28.3.17

two poems in "austerity measures"




















Two poems, "Mosquito" and "The poet in the hallway", from my second book in Greek, Akalyptos (Uncovered - or, in A.E. Stallings', the poems' translator's, rendition, Unsheltered; Kastaniotis, 2008) are included in Karen Van Dyck's anthology Austerity Measures - the new Greek poetry (Penguin, 2016; New York Review Books, 2017).


9.11.16

łazienki

























ŁAZIENKI


The squirrel kept sniffing in the wet grass
Its busy tail irritated the peacocks
that strutted around screeching
among the flower-beds, on the verandas
Their claws stabbed at the stone slabs

The last king, Poniatowski, slept uneasily
Ryx, his trusted companion, lay awake next door
A humble barber from Flanders
personal guard, manager, at last a nobleman
his coat of arms, a Ring

The little Water Palace unsuspecting
bridged the lake
A few years hence the country would be torn in three
half a century a later, swiftly and soundlessly
arisen from their barracks at the Park's other end
the select young men of Archduke Konstantin, the Russian
would cross the pavements
Disguised as a woman, he fled

One more uprising got drowned in blood
and thirty three years later
the Kingdom of Poland
was erased

In black, the women sold
hid their jewels
They put on
iron chains


[This poem, translated from the Greek (in Polonia, Kastaniotis Editions, 2016) by Panayotis Ioannidis, was anthologised in Th. Chiotis' [ed.] Futures – Poetry of the Greek Crisis (Penned in the Margins, 2015). Photo by P.I., Łazienki, iv.2004]


19.6.16

towards aristodikos



















TOWARDS ARISTODIKOS


After quarrying, if the marble is not to be worked on immediately, it is buried back into the earth: so that it may stay fresh, retain its juices.

~

In the foundations of the house where, years ago, we used to spend our holidays, an ancient road had been found, with traces of a vehicle on the rock. And, next to it, a funerary stele. A block away, the archaeologists never so much as complained when I slipped in amongst them while they worked. And after they abandoned the site, I would go and hide small treasures there among the ruins: a torchlight, a square battery, a box of matches, a couple of toy cars. In case of emergency.
~

I was born opposite the Archaeological Museum. Ever since I was little, every time I went in, I would turn left and keep my head up, looking for the smile of the Kouroi.

Were these funerary statues a debt to the dead dictated by a higher order of things?

How did art give form to such desires?


Almost simultaneously, statues appeared in the temples of the gods as well as on graves. The funerary statue is both a form of the objective debt to the dead and a fulfilment of the spiritual need of the living to have before them the dead person's likeness.

On my way out, I would slide down the inclined marbles to the left and right of the forecourt's wide steps. The marble, slightly concave in the middle, worn smooth from wear, was almost soft – and invariably warm.

~

















Aristodikos, the last Kouros, isn't smiling.

The eyes of Aristodikos are shadowed –not just literally, due to their sockets' curvature– but also metaphorically, as if by the shadow of memory.

At the Museum, we indeed come across him last in the sequence of Kouroi. Christos Karouzos –Director from 1942 to 1964, formidable archaeologist, unrivaled writer, lover of poetry– who loved and studied him, estimates that he died at the age of twenty five, around 500BC. On precious marble from Paros –the best for moulding the body–, his family asked for his form to be carved in full relief. They set it by the grave next to the road –as was the custom– at the edge of their estate in Mesogeia, in the locality of “Phinikia”. But twenty years later, they also laid the statue down to rest over the buried body, and covered it with soil. To save it from the Persians, about to burn down Attica from end to end, up to the Parthenon.

Almost intact, protected from the sun and rain, the statue then returned to earth.

It rose again 25 centuries later.

In 1944, the property owner sends over labourers to till his field. The plough hits on stone. Again and again. They get hold of hoes to dig it out, they unbury a body, whole.

Only the hands are missing. And the feet break off at the delicate ankles.

It would be ungrateful to complain about the degree of its preservation. Only the hands are entirely missing. Of the lesser wounds, the most annoying is the disfigurement of the eyes, lips and especially the nose, most probably caused by the frequent passing over of the plough.


For years the plough passed
over the face

Over and over the plough passed
on the face


They load the statue on a carriage, cover it with straw, take it to the Museum in secret. To the empty Museum: all the statues are already asleep, buried in the soil, under the floor of the halls, since the eve of the German invasion. (Months of secret toil, under Semni Karouzou's supervision.)

The monuments that were saved are “fortune's children”.

