George Seferis

I The house near the sea The houses I had they took away from me. The times happened to be unpropitious: war, destruction, exile; sometimes the hunter hits the migratory birds, sometimes he doesn’t hit them. Hunting was good in my time, many felt the pellet; the rest circle aimlessly or go mad in the shelters. Don’t talk to me about the nightingale or the lark or the little wagtail inscribing figures with his tail in the light; I don’t know much about houses I know they have their own nature, nothing else. New at first, like babies who play in gardens with the tassels of the sun, they embroider coloured shutters and shining doors over the day. When the architect’s finished, they change, they frown or smile or even grow resentful with those who stayed behind, with those who went away with others who’d come back if they could or others who disappeared, now that the world’s become an endless hotel. I don’t know much about houses, I remember their joy and their sorrow sometimes, when I stop to think; again sometimes, near the sea, in naked rooms with a single iron bed and nothing of my own, watching the evening spider, I imagine that someone is getting ready to come, that they dress him up in white and black robes, with many-coloured jewels, and around him venerable ladies, grey hair and dark lace shawls, talk softly, that he is getting ready to come and say goodbye to me; or that a woman — eyelashes quivering, slim-waisted, returning from southern ports, Smyrna Rhodes Syracuse Alexandria, from cities closed like hot shutters, with perfume of golden fruit and herbs — climbs the stairs without seeing those who’ve fallen asleep under the stairs. Houses, you know, grow resentful easily when you strip them bare. II Sensual Elpenor I saw him yesterday standing by the door below my window; it was about seven o’clock; there was a woman with him. He had the look of Elpenor just before he fell and smashed himself, yet he wasn’t drunk. He was speaking fast, and she was gazing absently towards the gramophones; now and then she cut him short to say a word and then would glance impatiently towards where they were frying fish: like a cat. He muttered with a dead cigarette-butt between his lips: — ‘Listen. There’s this too. In the moonlight the statues sometimes bend like reeds in the midst of ripe fruit — the statues; and the flame becomes a cool oleander, the flame that burns one, I mean.’ — ‘It's just the light. . . shadows of the night.’ — ‘Maybe the night that split open, a blue pomegranate, a dark breast, and filled you with stars, cleaving time. And yet the statues bend sometimes, dividing desire in two, like a peach; and the flame becomes a kiss on the limbs, then a sob, then a cool leaf carried off by the wind; they bend; they become light with a human weight. You don’t forget it.’ — ‘The statues are in the museum.’ — ‘No, they pursue you, why can’t you see it? I mean with their broken limbs, with their shape from another time, a shape you don’t recognize yet know. It’s as though in the last days of your youth you loved a woman who was still beautiful, and you were always afraid, as you held her naked at noon, of the memory aroused by your embrace; were afraid the kiss might betray you to other beds now of the past which nevertheless could haunt you so easily, so easily, and bring to life images in the mirror, bodies once alive: their sensuality. It’s as though returning home from some foreign country you happen to open an old trunk that’s been locked up a long time and find the tatters of clothes you used to wear on happy occasions, at festivals with many-coloured lights, mirrored, now becoming dim, and all that remains is the perfume of the absence of a young form. Really, those statues are not the fragments. You yourself are the relic; they haunt you with a strange virginity at home, at the office, at receptions for the celebrated, in the unconfessed terror of sleep; they speak of things you wish didn’t exist or would happen years after your death, and that’s difficult because. . .’ — ‘The statues are in the museum. Good night.’ — ‘. . . because the statues are no longer fragments. We are. The statues bend lightly. . . Good night.’ At this point they separated. He took the road leading uphill toward the North and she moved on towards the light-flooded beach where the waves are drowned in the noise from the radio: The radio — ‘Sails puffed out by the wind are all that stay in the mind. Perfume of silence and pine will soon be an anodyne now that the sailor’s set sail, flycatcher, catfish and wagtail. O woman whose touch is dumb, hear the wind’s requiem. ‘Drained is the golden keg the sun’s become a rag round a middle-aged woman’s neck who coughs and coughs without break; for the summer that’s gone she sighs, for the gold on her shoulders, her thighs. O woman, O sightless thing, Hear the blind man sing. ‘Close the shutters: the day recedes; make flutes from yesteryear’s reeds and don’t open, knock how they may: they shout but have nothing to say. Take cyclamen, pine-needles, the lily, anemones out of the sea; O woman whose wits are lost, listen, the water’s ghost. . . — ‘Athens. The public has heard the news with alarm; it is feared a crisis is near. The prime minister declared: “There is no more time. . .” Take cyclamen. . . needles of pine. . . the lily. . . needles of pine. . . O woman. . . — . . . is overwhelmingly stronger. The war. . .’ S oulmonger . III The wreck‘Thrush’ ‘This wood that cooled my forehead at times when noon burned my veins will flower in other hands. Take it. I’m giving it to you; look, it’s wood from a lemon tree. . .’ I heard the voice as I was gazing at the sea trying to make out a ship they’d sunk there years ago; it was called ‘Thrush’, a small wreck; the masts, broken, swayed at odd angles deep underwater, like tentacles, or the memory of dreams, marking the hull: vague mouth of some huge dead sea-monster extinguished in the water. Calm spread all around. And gradually, in turn, other voices followed, whispers thin and thirsty emerging from the other side of the sun, the dark side; you might say they were asking to drink a drop of blood; familiar voices, but I couldn’t distinguish one from the other. And then the voice of the old man reached me; I felt it falling into the heart of day, quietly, as though motionless: ‘And if you condemn me to drink poison, I thank you. Your law will be my law; how can I go wandering from one foreign country to another, a rolling stone. I prefer death. Whose path is for the better only God knows.’ Countries of the sun yet you cannot face the sun. Countries of men yet you cannot face man. The light As the years go by the judges who condemn you grow in number; as the years go by and you converse with fewer voices, you see the sun with different eyes: you know that those who stayed behind were deceiving you the delirium of flesh, the lovely dance that ends in nakedness. It’s as though, turning at night into an empty highway, you suddenly see the eyes of an animal shine, eyes already gone; so you feel your own eyes: you gaze at the sun, then you’re lost in darkness. The Doric chiton that swayed like the mountains when your fingers touched it is a marble figure in the light, but its head is in darkness. And those who abandoned the stadium to take up arms struck the obstinate marathon runner and he saw the track sail in blood, the world empty like the moon, the gardens of victory wither: you see them in the sun, behind the sun. And the boys who dived from the bowsprits go like spindles twisting still, naked bodies plunging into black light with a coin between the teeth, swimming still, while the sun with golden needles sews sails and wet wood and colours of the sea; even now they’re going down obliquely toward the pebbles on the sea floor, white oil-flasks. Light, angelic and black, laughter of waves on the sea’s highways tear-stained laughter, the old suppliant sees you as he moves to cross the invisible fields — light mirrored in his blood, the blood that gave birth to Eteocles and Polynices. Day, angelic and black; the brackish taste of woman that poisons the prisoner emerges from the wave a cool branch adorned with drops. Sing little Antigone, sing, O sing. . . I’m not speaking to you about things past, I’m speaking about love; adorn your hair with the sun’s thorns, dark girl; the heart of the Scorpion has set, the tyrant in man has fled, and all the daughters of the sea, Nereids, Graeae, hurry toward the shimmering of the rising goddess: whoever has never loved will love, in the light; and you find yourself in a large house with many windows open running from room to room, not knowing from where to look out first, because the pine trees will vanish, and the mirrored mountains, and the chirping of birds the sea will empty, shattered glass, from north and south your eyes will empty of the light of day the way the cicadas all together suddenly fall silent. Poros, ‘Galini’, 31 October 1946

Again with spring she wore light colours and with gentle steps again with spring again in summer she was smiling. Among fresh blossoms breast naked to the veins beyond the dry night beyond the white old men debating quietly whether it would be better to give up the keys or to pull the rope and hang from the noose to leave empty bodies there where souls couldn’t endure there where the mind couldn’t catch up and knees buckled. With the new blossoms the old men failed and gave up on everything grandchildren and great-grandchildren the broad fields the green mountains love and life compassion and shelter rivers and sea; and they departed like statues leaving behind a silence that no sword could cut that no gallop could break nor the voices of the young; and the great loneliness came the great privation along with this spring and settled and spread like the frost of dawn caught hold of the high branches slid down the trunks of trees and wrapped around our soul. But she smiled wearing light colours like a blossoming almond tree in yellow flames and walked along lightly opening windows in the delighted sky without us the luckless ones. And I saw her breast naked the waist and the knee, as the inviolate martyr inviolate and pure issues from the torment to go to heaven, beyond the inexplicable whispering of people in the boundless circus beyond the black grimace the sweaty neck of the exasperated executioner striking vainly. The loneliness now a lake the privation now a lake untouched and untraceable. 16 March ’39

