Με την ευγενική χορηγία του Ιδρύματος με την επωνυμία «Κληροδότημα Δημητρίου και Λιλίκας Μωραιτη-Άνδρου»- Καϊρειος Βιβλιοθήκη [επιμέλεια έκδοσης Άργα]
Μετάφραση-Εισαγωγή: Γιάννης Γκούμας
COMPLETION OF A CARGO STEAMER
The calm of her eyes was disturbed like the waters of a jury but her recovered sight finally prevailed and flew to the transluscence of her vaulted dream as a fly flies from the nose of a sleeping child to the whirl of a glimmering silence. Then the assembled law observers decided to do away with silence once and for all and raise at the very spot a statue of the calm of her eyes because the young woman held in her hands her recovered sight like a miraculous snake.
*
SUCKLING OF MARES
Starting off in a circle the gun’s morsels arrived even earlier than the stroke of light. A young lady stood up in the dark and was at once replaced by another young lady who offered nuptial coaching in correlative flashes of twenty-thousandfold centuries. But the demand of lilies was not met because the gardener’s slap exposed the snow-white skin of the new day and animated the glow of her immaculate breast word for word and almost diagonally.
WAVES (Canada), Vol. 4, No. 2, Winter 1976.
*
LIGHT ON A WHALE
The initial form of woman was the interweaving of two dinosaur necks. Times changed after that and woman too changed shape. She became much smaller more fluid more adjusted to the two-masted (in some countries three-masted) ships that sail above the misfortunes of life’s struggles. Woman herself floats on the scales of a cylinder-carrying dove of long trajectory. Times change and in our time woman resembles the chasm of a fuse.
PLATFORM (UK), 5, 1972.
CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE IN TRANSLATION (Canada), No. 14, Fall/Winter 72/73.
HELLENIC QUARTERLY (Greece), No. 10, November 2001.
*
TIME
She bared her breast like a fan and bowed at a time when the legends of the darkest towns arise. There was just a rattle of teeth and the present vanished forever. In its old footprints stood something of something else. The night swept away the remaining branches and the root of the tree was strewn with ashes.
SHENANDOAH (USA), Vol. XIX, Autumn 1967, No. 1.
NINE GREEK POETS, Athens Publishing Center, 1968.
HELLENIC QUARTERLY (Greece), No. 10, November 2001.
*
THE BELLS OF A FRIGATE
The front line disappeared. After thirty-two minutes had elapsed there sprouted in its place our very dream with us concealed in its azure leaves. Two years later we reemerged from the liturgy attended also by the wings of our women and our women tall (taller now than before) and holding smooth almost slimy oars came to glean us. It was morning. Morning soon turned into evening but an evening of elegance despite the fact that it was panoplied and guided us. Then and only then did the seven year-old rabbit emerge from the hair of the universe and running towards us we saw our front line with three stars round its neck.
*
DECEIT
Nothing accomplished. Ashes everywhere. Everywhere murders. Each day brings another day and the shoeshine parlour’s stock is gradually diminishing. A few brave attendants peel off the skin on their arms and wear large umbrellas in front of milky mirrors. The young maidens remaining rooted in their tracks impregnate their shadows. Two nereids puff and blow. A truncated cone persists. The hair on its head is proof of an accomplished fact.
PLATFORM (UK), 5, 1972.
NINE GREEK POETS, Athens Publishing Center, 1968.
*
THE BLENDING OF COLOURS RESEMBLES A NATIONAL FEAST
When the rocket ceased to emit sperm the buzzing of floating villas continued. Inside the secret watertank a drop fastened itself on the breast of a young girl who attended to the silken crops of her own nonchalance. The girl was named Maria and from her left foot dangled an ornate lizard eyeless but with a double tail. When the rock upon which she stood crumbled away she became a tulip and the drop that fell from her breast blossomed and in its place ever since stands an immature almond tree.
SHENANDOAH (USA), Vol. XIX, Autumn 1967, No. 1.
NINE GREEK POETS, Athens Publishing Center, 1968.
PLATFORM (UK), 5, 1972.
HELLENIC QUARTERLY (Greece), No. 10, November 2001.
*
INSTEAD OF A TEACUP
One girlfriend met another girlfriend. The bonds that held the cicadas of their navels together drifted apart like newly poured steel and the two friends became a brooch.
NINE GREEK POETS, Athens Publishing Center, 1968.
CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE IN TRANSLATION (Canada), No. 14, Fall/Winter 72/73.
HELLENIC QUARTERLY (Greece), No. 10, November 2001.
*
BITTER THORN
The maiden I met in my drawer appeared and was lost again. In her place a tulip holds the phosphorescence of her frieze. Settlers exploit the spaces she abandoned but the youth of memories carries tentacles which resemble the six different sensual pleasures of the maiden who was basically mother of her child and mother of mine. Occasionally I dwell in the drawer. But each time certain matters are not named other than mantles under which the bases of a tragic curtain are being undermined I take her last handkerchief and beg my frog to do away with every moan that can possibly exist in the armchairs and over the curtains.
NINE GREEK POETS, Athens Publishing Center, 1968.
PLATFORM (UK), 5, 1972.
*
WINTER GRAPES
They took away her toys and her lover. So she bowed her head and almost died. But her thirteen destinies like her fourteen years pierced the fleeting disaster. No one spoke. No one ran to protect her from the overseas sharks which had already put the evil eye on her like a fly staring with malice on a diamond or a magic land. And so this story was heartlessly forgotten as usually happens when a ranger leaves behind his thunderbolt in the forest.
CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE IN TRANSLATION (Canada), No. 27, Summer 1977. Contemporary Greek Issue. Guest Editor: YANNIS GOUMAS.
*
ISFAHAN
A most violent storm covered the land. Rocks came crashing down upon the broad-brimmed lakes and the injured fish dragged itself to the anachorites’ post. No help was available there because the dinosaurs’ bleating scattered its wings here and there and the mushrooms suppressed the actual happenings in the hovering bridal procession of sighs of a new planet. After this nothing again was the same. Peace no longer existed as an actual entity. Camels controlled disaster. Flowers bloomed on the temples of the dead. The few doves roughed it for the lake’s pulp had formed a channel at the narrowest point of their crossing of innumerable insults trampled down by a fit of frenzy of mothers and infants thinner than bats’ bones.
*
LEGENDARY SOFA
The continuity of the river was interrupted. But the landscape’s coherence was such that the river continued to flow. From within the leaves of the field towards the bridge seared by the sun the esparto the white breasts the flowers within the transparent shirts they placed on dawn girls stooped naked or almost naked to cuddle and generally to fondle their bodies and the bodies of flowers. Its peripheral road became the road of an entire city and the river that divides it into six parts embraces the hour that caught the landscape in the fingers of destiny.
CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE IN TRANSLATION (Canada), No. 27, Summer 1977. Contemporary Greek Issue. Guest Editor: YANNIS GOUMAS.
*
CORINTHIAN SUN
Since the tree’s wantonness did not survive since the harpoon is impoverished since the climber of nightingales has grown bold since the cicada dozes on the harness of the wine procession every kneecap has been and is being banned and the most hapless of lions are being ridiculed. Malaise sighs and begs to be relieved of her coat but its teeth are so heavy that they fall on caterpillars and the nightbirds on the stud farms take advantage of the impassion of maidens who still abide in the pockets of purple mantles. Beyond them there is only their hair and the bodyguards are making merry.
*
A BEAUTIFUL MORNING
Like the sea that kisses the hand of a maiden rose the voice of our dream. Three hundred dwarfs surrounded our mystagogy. A few exhibited insanity but the majority squeezed their hearts dry and ate them. Last evening’s leaves fall and all the maidens who had known love tap their hands and foreheads with devotion for our devotion and become increasingly like us as we resemble more and more their blue breasts and the brooches of their bosom.
NINE GREEK POETS, Athens Publishing Center, 1968.
*
DESIRE
Prone and with sugar on the lips he reclined on the aureole of love. The call was not long being granted. Two birds first took it then the wires of the compassionate plot and lastly five cocks that resembled trained horses and placed it between her thighs. The response of extrinsic components disappeared and with longing with fragrant seaweed and with scintillating sighs she came clean and unrestrained like an intrinsic passing cloud. Now they are both called Meropi.
*
A VIRTUOUS WOMAN IS WORTH THREE BIRDS
A WOMAN SIMPLY WOMAN IS WORTH DOZENS OF ROEBUCKS
The rowing was reddish. The sperm we traversed was richer than the water of the warmest of festivities thus we arrived decidedly superior both as oarsmen and as conductors of our deliverance. Now even the schizomycetes of yesterday acclaim us and no one mocks. Almond trees blossom on our arms and from our eyes ascend and descend scales of royal purple with the zeal and self-denial of those whose longing for a real woman is emancipated.
NINE GREEK POETS, Athens Publishing Center, 1968.
*
SPINDLE OF NOCTURNAL REPOSE
We are all within our future. When we sing we sing before the expressive pictures of painters when we bow before the straw of a burnt city when we become one with the drizzle of a shudder we are all within our future for whatever we pursue it is not possible for us to say no to say yes without the future of our destiny just as a woman can do nothing without the fire she encloses in the ashes of her feet. Whoever saw her did not stop to gaze either at the twisting garden plots or the feast of her worshipped hair or the flutes of laboratory transfusions from one country into the veins of a warm bay sheltered from worldly things and the etesian winds of the azure glow of slender virgins. We are all in the future of a compound flag that holds the enemy fleets before the lips of my heart safeguarding illusions vouching for intermediary imploring reforms without realizing the object of the struggle. Snapshots have shown the correctness of our path towards the trainer of the same phantom of a dream’s origin and of each dweller in the heart of an ancient city. When our annals are exhausted we shall appear more naked than the arrival of the condemnation of similar tentacles and clean winches for we are all within the silence of pain plunging into the purling wiles of our future.
CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE IN TRANSLATION (Canada), No. 27, Summer
1977. Contemporary Greek Issue. Guest Editor: YANNIS GOUMAS.
*
TRUSSED UP
Forward to the trains. To the boats and bundles that hunt us as they hunt under the petticoats of women who mount bulls who love creole girls who love negroes who love parish deans who glow and till the shallows of night. No one knows the dawn that bids us join her. Our hunting is discriminate because they love us because we love them and go to our women with our bulls in seaweed of women we love.
*
DEPTH
The voice’s breach propels the bloodclot’s course and on the summit gapes the joy of the arrival of another dolichocephalous woman. Her petals have closed and the necklace she bent to touch provokes and safeguards her copulation beyond the haystacks and the velvets of the shore. The hour does not kindle like a furnace but brings down the walls and circulates amid the joy of her arrival and so the gradual spreading of intercourse resembles the hideouts of lovers who remain united standing up as well as lying down within the dense tufts of their vowels.