“She is a real renaissance mistress.” Then the sirens blew for an air raid warning, bringing me back to monstrous cramps and headache. Can you explain this apparition? Is it a pure elemental? A form from naid or dryad realms? Am I alone in encountering such phenomena ? I feel exhausted and confused by experiences like these but I know I must persist. My growing sense of isolation is compounded by my social situation. As a Scholarship boy from a Cardiff grammar school I find it hard to fit into this genial squirearchy of rugby players and would-be lawyers, whose rituals revolve around sconces of beer and Bump Suppers. The few apologists for the Left have a totally sentimental notion of ‘working-class life’ in industrial areas. I have refused to be their mascot. My tutors change constantly. I am anxious to serve my country but I’m told my medical history (TB and a childhood head injury that sometimes affects my vision) may well have grounded my dreams of flying; although I expect call-up papers at any time. In the meantime, it seems more important to raise one’s whole Being to the Gods than to tinker away with essays about the Scottish Chaucerians or the influence of Trollope. Your Brazen Head society sounds most attractive and it would be a great privilege to attend the next meeting. I could volunteer a paper on the Enochian Magic of Dr. John Dee, but feel I am indeed ready to go beyond academic research into collective working of rites. I think you would find me an eager pupil. Yours most sincerely in the fellowship of The Gods, Richard Firestone. (There are gaps, lacunae, broken spaces, and now the God of the Gaps is laughing at me, and I forget how many letters there were at this stage. I have a confused vision of a huge alcoved reception room, black walls, indigo recesses, old women in ratty furs natter coldly, a spider crawls down the chandelier, but it’s going too fast, I can’t get it down, I keep missing it, have to go on, on, into the summer of ’43 . . . )
In Notes on the Margins of Time, the short poem does not merely reduce the scale of the longer lyric. It changes the reader’s experience of implication. “Doxology” concentrates its action into the relation between a damaged human figure and the sun he praises (93). The man resembles a dusty, leafless tree; the sun that has burned him remains beyond burning. The compactness prevents the relation from settling into a straightforward moral. Praise may suggest endurance, dependence, helplessness, or an affirmation made despite injury. The English is strongest in its refusal to explain which response should dominate.
The repeated tree establishes the man’s exposure before the final contrast arrives. The poem’s restraint matters more than any single ornamental effect. Its language lets the asymmetry between human vulnerability and the sun’s power remain visible. A more elaborately lyrical translation could easily turn that asymmetry into consolation. Here, the starkness permits a harder reading: praise does not prove that suffering has been reconciled with justice. It shows a human response whose dignity and difficulty cannot be separated.
“Hour of Song,” printed on the same page, similarly finds expression at a moment of deprivation rather than abundance. Wine and fruit are present when singing is forgotten; separation supplies the occasion on which song becomes necessary. The poem reverses the expectation that fullness generates art and loss merely silences it. Its short lines make that reversal almost ceremonially plain. Manolis’s uncluttered diction allows the relation between the two moments to remain the main event. The poem needs no explanation of why people sing; its arrangement of circumstances performs the explanation.
Elsewhere, the domestic image carries a more troubling psychological charge. In “Memory,” a father returns without greeting his family, while the others remain absorbed in their own relations (98). The child’s perception is organized by the father’s silence, the window, the storm, and the cross-shaped mark disclosed by lightning. What might have remained a minor household omission becomes a retrospective scene of separation. The poem is not simply remembering an event. It is showing how an event acquires meaning when remembered, and how the child’s image persists beyond the occasion that produced it.
This is an important test of English syntax. The delayed and repeated references to the father create a hesitation appropriate to recollection, yet some constructions are cumbersome enough to slow comprehension unnecessarily. The reader can distinguish that grammatical friction from the productive uncertainty of the image itself. What the window-cross signifies may remain open; who has failed to notice a greeting should be clear. The distinction matters because the poem’s emotional force depends on ordinary actions being apprehensible before their meanings become strange.
“Winter is Approaching” offers another powerful transformation of the domestic (97). A former hat becomes a place for chickens’ eggs, while a father’s stored collar helps define the coming cold. These objects have survived their original occasions of use, acquiring new functions or retaining an unsettling remnant of an old one. The trees’ association with mothballs brings seasonal change into the atmosphere of storage and inheritance. Such images demonstrate why Ritsos’s objects should not be reduced to emblems with fixed meanings. Their force comes from displaced use, touch, and memory.
The English miniatures are often successful precisely because they preserve this practical identity of things. A hat remains a hat even while it becomes a nest; a collar remains a piece of clothing even while it carries paternal distance. The material object is not discarded once the metaphor has been understood. Manolis’s plain nouns help maintain the double attention that these poems require. The reader must see both what an object is and what a particular history has made it capable of suggesting.