This sun was mine and yours; we shared it. Who’s suffering behind the golden silk, who’s dying? A woman beating her dry breasts cried out: ‘Cowards, they’ve taken my children and torn them to shreds, you’ve killed them gazing at the fire-flies at dusk with a strange look, lost in blind thought.’ The blood was drying on a hand that a tree made green, a warrior was asleep clutching the lance that cast light against his side. It was ours, this sun, we saw nothing behind the gold embroidery then the messengers came, dirty and breathless, stuttering unintelligible words twenty days and nights on the barren earth with thorns only twenty days and nights feeling the bellies of the horses bleeding and not a moment’s break to drink the rain-water. You told them to rest first and then to speak, the light had dazzled you. They died saying ‘We don’t have time’, touching some rays of the sun. You’d forgotten that no one rests. A woman howled ‘Cowards’, like a dog in the night. Once she would have been beautiful like you with wet mouth, veins alive beneath the skin, with love. This sun was ours; you kept all of it, you wouldn’t follow me. And it was then I found out about those things behind the gold and the silk: we don’t have time. The messengers were right.

To Nani Panayíotopoulo And yet we should consider how we go forward. To feel is not enough, nor to think, nor to move nor to put your body in danger in front of an old loophole when scalding oil and molten lead furrow the walls. And yet we should consider towards what we go forward, not as our pain would have it, and our hungry children and the chasm between us and the companions calling from the opposite shore; nor as the bluish light whispers it in an improvised hospital, the pharmaceutic glimmer on the pillow of the youth operated on at noon; but it should be in some other way, I would say like the long river that emerges from the great lakes enclosed deep in Africa, that was once a god and then became a road and a benefactor, a judge and a delta; that is never the same, as the ancient wise men taught, and yet always remains the same body, the same bed, and the same Sign, the same orientation. I want nothing more than to speak simply, to be granted that grace. Because we’ve loaded even our song with so much music that it’s slowly sinking and we’ve decorated our art so much that its features have been eaten away by gold and it’s time to say our few words because tomorrow our soul sets sail. If pain is human we are not human beings merely to suffer pain; that’s why I think so much these days about the great river, this meaning that moves forward among herbs and greenery and beasts that graze and drink, men who sow and harvest, great tombs even and small habitations of the dead. This current that goes its way and that is not so different from the blood of men, from the eyes of men when they look straight ahead without fear in their hearts, without the daily tremor for trivialities or even for important things; when they look straight ahead like the traveller who is used to gauging his way by the stars, not like us, the other day, gazing at the enclosed garden of a sleepy Arab house, behind the lattices the cool garden changing shape, growing larger and smaller, we too changing, as we gazed, the shape of our desire and our hearts, at noon’s precipitation, we the patient dough of a world that throws us out and kneads us, caught in the embroidered nets of a life that was as it should be and then became dust and sank into the sands leaving behind it only that vague dizzying sway of a tall palm tree. Cairo, 20 June ’42