~

I still strive to see
what the hands held

Fruit
bottle, cup
weapon or bridle

Or nothing –
Open palms
full of arrival

They might have held
scales
offered
fair opposites
Except they 're missing

Back to the earth
whence they emerged
idle they have returned
As prescribed
by the order of time

Now equidistant
brokenly
they balance




















~

The statue does not unfold its world outwards but has gathered its strength in, as if meditating on some inner stirring.

Karouzos, in his study on Aristodikos, includes a long list of attic sculptures from 550-480 BC. There, twice he refers to Rilke:

540-530
Stele of two siblings in New York and Berlin – incontestable seems the kinship of the girl's head with the “Rilke” head in the Louvre.
...
Male head Louvre 695 – which, according to Haussmann, may be the subject of Rilke's sonnet “Fruehe Apollo”
 

As sometimes between the yet leafless branches
a morning looks through that is already
radiant with spring: so nothing of his head
could prevent the splendour of all poems

from striking us with almost lethal force;
for there is yet no shadow in his gaze,
his temples are yet too cool for the laurel crown,
and only later from his eyebrows' arches

will the rose garden lift up on tall stems,
from which petals, loosened, one by one
will drift down on the trembling of his mouth,

which now is yet quiet, never-used, and gleaming
and only drinking something with its smile
as though its song were being instilled in him.


Rilke wrote this poem in Paris, on July 11, 1906. Although in May of that year his term as Rodin's secretary had ended following a rupture between the two men, his New Poems –the First Book (1907) of which opens with this sonnet– are written under the influence of the great sculptor who seems to have shown him anew how to see and how to reflect.

Three years earlier, near the end of his essay, Auguste Rodin, Rilke had said about his sculptures: “a great gesture seems to live and to force space to participate in its movement.”

~

Upon the pedestal, rises the youthful form of Aristodikos, slender in its deeper conception. With difficulty might it be said that he is standing. We would be closer to this image of a man imperceptibly moving, were we to say that he witholds movement. Nor is it possible to speak of a state arrived at but, rather, of a force in action.

~

Funerary statues stop, so far as we can see today, a little after 500BC, for sixty years or so. Archaeological research has almost unanimously conceded Milchhoefer's conjecture that a law that came out in Athens according to Cicero, “a fair while” after Solon, against the lavishness of funerary monuments, must indeed belong to this late archaic period, and possibly to Kleisthenes, as Hirschfeld subsequently hypothesized. Cicero's source is known to be Demetrius Phalereus and this vir eruditissimus in turn draws information and suggestions for his own radical restrictions on grave monuments from Plato and the preceding attic legislation. An attractive hypothesis, though no more, is that this law is contemporaneous and not unrelated to the law of ostracism.

I might almost not have existed

~

ARISTODIKO: the name of the dead in the genitive, on the statue's pedestal.

The mere name of a man is tantamount to anonymity.

The pedestal is preserved, and the name, and the plinth of the statue. But –a strange thing, unexpected for a work such as this– there is no funerary epigram to be found.


Voice
that does not reach out from the stone
speak up

Whose face?
Distance touches it
as pain returns
to its black owner

The eyes no longer
oppose
the most beautiful thing
springing
from life renounced

Each morning
there survives a song
From dreams

Which one has dripped
on his half-parted lips
so he now sings, upright and whole?

Threshold of song
mouth
of a lost youth

Music
breath of statues
silence of images

Space of the heart
suddenly so large




















Note: This text (translated by Konstantine Matsoukas) is a fragment of a work in progress, re-contextualised for publication in NICE! Is return possible?, ed.: Salon de Vortex (Y. Grigoriadis & Y. Isidorou), 2016, together with the three pairs of my photographs that, in addition to my photograph of the statue, appear here. In italics, phrases from Ch. I. Carouzos's monograph, Aristodikos (1961). The translation of Rilke's poem is by Dylan Schenker [http://earlyapollo.blogspot.gr/2007/09/critical-analysis.html]; that of his essay, Auguste Rodin, by Jessie Lemont and Hans Trausil (1919).

8.11.15

2 poems @ "futures" + 1 poem @ poetry london




















Unfathomable
this love of Jan Sobieski
for his enemy’s beauty [1]


I won't, unfortunately, be able to assist at any of the launch events: tomorrow's, for issue 82 [Autumn 2015] of "Poetry London", or the two events for Futures: Poetry of the Greek Crisis (Penned in the Margins, London, 2015) in Oxford and London, later in the week.

But I greatly treasure the pleasure of having poems of mine appear in both publications. 

"Burning candle" (translated by myself and Stefanos Basigkal; its two final stanzas appear in [2], below), from my 2008 book (in Greek), The lifesaver (Kastaniotis editions), is published -thanks to editor Ahren Warner- in "Poetry London". And it's quite moving for me that, amongst the various poetic riches in the issue, there appear poems by two UK poets I have had the privilege to meet and translate: David Harsent and Fiona Sampson.