(If you like poetry of this kind, you may find more about this great poet in the following links)
Of course, there is here a certain approximation of the concept of the Imaginative, a concept that Aristotle was unable to define in all its complexity. For this reason, the Stagirite appeals to a Prime Mover of divine origin. Time and space, as conceived in Hellenic philosophy and throughout the philosophical tradition up to Kant, were understood as factual, material elements. This made it impossible to comprehend the purely subjective re-creation of the world and the a priori forms of pure sensibility–namely, time and space as they are presented in the Critique of Pure Reason. The Imaginative, as the essential human faculty through which man re-creates the world out of pure transcendentality, could not be defined in that age, and Kant himself, together with those who followed him, failed to grasp this meaning. Within the Imaginative are encompassed both the human being and the world, together with everything that has been, is, or will be produced, both in the spiritual sense–which is primary–and in the material sense, which follows as a consequence of this Imaginative creation. Jules Verne’s submarines, computers, and smartphones are all fruits of this rational capacity of the Imaginative, which becomes reality and creates out of nothing. Nothingness–not as an object, but as an essential attribute of pure subjectivity–creates reality. This creation is rational, because the human intellect is capable of thinking only in terms of categories and reason. Kant’s philosophy merely raises the question of the possibility of a priori synthetic judgments. Yet the connection established by the possibility of synthesizing judgments that are independent of experience is attributed to a synthetic capacity of the inner sense residing within self-consciousness. Here lies the key to Kant’s philosophy, which maintains that thought is a concrete a priori…
Dangle An erect nipple dangles over my lips a game like tease or please, now you touch me now you don’t an unspoiled breast flashes the night sky playing with my flesh as a star loosens its footing now you see me now you don’t My descent is revealed
Even for a funeral, Pete Torgerson’s service was a glum affair, Spanger thought. Everyone who could be expected to attend a mayor’s funeral was there. The lieutenant governor, looking preoccupied, represented the state administration. The minister read the 23rd Psalm, the choir sang “In The Garden,” people paid the widow their respects at the reception, and all went home with a sense of relief. The hobo measure slipped off the council’s agenda. Not even Frank Stout mentioned it again. The council set a special election for November to fill the final year of Torgerson’s term and appointed Ken Spear to serve as acting mayor in the interim. Spanger knew Spear would run.A group of businessmen was trying to convince Spanger to be a candidate. Without Torgerson to contend with, he had the opportunity to mould the police department into the organization he wanted. Still, he liked the idea of leading the town. His family could not live on the salary of a part-time mayor, but his share in the orchard produced a fair income, and the prospect of spending more time on the ranch appealed to him. Politics wasn’t what he had educated himself for, but it could be what he was meant to do. When he asked Phyllis about it, she said, “Is that what you want?” Up here at the top of the valley, he thought it was.
…your splendid heart, splendid since I chose it, will always be somewhere else and with the words I’ll sever the threads that tie me to a particular man for who I long until Odysseus becomes symbol of nostalgia and sails the seas in everybody’s mind. I forget you daily, passionately that you’ll cleanse yourself of the sins of sweetness and smell and completely clean you’ll enter the realm of immortality. This job is hard and joyless. my only reward is that I finally understand what’s human presence what’s absence or how the ego functions in such desolation, in such long time that nothing stops the tomorrow the body always renews itself gets up and goes to bed as if someone chops it sometimes sick, sometimes in love hoping that what of the touch it loses it gains in substance.
(If this poem spoke to you, you may find more about this translation book in the following links)
I Want to Leave I want to leave this place, to go far away I want to become golden dust in the air simple element, free, brave to an unfamiliar new land I’ll go where things of the world will appear like dreams and they’ll talk to the soul where the nice faces of people will smile and where I too shall be beautiful where, my god, darkness wouldn’t exist in the night, nor in the despair of the place upon the horrible skyline or in the wind’s wailing nor in the glances or words of people where there won’t remain anything but a little joy and satisfaction where all will say that they have left forever that perhaps they are all already dead.
(If this poem touched you, you may find more about this beautiful poetry book in the following links)
Hestia The merciful Hestia built my dwelling echo of a gallop heard in faraway lands sound of a comma I noticed the exclamation of a woman’s nipple softly touched, aroused the exhausted tree stopped its rustle and I existed in vague limbo, man without a homeland homophonic crickets spoke of duty foggy installment of guilt which I carried into this world from the serenity of the blessed souls an unbroken link to my ancestors’ beauty wrath of barbarians at the cross points of history and I felt Fate leaning over my cradle to remind me of my future war against shadows and prickly pears seeds the slow crawl of pain had already commenced my easy path to humanness
(If this poem spoke to you, you may find more about this beautiful poetry book in the following link)
Origin of Life The origin of life starts from the mythical zero and the death of the enigmatic God before the immenseness that I am an escape from the unheard-of authenticity I learn to grow old by stumbling, by searching for my life in the Beginning of Time light isn’t the exclusive property of the baby who vaguely remembers darkness and knows that greediness exists in the innocence of things in the whistling sound of water beyond the shadows over another land each being a goodbye that floats over the flattened time over the foggy skull of the old man tightly held by the net that signals to the water verses that once it tried to discover in the origin of kites.
(If this poem touched you, you may find more about this book of translations in the following link)
School Days The Colson district had a small schoolhouse situated in the corner of a farmer’s field, one and a half miles northwest of the Fielding farm. When it was built in 1920 the children of the district almost filled the thirty seats in the one-room learning establishment. According to the registers stored at the Department of Education in the capital city of Regina, Benjamin Fielding attended school there up to the end of the seventh grade. Had anyone investigated those old records, they may have noted that it was not uncommon for the formal education of a boy from the districts to terminate anywhere after grade seven. Seldom did a boy’s name appear beyond the ninth grade. The McNeill brothers were the exception. Their grandfather, Andrew McNeill, had a healthy respect for education, a characteristic he passed down to his son and thence to his grandsons. And although Dave, being the eldest, did not have the advantages of his younger brother, he did manage to complete the tenth grade with excellent marks, before his services were required full time on the farm. Alan, on the other hand, was one of the few country boys who went on to high school in Bradshaw, graduating in 1939, only months before the onset of the Second World War. Dave, like his father and grandfather before him, was committed to procuring the best possible education for any offspring he might produce. So, even before his son was born, Dave began to take an active interest in the Colson school district. Two years after arriving home from overseas he became a trustee on the school board which, since 1947, had been chaired by Arnold Johnson. Sarah had been inside Colson School only once, shortly before…
(If this excerpt spoke to you, you may find more about life in the Canadian Prairies and this book in the following link)