1 The angel — three years we waited for him, attention riveted, closely scanning the pines the shore the stars. One with the blade of the plough or the ship’s keel we were searching to find once more the first seed so that the age-old drama could begin again. We returned to our homes broken, limbs incapable, mouths cracked by the tastes of rust and brine. when we woke we traveled towards the north, strangers plunged into mist by the immaculate wings of swans that wounded us. On winter nights the strong wind from the east maddened us, in the summers we were lost in the agony of days that couldn’t die. We brought back these carved reliefs of a humble art. 2 Still one more well inside a cave. It used to be easy for us to draw up idols and ornaments to please those friends who still remained loyal to us. The ropes have broken; only the grooves on the well’s lip remind us of our past happiness: the fingers on the rim, as the poet put it. The fingers feel the coolness of the stone a little, Then the body’s fever prevails over it and the cave stakes its soul and loses it every moment, full of silence, without a drop of water. 3 Remember the baths where you were murdered I woke with this marble head in my hands; it exhausts my elbow and I don’t know where to put it down. It was falling into the dream as I was coming out of the dream so our life became one and it will be very difficult for it to separate again. I look at the eyes: neither open nor closed I speak to the mouth which keeps trying to speak I hold the cheeks which have broken through the skin. That’s all I’m able to do. My hands disappear and come towards me mutilated. 4 Argonauts And a soul if it is to know itself must look into its own soul: the stranger and enemy, we’ve seen him in the mirror. They were good, the companions, they didn’t complain about the work or the thirst or the frost, they had the bearing of trees and waves that accept the wind and the rain accept the night and the sun without changing in the midst of change. They were fine, whole days they sweated at the oars with lowered eyes breathing in rhythm and their blood reddened a submissive skin. Sometimes they sang, with lowered eyes as we were passing the deserted island with the Barbary figs to the west, beyond the cape of the dogs that bark. If it is to know itself, they said it must look into its own soul, they said and the oar’s struck the sea’s gold in the sunset. We went past many capes many islands the sea leading to another sea, gulls and seals. Sometimes disconsolate women wept lamenting their lost children and others frantic sought Alexander the Great and glories buried in the depths of Asia. We moored on shores full of night-scenes, the birds singing, with waters that left on the hands the memory of a great happiness. But the voyages did not end. Their souls became one with the oars and the oarlocks with the solemn face of the prow with the rudder’s wake with the water that shattered their image. The companions died one by one, with lowered eyes. Their oars mark the place where they sleep on the shore. No one remembers them. Justice 5 We didn’t know them deep down it was hope that said we’d known them since early childhood. We saw them perhaps twice and then they took to the ships: cargoes of coal, cargoes of grain, and our friends lost beyond the ocean forever. Dawn finds us beside the tired lamp drawing on paper, awkwardly, painfully, ships mermaids or sea shells; at dusk we go down to the river because it shows us the way to the sea; and we spend the nights in cellars that smell of tar. Our friends have left us perhaps we never saw them, perhaps we met them when sleep still brought us close to the breathing wave perhaps we search for them because we search for the other life, beyond the statues. 6 M.R. The garden with its fountains in the rain you will see only from behind the clouded glass of the low window. Your room will be lit only by the flames from the fireplace and sometimes the distant lightning will reveal the wrinkles on your forehead, my old Friend. The garden with the fountains that in your hands was a rhythm of the other life, beyond the broken statues and the tragic columns and a dance among the oleanders near the new quarries — misty glass will have cut it off from your life. You won’t breathe; earth and the sap of the trees will spring from your memory to strike this window struck by rain from the outside world. 7 South wind Westward the sea merges with a mountain range. From our left the south wind blows and drives us mad, the kind of wind that strips bones of their flesh. Our house among pines and carobs. Large windows. Large tables for writing you the letters we’ve been writing so many months now, dropping them into the space between us in order to fill it up. Star of dawn, when you lowered your eyes our hours were sweeter than oil on a wound, more joyful than cold water to the palate, more peaceful than a swan’s wings. You held our life in the palm of your hand. After the bitter bread of exile, at night if we remain in front of the white wall your voice approaches us like the hope of fire; and again this wind hones a razor against our nerves. Each of us writes you the same thing and each falls silent in the other’s presence, watching, each of us, the same world separately the light and darkness on the mountain range and you. Who will lift this sorrow from our hearts? Yesterday evening a heavy rain and again today the covered sky burdens us. Our thoughts – like the pine needles of yesterday’s downpour bunched up and useless in front of our doorway — would build a collapsing tower. Among these decimated villages on this promontory, open to the south wind with the mountain range in front of us hiding you, who will appraise for us the sentence to oblivion? Who will accept our offering, at this close of autumn? 