unspoken, an unexplained grief,
A powerful grief,
A grief not quenched even within the paradise
Of our early life close to the boundless sea.