SONG OF OLD TIMES by Nikos Gatsos

Λουκάς Γεραλής

For George Seferis

Times change, years pass

the river of the world is muddy

but I go out on the balcony of a dream

to see you bent over your clay

embroider ships and swallows.

The sea is bitter, our land small

the water in the clouds dear

the cypress wrapped in bareness

the grass burns to ashes in silence

and the hunt of the sun is endless.

And you came and carved a fountain

for the old shipwrecked man of the sea

who vanished but a memory of him

remains

a gleaming shell on Amorgos

a salty pebble on Santorini.

From the dew that shakes on a fern

I have taken the drop of a pomegranate

so I can in this notebook

spell out the longings of a heart

with the first star of a fable.

But now that Holy Tuesday arrives

and Easter will come slowly

I want you to go to Mani and to Crete

with your company there perpetually

the wolf the eagle and the asp.

And when you see the shooting star

from another time shine on your face

secretly with delicate twinkle, stand up

bring back again a spring

that wells up in your own rock

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Times change, years pass

the river of the world clouds over

but I go out on the balcony of a dream

to see you bent over your clay

embroider ships and swallows

source: http://nauplion.net/NIKOSGATSOS.html

The Cretan by Dionysios Solomos (Selections from a Fragment)

And the sea, that earlier stirred like boiling liquid,

Became still and everywhere spread calm and quiet,

Like a fragrant flower bed reflecting stars bright;

A certain secret mystery embraced all of nature

Adorning it with beauty and peace like a quiet pasture.

In the sky there was no breath, on the sea the blowing

Wind was gentle as a bee’s brush of a flower in its flying…

And before me, lo, appeared she, dressed in the moon.

The cool light trembled in front of her divine sight,

In her dark eyes and in her golden hair so bright.

I gazed at her, wretched me, she gazed at me intently.

Thought to myself I had seen her, way back in the past

Perhaps in a church painted by an artist unsurpassed… 

In the Woods with Orestes Kanellis

 

 Orestes Kanellis was born in 1910 in Smyrni.  He died in Athens in 1979.

GEORGE SEFERIS: An Old Man on the River Bank

Painting by Emmanuel Zairis 

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

George Seferis, "Mythistorema" from Collected Poems (George Seferis). Translated, edited, and introduced by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Copyright © 1995 by George Seferis.

Zissimos Lorenzatos: “One Instant!”

For it is not enough to say what you are; you must also be what you say.  Without putting into effect God’s commandment to love, man will never change, and neither will the world.  Our only hope lies in this simple thing, which is also the most difficult thing of all.  The world would change in one instant if we were able to love, if we could change the inner man...