8 What are they after, our souls, travelling on the decks of decayed ships crowded in with sallow women and crying babies unable to forget themselves either with the flying fish or with the stars that the masts point our at their tips; grated by gramophone records committed to non-existent pilgrimages unwillingly murmuring broken thoughts from foreign languages. What are they after, our souls, travelling on rotten brine-soaked timbers from harbour to harbour? Shifting broken stones, breathing in the pine’s coolness with greater difficulty each day, swimming in the waters of this sea and of that sea, without the sense of touch without men in a country that is no longer ours nor yours. We knew that the islands were beautiful somewhere round about here where we grope, slightly lower down or slightly higher up, a tiny space. 9 The harbour is old, I can’t wait any longer for the friend who left the island with the pine trees for the friend who left the island with the plane trees for the friend who left for the open sea. I stroke the rusted cannons, I stroke the oars so that my body may revive and decide. The sails give off only the smell of salt from the other storm. If I chose to remain alone, what I longed for was solitude, not this kind of waiting, my soul shattered on the horizon, these lines, these colours, this silence. The night’s stars take me back to Odysseus, to his anticipation of the dead among the asphodels. When we moored here we hoped to find among the asphodels the gorge that knew the wounded Adonis. 10 Our country is closed in, all mountains that day and night have the low sky as their roof. We have no rivers, we have no wells, we have no springs, only a few cisterns — and these empty — that echo, and that we worship. A stagnant hollow sound, 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 sheep-folds. And our marriages, the cool coronals and the fingers, become enigmas inexplicable to our soul. How were our children born, how did they grow strong? Our country is closed in. The two black Symplegades close it in. When we go down to the harbours on Sunday to breathe freely we see, lit in the sunset, the broken planks from voyages that never ended, bodies that no longer know how to love. 11 Sometimes your blood froze like the moon in the limitless night your blood spread its white wings over the black rocks, the shapes of trees and houses, with a little light from our childhood years. 12 Bottle in the sea Three rocks, a few burnt pines, a lone chapel and farther above the same landscape repeated starts again: three rocks in the shape of a gateway, rusted, a few burnt pines, black and yellow, and a square hut buried in whitewash; and still farther above, many times over, the same landscape recurs level after level to the horizon, to the twilit sky. Here we moored the ship to splice the broken oars, to drink water and to sleep. The sea that embittered us is deep and unexplored and unfolds a boundless calm. Here among the pebbles we found a coin and threw dice for it. The youngest won it and disappeared. We put to sea again with our broken oars. 13 Hydra Dolphins banners and the sound of cannons. The sea once so bitter to your soul bore the many-coloured and glittering ships it swayed, rolled and tossed them, all blue with white wings, once so bitter to your soul now full of colours in the sun. White sails and sunlight and wet oars struck with a rhythm of drums on stilled waves. Your eyes, watching, would be beautiful, your arms, reaching out, would glow, your lips would come alive, as they used to, at such a miracle: that’s what you were looking for what were you looking for in front of ashes or in the rain in the fog in the wind even when the lights were growing dim and the city was sinking and on the stone pavement the Nazarene showed you his heart, what were you looking for? why don’t you come? what were you looking for? 14 Three red pigeons in the light inscribing our fate in the light with colours and gestures of people we once loved. 15 Quid πλατανων opacissimus Sleep wrapped you in green leaves like a tree you breathed like a tree in the quiet light in the limpid spring I looked at your face: eyelids closed, eyelashes brushing the water. In the soft grass my fingers found your fingers I held your pulse a moment and felt elsewhere your heart’s pain. Under the plane tree, near the water, among laurel sleep moved you and scattered you around me, near me, without my being able to touch the whole of you — one as you were with your silence; seeing your shadow grow and diminish, lose itself in the other shadows, in the other world that let you go yet held you back. The life that they gave us to live, we lived. Pity those who wait with such patience lost in the black laurel under the heavy plane trees and those, alone, who speak to cisterns and wells and drown in the voice’s circles. Pity the companion who shared our privation and our sweat and plunged into the sun like a crow beyond the ruins, without hope of enjoying our reward. Give us, outside sleep, serenity. 