It’s a dark windy night. Eteocles is about three years old, Nicolas five, and their mother as old as the worry about how to feed her children has made her, as old as any mother who lives in the ruins of war, a woman whose husband is on the front line. It’s a windy night, and the gaps around the frame of the door and the lone window make an apocalyptic music, as if the inhabitants of this hovel are walking through the hallways of hell. Eteocles remembers the scene well. They are sitting around the metal bucket their mother has made into a heating element. She burns wood in it, and the heat reaches out perhaps a meter all around it. They are sitting warming themselves, listening to the wrath of the tempest just a few meters away beyond the frames of the single door and the courageous lone window to the north.
Suddenly from the deadly war of the elements outside a sudden wind floods the room as the door opens. A man stands in the frame gazing inside. It’s their father returning from the war. He stands there for long time, not knowing what to say, how to greet them; he hasn’t seen them for thirty six long months. Their mother lets out a cry, a cry that sounds like the name of the standing man, her husband, the man who had gone to war when Eteocles was just a few months old. Her husband is home at last, and she gets up and calls him inside and walks up to him and hugs him with a fierceness that expresses the emotional volcano boiling inside her. She hugs him for a long time, then she pulls away, and their father kneels and calls his sons to him. Neither of them dares approach this stranger. Eteocles doesn’t know this man at all, while Nicolas, who was two years old when his father left his sons, perhaps has some faint memory of him.
Neither of the two dare move toward the man in soldier’s clothes who calls them again and again until Eteocles observes his feet making small steps toward the open arms of their father and Nicolas follows soon after. The soldier clings tightly to them, saying words the two brothers only feel, the soothing words of a father who has missed his sons, a man who had gone to war without knowing if he would ever see them again. They feel those words, and they cuddle with the man who has come inside their house and ignore the wind that has entered with him and turned the room into a frozen habitat in which the small metal bucket with the burning wood cannot warm more than a meter in diameter around it.
Κι ήτανε κιόλας σα ν’ ακούγαμε τα μυστικά πελέκια μες στο δάσος να κόβουν ξύλα. Ακούγαμε το μέγα γδούπο, όταν σωριάζονταν ένα δέντρο στο χώμα, και τη σιωπή τρομαγμένη να κρύβεται πίσω απ’ τους ώμους μας. Κι ήταν σα να ’βλεπα κιόλας τον Δούρειο Ίππο, κούφιον, θεόρατο, να λάμπει επικίνδυνος μες στην αστροφεγγιά, θρησκευτικός σχεδόν, ενώ η σκιά του εκτεινόταν μυθική στα τείχη. Κι ένιωθα κιόλας σα να βρισκόμουν μες στο κούφωμα του αλόγου, μαζί με τους άλλους, ολομόναχος, σε άβολη στάση, μέσα στο λαιμό του αλόγου, και να κοιτάζω με τ’ άδεια του μάτια τη γυάλινη νύχτα, σαν κρεμασμένος μες στο χάος, γνωρίζοντας πως η χαίτη που ανέμιζε πάνω απ’ τον αυχένα μου δεν ήταν δική μου, — ούτε κι η νίκη, φυσικά. Ωστόσο ετοιμαζόμουνα για το τεράστιο, μάταιο άλμα μέσα στο άγνωστο.
Έτσι, σ’ αυτή τη στάση, εκεί ψηλά, μέσα στο σανιδένιο λαρύγγι του αλόγου, θα ’νιωθα καταβροχθισμένος, κι όμως ζωντανός, να εποπτεύω τ’ αντίπαλα στρατόπεδα, τις φωτιές, τα καράβια, τ’ αστέρια, όλο το οικείο, το τρομερό, τ’ αναρίθμητο θαύμα —όπως λένε— του κόσμου, σα να ’μαι μπουκιά σταματημένη στο λαρύγγι του απείρου και ταυτόχρονα μια γέφυρα πάνω από δυο, το ίδιο απόκρημνες κι άγνωστες, όχθες — μια γέφυρα ψεύτικη, βέβαια, από ξύλο και πικρή πανουργία. (Από κει πάνω, θαρρώ, μες σ’ έναν τέτοιο εφιάλτη, αγνάντεψα πρώτη φορά την πραϋντική λάμψη των όπλων σου).
And it was as if we were already hearing the secret axes
in the forest cutting wood. We could hear the big thump
when a tree fell on the ground and silence, in fear,
hiding behind our shoulders. And it was as if I was seeing
the Trojan Horse gleaming in the starlight, huge, hollow,
dangerous, almost religious, while its shadow spread
on the walls like a fable. And I felt as if I was already
in the cavity of the Horse along with the others, in an
awkward position in the horse’s neck, all alone, seeing
the crystal night through its empty eyes
as if I was hanging over the void, and knowing that
it wasn’t my nape that waved but the horse’s mane,
nor was the victory, of course. Yet I prepared myself
for the endless, futile leap into the unknown.
In this position, high above, in the plank-lined throat
of the horse, I truly felt swallowed, and yet alive and
I observed the enemy camp, the fires, the ships, the stars
all that familiar miracle, as it was called, the horrible,
incalculable miracle of the world, as if I was a morsel
of food stuck in the throat of infinity and at the same time
a bridge over two embankments equally unknown and
precipitous, a false bridge, of course, made of wood
and bitter cunningness.
