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)
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
I like to begin where winds shake the first branch. ― Odysseus Elytis, Open Papers. (Copper Canyon Press, October 1, 1994)
The Vale of Soul-Making 