16 The name is Orestes On the track, once more on the track, on the track, how many times around, how many blood-stained laps, how many black rows; the people who watch me, who watched me when, in the chariot, I raised my hand glorious, and they roared triumphantly. The froth of the horses strikes me, when will the horses tire? The axle creaks, the axle burns, when will the axle burst into flame? When will the reins break, when will the hooves tread flush on the ground on the soft grass, among the poppies where, in the spring, you picked a daisy. They were lovely, your eyes, but you didn’t know where to look nor did I know where to look, I, without a country, I who go on struggling here, how many times around? and I feel my knees give way over the axle over the wheels, over the wild track knees buckle easily when the gods so will it, no one can escape, what use is strength, you can’t escape the sea that cradled you and that you search for at this time of trial, with the horses panting, with the reeds that used to sing in autumn to the Lydian mode the sea you cannot find no matter how you run no matter how you circle past the black, bored Eumenides, unforgiven. 17 Astyanax Now that you are leaving, take the boy with you as well, the boy who saw the light under the plane tree, one day when trumpets resounded and weapons shone and the sweating horses bent to the trough to touch with wet nostrils the green surface of the water. The olive trees with the wrinkles of our fathers the rocks with the wisdom of our fathers and our brother’s blood alive on the earth were a vital joy, a rich pattern for the souls who knew their prayer. Now that you are leaving, now that the day of payment dawns, now that no one knows whom he will kill and how he will die, take with you the boy who saw the light under the leaves of that plane tree and teach him to study the trees. 18 I regret having let a broad river slip through my fingers without drinking a single drop. Now I’m sinking into the stone. A small pine tree in the red soil is all the company I have. Whatever I loved vanished with the houses that were new last summer and crumbled in the winds of autumn. 19 Even if the wind blows it doesn’t cool us and the shade is meagre under the cypress trees and all around slopes ascending to the mountains; they’re a burden for us the friends who no longer know how to die. 20 In my breast the wound opens again when the stars descend and become kin to my body when silence falls under the footsteps of men. These stones sinking into time, how far will they drag me with them? The sea, the sea, who will be able to drain it dry? I see the hands beckon each drawn to the vulture and the hawk bound as I am to the rock that suffering has made mine, I see the trees breathing the black serenity of the dead and then the smiles, so static, of the statues. 21 We who set out on this pilgrimage looked at the broken statues became distracted and said that life is not so easily lost that death has unexplored paths and its own particular justice; that while we, still upright on our feet, are dying, affiliated in stone united in hardness and weakness, the ancient dead have escaped the circle and risen again and smile in a strange silence. 22 So very much having passed before our eyes that even our eyes saw nothing, but beyond and behind was memory like the white sheet one night in an enclosure where we saw strange visions, even stranger than you, pass by and vanish into the motionless foliage of a pepper tree; having known this fate of ours so well wandering among broken stones, three or six thousand years searching in collapsed buildings that might have been our homes trying to remember dates and heroic deeds: will we be able? having been bound and scattered, having struggled, as they said, with non-existent difficulties lost, then finding again a road full of blind regiments sinking in marshes and in the lake of Marathon, will we be able to die as we should? 23 A little farther we will see the almond trees blossoming the marble gleaming in the sun the sea breaking into waves a little farther, let us rise a little higher. 24 Here end the works of the sea, the works of love. Those who will some day live here where we end — should the blood happen to darken in their memory and overflow — let them not forget us, the weak souls among the asphodels, let them turn the heads of the victims towards Erebus: We who had nothing will school them in serenity.

