Your eyes, watching, would be beautiful,your eyes, reaching out, would glow,your lips would come alive, as they used to,at such a miracle;you were searching for itwhat were you looking for in front of ashesor in the rain in the fog in the windeven when the lights were growing dimand the city was sinking and on… Continue reading Giorgos Seferis
Our life is always a separationand a more difficult presence. — Giorgos Seferis, from “Letter to Rex Warner,” Collected Poems (Princeton University Press, 1969)
But to say what you want to say, you must create another language and nourish it for years and years with what you have loved, with what you have lost, with what you will never find again. — Giorgos Seferis, A Poet’s Journal: Days of 1945-1951. (iUniverse November 23, 1999) Oribinally published January 1st 1974.
We have no rivers, we have no wells, we have no springs; / only a few cisterns — and these empty — that echo, and we worship / them. A stagnant hollow sound, the same as our loneliness, / the same as our love, the same as our bodies. — Giorgos Seferis; from strophe 10… Continue reading Giorgos Seferis
Beauty and the Illiterate Often, in the Repose of Evening her soul took a lightness from the mountains across, although the day was harsh and tomorrow foreign. But, when it darkened well and out came the priest’s hand over the little garden of the dead, She Alone, Standing, with the few domestics… Continue reading Odysseus Elytis
In the final analysis, roses are nothing but tears. Nothing but the whistle of the leaving train and the breach of a promise. Sorrow, too, is nothing but an evening leaning on April. — Odysseus Elytis, from “Disappointment Below Zero,” Cards on the Table (1974) (collection of essays and letters, 1936-1974)
In my ripped clothes I have a tender heart made of birds and flowers (How many nights I cried secretly for the wound of the butterfly). — Yannis Ritsos, from “The March of the Ocean,” Yannis Ritsos: Poems. (Libros Libertad, September 29, 2010)
You’ll come to learn a great deal if you study the Insignificant in depth. ― Odysseus Elytis
Do you know the flowing hair that wrote the wind? The glances that ran parallel with time? The silence that understood itself? — Odysseus Elytis, from “Windows Toward The Fifth Season,” trans. Kimon Friar, The Collected Poems of Odysseus Elytis (Johns Hopkins University, 1997)
If a separate personal Paradise exists for each of us, mine must be irreparably planted with trees of words which the wind silvers like poplars, by people who see their confiscated justice given back, and by birds that even in the midst of truth of death insist on singing in Greek and saying eros, eros,… Continue reading Odysseus Elytis
The Vale of Soul-Making 