(from that high vantage position, I think, in such
a nightmare I first noticed the soothing brilliance
Με ιδιαίτερη χαρά έμαθα ότι το βιβλίο ποίησης μου Νόστος και Άλγος, σε μετάφραση στην Πολωνική από τους Mirek Grudzien και Gosia Zurecka, μόλις εκδόθηκε στην πόλη Rzeszow από τους εκδότες Podkarpacki Institut. Ευχαριστώ πολύ τους μεταφραστές και τον εκδότη για την καλαίσθητη έκδοση
I’m pleased to inform all my friends that my poetry book Nostos and Algos, translated in Polish by Mirek Grudzien and Gosia Zurecka was just released in the city of Rzeszow in Poland by the publishers Podkarpacki Institut. Thank you to both the translators and the publisher for the beautiful release.
Θεωρώ το Νόστος και Άλγος σαν το πιο πετυχυμένο μου βιβλίο ποίησης αφού μεταφράστηκε σε 6 γλώσσες κι εκδόθηκε σε 6 χώρες. Στα ελληνικά με τίτλο Φυλλορροές, από τις εκδόσεις Ένεκεν στη Θεσσαλονίκη.
I consider Nostos and Algos my most successful poetry book since it has been translated into 6 different languages and published in six different countries of the world.
Important aspects of so many of our cultural institutions in North America and Western Europe can be traced back to the Ancient Greeks. We were taught that inescapable truth in our school classrooms and we have read it in our history books. And yet, for some reason, we in the West have been less mindful of modern Greek history and modern Greek literature in particular. There may have been a brief brush with Seferis during a second- or third-year poetry course at university, yes. And one perhaps recalls a fleeting encounter with Cavafy in an anthology of modern world literature in translation. Perhaps. But most of us are woefully ignorant of the great wealth of poetry that has proliferated in Greece since the mid-1700s. Manolis’ book of translations of the works of many, many diverse poetic voices from the modern era in Greece thus constitutes a great gift. He has given us—handily assembled between the two covers of Neo-Hellene Poets: An Anthology of Modern Greek Poetry, 1750-2018—a ready resource to which we may now turn in order to make up that glaring lacuna that exists in our cultural education. Poems that are orderly and formal, and poems that are unruly and unbounded; works steeped in tradition and works that are wildly innovative; verse that is serious and sentimental, and verse that is droll and irreverent; it’s all there. The modern Greek poetic tapestry is multi-coloured, artful and highly textured and it deserves far more attention that it has gotten to date from scholars and from other members of Western societies who turn to poetry for pleasure and inspiration but cannot read or speak Greek. We must be thankful to Manolis for opening a door that has been effectively closed for three centuries. At last, English speakers and readers can feast at a long-overlooked table, a table well laden with many exotic literary delights. Mr. Waiter, would you please bring us the wine list?
This new translation of Yannis Ritsos (volume II) is another triumph for Manolis Aligizakis, the foremost Canadian translator of Greek poetry. He has undertaken an important project: unearthing the many poems of the wonderful Yannis Ritsos for a new audience. As Chryssa Nikolakis says in the introduction to this volume, “Ritsos’ poetry is purely humane and existential, but also deeply lyrical. It speaks boldly about the revolution, about the adventures of the social vision, about love and the beauty of life— about everything human— in an unparalleled, universal tongue.” Aligizakis is particularly deft in capturing the dense mythic language of Ritsos’ long poems, “Shape of Absence,” “Ismene,” “Phaedra,” and others. But my favorite part of this book might be the elegantly translated short poems from “Exercises.” Listen to this: “The wet hat of the sailor was tossed / in the waves / like rye bread thrown away / while men were hungry. // It was the war.” (“Brief Story”). And it’s a gorgeous book physically, with illustrations from classic painters, and introductions to help the reader unpack some of the more difficult contexts.
Reading Manolis Aligizakis’s translation of Ritsos’s poetry (Volume ll), I am struck by the undertow of longing that ebbs through Ritsos’s poems. There seems to be this heroic attitude of waiting for fulfilment, shadowing the events and circumstances Ritsos has chosen to focus his creative gaze upon. He seems to balance the frailty, anguish, and vulnerability he sees at the very heart of human nature with the defiant prospect of hope, and with the implied possibility of future wholeness. Though he never hesitates to decry and condemn the suffering caused by adversity and injustice, I think he modulates it as an inscrutable attribute whose redemptive meaning circles all the way back to the mythic forces inherent in creation. Perhaps like Job in the whirlwind, he accommodates the darkness of fate not only as a tragic flaw, but also as a divine element in the longing that saves.
Dramatically, I can imagine Ritsos sitting on a chair, center stage, against the back drop of a sun rising above the ocean, facing his audience— all those mortal men, women, children, animals and mythical aspects of an evolving self that sparked his awareness— then grinning defiantly, concludes with these final words: You are my advent. You are what I carry through the void. You are who I am.
This impressive and insightful translation by an equally creative and prolific poet, will continue to give voice to the silence we inhabit.
Manolis Aligizakis 