The skyscrapers of New York will never know the coolness that comes down on Kifisia but when I see the two cypress trees above your familiar church with the paintings of the damned being tortured in fire and brimstone then I recall the two chimneys behind the cedars I used to like so much when I was abroad. All through March rheumatism wracked your lovely loins and in summer you went to Aidipsos. God! what a struggle it is for life to keep going, as though it were a swollen river passing through the eye of a needle. Heavy heat till nightfall, the stars discharging midges, I myself drinking bitter lemonades and still remaining thirsty; Moon and movies, phantoms and the suffocating pestiferous harbour. Verina, life has ruined us, along with the Attic skies and the intellectuals clambering up their own heads and the landscapes reduced by drought and hunger to posing like young men selling their souls in order to wear a monocle like young girls — sunflowers swallowing their heads so as to become lilies. The days go by slowly; my own days circulate among the clocks dragging the second hand in tow. Remember how we used to twist breathless through the alleys so as not to be gutted by the headlights of cars. The idea of the world abroad enveloped us and closed us in like a net and we left with a sharp knife hidden within us and you said ‘Harmodios and Aristogeiton’. Verina, lower your head so that I can see you, though even if I were to see you I’d want to look beyond. What’s a man’s value? What does he want and how will he justify his existence at the Second Coming? Ah, to find myself on a derelict ship lost in the Pacific Ocean alone with the sea and the wind alone and without a wireless or strength to fight the elements. Kokkinaras, 5 August 1928

The day was cloudy. No one could come to a decision; a light wind was blowing. ‘Not a north-easter, the sirocco,’ someone said. A few slender cypresses nailed to the slope, and, beyond, the sea grey with shining pools. The soldiers presented arms as it began to drizzle. ‘Not a north-easter, the sirocco,’ was the only decision heard. And yet we knew that by the following dawn nothing would be left to us, neither the woman drinking sleep at our side nor the memory that we were once men, nothing at all by the following dawn. ‘This wind reminds me of spring,’ said my friend as she walked beside me gazing into the distance, ‘the spring that came suddenly in the winter by the closed-in sea. So unexpected. So many years have gone. How are we going to die?’ A funeral march meandered through the thin rain. How does a man die? Strange no one’s thought about it. And for those who thought about it, it was like a recollection from old chronicles from the time of the Crusades or the battle of Salamis. Yet death is something that happens: how does a man die? Yet each of us earns his death, his own death, which belongs to no one else and this game is life. The light was fading from the clouded day, no one decided anything. The following dawn nothing would be left to us, everything surrendered, even our hands, and our women slaves at the springheads and our children in the quarries. My friend, walking beside me, was singing a disjointed song: ‘In spring, in summer, slaves . . .’ One recalled old teachers who’d left us orphans. A couple passed, talking: ‘I’m sick of the dusk, let’s go home, let’s go home and turn on the light.’ Athens, Feb. ’39

’Ασíνην τε . . . — Iliad All morning long we looked around the citadel starting from the shaded side there where the sea green and without lustre — breast of a slain peacock — received us like time without an opening in it. Veins of rock dropped down from high above, twisted vines, naked, many-branched, coming alive at the water’s touch, while the eye following them struggled to escape the monotonous see-saw motion, growing weaker and weaker. On the sunny side a long empty beach and the light striking diamonds on the huge walls. No living thing, the wild doves gone and the king of Asini, whom we’ve been trying to find for two years now, unknown, forgotten by all, even by Homer, only one word in the Iliad and that uncertain, thrown here like the gold burial mask. You touched it, remember its sound? Hollow in the light like a dry jar in dug earth: the same sound that our oars make in the sea. The king of Asini a void under the mask everywhere with us everywhere with us, under a name: ‘’Ασíνην τε. . .’Ασíνην τε. . .’ and his children statues and his desires the fluttering of birds, and the wind in the gaps between his thoughts, and his ships anchored in a vanished port: under the mask a void. Behind the large eyes the curved lips the curls carved in relief on the gold cover of our existence a dark spot that you see travelling like a fish in the dawn calm of the sea: a void everywhere with us. And the bird, a wing broken, that flew away last winter — tabernacle of life — and the young woman who left to play with the dog-teeth of summer and the soul that sought the lower world gibbering and the country like a large plane-leaf swept along by the torrent of the sun with the ancient monuments and the contemporary sorrow. And the poet lingers, looking at the stones, and asks himself does there really exist among these ruined lines, edges, points, hollows and curves does there really exist here where one meets the path of rain, wind and ruin does there exist the movement of the face, shape of the tenderness of those who’ve waned so strangely in our lives, those who remained the shadow of waves and thoughts with the sea’s boundlessness or perhaps no, nothing is left but the weight the nostalgia for the weight of a living existence there where we now remain unsubstantial, bending like the branches of a terrible willow tree heaped in unremitting despair while the yellow current slowly carries down rushes uprooted in the mud image of a form that the sentence to everlasting bitterness has turned to stone: the poet a void. Shieldbearer, the sun climbed warring, and from the depths of the cave a startled bat hit the light as an arrow hits a shield: ‘’Ασíνην τε. . .’Ασíνην τε. . .’. If only that could be the king of Asini we’ve been searching for so carefully on this acropolis sometimes touching with our fingers his touch upon the stones. Asini, summer ’38—Athens, Jan. ’40

Oil on limbs, maybe a rancid smell as on the chapel’s oil-press here, as on the rough pores of the unturning stone. Oil on hair wreathed in rope and maybe other scents unknown to us poor and rich and statuettes offering small breasts with their fingers. Oil in the sun the leaves shuddered when the stranger stopped and the silence weighed between the knees. The coins fell: ‘In the goddess’s name I summon you...’ Oil on the shoulders and the flexing waist legs grass-dappled, and that wound in the sun as the bell rang for vespers as I spoke in the churchyard with a crippled man.

