Life Identified With Poetry

Tasos Livaditis was and remains one of the greatest poets of the last century. Poetry was his life. He lived all his life with love, with the dream of the revolution and with the nightmare of its oblivion. He lived the drama of persecution, the pain only a few others experienced and with the agony of his deep dive into himself. He lived the joy of relationships with the family and friends and the tyrannizing wish to escape all human ties. He lived talking to the everyday people of his neighbourhood or the ones he met in the crossroads of the world and he talked to the dead to whom he always had something to say even sometimes late. He enjoyed pleasures and happy moments and he also punished himself for real or imaginary guilt. And all this fed his poetry.

       The man, the poet, the fighter Tasos Livaditis whose vision once seemed shuttered wasn’t shuttered at all; it only revealed itself in a different way as the years went by. Although his vision of a socialist world that he gave all he could fell within itself for Livaditis it remained alive in his disappointment which was counterbalanced by his human compassion. For this his last books, that at first glance seem full of disillusionment at the shuttering of his hopes, in reality they are books of deeper human reattachment arising from the deep emotional connection people feel when they meet, when they feel that they are joined by something inexplicable that in fact helps them remain human forever.

            And, Oh, memories, that retain something more

            than what we’ve lived…

~Titos Patrikios

Transformations

I coaxed her – he says the black bear I tamed her

first I threw my bread at her then my head

Now I am the bear and I am the mirror

I sit on the chair I take care of my nails

I paint them red or yellow I see them I like them

I cannot touch anything I’m afraid of death

I turn the chain of my neck into a crown and

I place it on my forehead Now what could I do?

I must keep my head high and always

gaze upward However at midnight

in my new sleeplessness in whichever way I walk

I hear my footsteps echoing down through the trapdoor

where the other chains hang from the walls

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At one stroke, all changed direction.

The steel echo of the rains

brought us to dawn, and I dreamed of you,

the whole earth was sleepless,

and generations of trees bent,

and the clouds crowded in the skies,

and the wild inspiration

 engulfed the night, and we were in love.

Olexandre Korotko, Ucraine (1952)

Σε μια στιγμή όλα άλλαξαν κατεύθυνση:

ο μεταλλικός ήχος της βροχής

μας έφερε το ξημέρωμα, και σ’ ονειρεύτηκα.

Όλη η γη ξάγρυπνη

γενιές δέντρα έγερναν

σύνεφα γέμισαν τον ουρανό

κι ελεύθερη η έμπνευση

αγκάλιασε τη νύχτα, κι ερωτευτήκαμε.

Μετάφραση Μανώλη Αλυγιζάκη//translated by Manolis Aligizakis