Two poems from my upcoming (in Greek), third book, Poland (Kastaniotis editions), translated by myself, appear in the stimulating and provocative anthology that Theodoros Chiotis edited for Penned in the Margins: "Łazienki" and "Jan III" [whose opening lines appear in [1], above].


But before dozing yesterday I forgot
blew out the flame – the wall
got splashed above the second pillow

with melted candle wax
Nothing then could comfort me – as if
it were a human being – and I were to blame [2]


[the photograph was taken in Poland, in 2008 - from my ongoing visual diary]

4.5.15

3 poems @ hotel amerika













Just before lowering his bow
the violinist sees his mother
straightening his collar before the parade

Unfathomable
this love

As everyone got up to leave
we stayed put quietly in our seats

*

Very happy that translations of three poems of mine -"Cadenza" (from my first Greek book, The lifesaver; translated by myself and Stefanos Basigkal), "Chinese movie" (from the second, Uncovered; translated by Moira Egan), and "Jan III" (as yet unpublished in Greek)- appear in the current, 13th volume of "Hotel Amerika" (editor, David Lazar) - amongst a wonderfully diverse and exciting selection of poetry, essays, fiction, trans-genre texts, etc.

(A few lines from each poem form the collage at the top.)

[photograph from my ongoing visual diary, here]

8.1.15

2 poems @ drunkenboat





















issue 19 of "drunken boat" hosts "the orchard" and "in summer, he":



IN SUMMER HE




Salt on his chest and sand on his back
the sun wedged in his eye
all day he wanders
and you have no rest
A sun with heavy eyelashes
animal gait
*
He goes out walking on his own
in the summer noon
Dogs stop in their tracks
turn round and curl up in the doorways
Men shut up in their bedrooms
sweat in their sleep
His steps melt the asphalt
Women hear him coming
and close the windows tight
Children stop their games
Run to the shutters
They only see his bare feet
The city swelters in the sun
the walls are peeling
Its only freshness, he
– taking alone to the streets
*
I first came upon him a full moon
at the end of a passage
between two whitewashed walls –
the quick-lime, his shirt
the moon hanging above
The second time I met him
at the opposite end of that passage
shirtless and
with the sun on his head
The wall curved behind him
a huge palm
pushed him towards me
The way was narrow
I pressed against the whitewash
– he didn’t even notice
Third time I saw him from afar
walk on the asphalt
barefoot –
in early morning’s yellow light
The road skirted the rock
above the sea
Suddenly he paused
and started down the slope
–almost vertical– running
without grabbing onto the bushes
He reached the water –
he stares, hands in his pockets
*
Now nothing’s wanting –
a precipitous thyme
the thickly flowing heatwave
the water’s scales
The sea swells like a face
that’s holding back its tears
He stands he won’t go in


- both from my first book of poems, The lifesaver [To sossivio], Kastaniotis Editions, 2008, and both translated by myself and Stephanos Basigkal.

[photo: p.i., viii.2008 - from my ongoing visual diary]

1.7.12

no oracles here



















Is attempting to translate poetry at the site where Apollo's priests used to translate Pythia's mutterings into equivocal verses, a good idea - or an affront to the God who led the Muses?


At any rate, we tried, and enjoyed it too: at the European Cultural Center of Delphi last week, a group of Greek poets (Socrates Kabouropoulos and Vassilis Manoussakis -the Workshop's co-organisers-, Krystalli Glyniadakis, Panayotis Ioannidis, Dimitra Kotoula, Aris Koutougkos, Angelos Parthenis, Kallia Papadaki, and Thanassis Polyzoidis) and translator Elena Stagkouraki, translated into Greek, poems by anglophone poets Moira Egan, Elaine Feinstein, Adrianne Kalfopoulou and Fiona Sampsonand were translated by them, as well as by translator Richard Pierce. Three days of hard work - and no kidding: at the rate of one poem per two hours, I felt ravenous at 14:00, despite a hearty breakfast at 9:00. (Blessed be "Bacchus"' divine cooking!) Then we revised in the afternoon (my swimming things remained unused, in the trunk of the car), before each evening's reading to the fading sound of the cicadas, and the waning evening light.

And on the fourth day, the fruit of our toil was presented -together with Greek translations of poems by Michael Symmons Roberts, who could not make it to Delphi, as well as work by other Greek poets, translated on previous years- in the packed garden of the always welcoming Athens Center, in collaboration with the British Council.



It was strange, and incredibly rewarding, to experience relationships growing through the traffic of shared words and working side by side; one can't help but wish for more.


[photo: p.i., 2006]