Teucer: . . . in sea-girt Cyprus, where it was decreed by Apollow that I should live, giving the city the name of Salamis in memory of my island home. . . . . . . . . . . Helen: I never went to Troy; it was a phantom. . . . . . . . . . . Servant: What? You mean it was only for a cloud that we struggled so much? — Euripides, Helen ‘The nightingales won’t let you sleep in Platres.’ Shy nightingale, in the breathing of the leaves, you who bestow the forest’s musical coolness on the sundered bodies, on the souls of those who know they will not return. Blind voice, you who grope in the darkness of memory for footsteps and gestures — I wouldn’t dare say kisses — and the bitter raving of the frenzied slave-woman. ‘The nightingales won’t let you sleep in Platres.’ Platres: where is Platres? And this island: who knows it? I’ve lived my life hearing names I’ve never heard before: new countries, new idiocies of men or of the gods; my fate, which wavers between the last sword of some Ajax and another Salamis, brought me here, to this shore. The moon rose from the sea like Aphrodite, covered the Archer’s stars, now moves to find the heart of Scorpio, and alters everything. Truth, where’s the truth? I too was an archer in the war; my fate: that of a man who missed his target. Lyric nightingale, on a night like this, by the shore of Proteus, the Spartan slave-girls heard you and began their lament, and among them — who would have believed it? — Helen! She whom we hunted so many years by the banks of the Scamander. She was there, at the desert’s lip; I touched her; she spoke to me: ‘It isn’t true, it isn’t true,’ she cried. ‘I didn’t board the blue bowed ship. I never went to valiant Troy.’ Breasts girded high, the sun in her hair, and that stature shadows and smiles everywhere, on shoulders, thighs and knees; the skin alive, and her eyes with the large eyelids, she was there, on the banks of a Delta. And at Troy? At Troy, nothing: just a phantom image. That’s how the gods wanted it. And Paris, Paris lay with a shadow as though it were a solid being; and for ten whole years we slaughtered ourselves for Helen. Great suffering had desolated Greece. So many bodies thrown into the jaws of the sea, the jaws of the earth so many souls fed to the millstones like grain. And the rivers swelling, blood in their silt, all for a linen undulation, a filmy cloud, a butterfly’s flicker, a wisp of swan’s down, an empty tunic — all for a Helen. And my brother? Nightingale nightingale nightingale, what is a god? What is not a god? And what is there in between them? ‘The nightingales won’t let you sleep in Platres.’ Tearful bird, on sea-kissed Cyprus consecrated to remind me of my country, I moored alone with this fable, if it’s true that it is a fable, if it’s true that mortals will not again take up the old deceit of the gods; if it’s true that in future years some other Teucer, or some Ajax or Priam or Hecuba, or someone unknown and nameless who nevertheless saw a Scamander overflow with corpses, isn’t fated to hear messengers coming to tell him that so much suffering, so much life, went into the abyss all for an empty tunic, all for a Helen.