Greek Poetry - A Sample

Alkis Alkeos:
The first cigarette

The day is breaking and the city reposes
in our neighborhood a chimney is smoking
and I want you like the first cigarette
like bitter coffee
like bitter coffee

The streets are empty, no soul can be seen
the moon has just set down in the West
and I seek you like a final solution
like the sunrise
like the sunrise

The sun has risen and on the radio
a hasapiko is crying for some Tassos
and I bet on you and then I pass you by the card
four of a kind
four of a kind

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Konstantinos P. Kavafis:
Ithaca

As you set out for Ithaca
hope your road is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
angry Poseidon - don't be afraid of them:
you' ll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
wild Poseidon - you won't encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.

Hope your road is a long one.
May there be many summer mornings when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you enter harbours you're seeing for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind -
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to learn and go on learning from their scholars.

Keep Ithaca always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you're destined for.
But don't hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you're old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you've gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaca to make you rich.
Ithaca gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you wouldn't have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.

And if you find her poor, Ithaca won't have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you'll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

.::::

Interval of Joy:
George Seferis
We were happy all that morning
Ï God how happy.
First the stones the leaves and the flowers shone
and then the sun
a huge sun all thorns but so very high in the heavens.
Á Nymph was gathering our cares and hanging them on the trees
a forest of Judas trees.
Cupids and satyrs were singing and playing
and rosy limbs could be glimpsed amid black laurel
the flesh of young children.
We were happy all that morning;
the abyss was a closed well
ïn which the tender foot of a young faun stamped
do ãïõ remember its laughter: how happy we were!
And then clouds rain and the damp earth;
you stopped laughing when you reclined in the hut,
and opened your large eyes and gazed
on the archangel wielding a fiery sword

"É cannot explain it," you said, "É cannot explain it,"
É find people impossible to understand
however much they may play with colors
they are all black.

Translated by Kimon Friar.

.::::

Calendar of an Invisible April:
Odysseas Elytis

"The wind was wistling continuously, it was
getting darker, and that distant voice was
incessantly reaching my ears : "an entire life"...
"an entire life"...
On the opposite wall, the shadows of the
trees were playing cinema"

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"It seems that somewhere people are celebrating;
although there are no houses or human beings
I can listen to guitars and other laughters which
are not nearby

Maybe far away, within the ashes of heavens
Andromeda, the Bear, or the Virgin...

I wonder; is loneliness the same, all over the
worlds ? "

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"Almond-shaped, elongated eyes, lips; perfumes stemming
from a premature sky of great feminine delicacy
and fatal drunkeness.

I leant on my side -almost fell- onto the
hymns to the Virgin and the cold of spacious
gardens.

Prepared for the worst."


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"FRIDAY, 10c

LATE MIDNIGHT my room is moving in the
neighborhood shining like an emerald.
Someone searches it, but truth eludes him
constantly. How to imagine that it is
placed lower

Much lower

That death too, has its own Red sea."


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Translation from Greek: Marios Dikaiakos