The Monogram (1971) - Odysseas Elytis
https://www.psu.edu/dept/cellwall/GreekStuff/Elytis/theMonogram.htm
Thus I speak for you and me
Because I love you and in love I know
How to enter like the Full Moon
From everywhere, for your small foot on the huge sheets
How to pluck jasmine flowers – and I have the power
To blow and move you asleep
Through moonlit passages and the sea’s secret arcades
Hypnotized trees with silvering spiderwebs
The waves have heard of you
How you caress, how you kiss
How you say in a whisper the “what” and the “eh”
Around the neck around the bay
Always we the light and shadow
Always you the little star and always I the dark boat
Always you the harbor and I the beacon on the right
The wet dockwall and the gleam on the oars
High in the house with the vine arbors
The bound-up rosebushes, the water that feels cold
Always you the stone statue and always I the lengthening shadow
The half-closed window shutter you, I the wind that opens it
Because I love you and I love you
Always you the coin and I the adoration that cashes it:
So much for the night, so much for the roar in wind
So much for the droplet in the air, so much for the quietude
Around the despotic sea
Arch of the sky with the stars
So much for your least breath
That I have nothing more
Amid the four walls, the ceiling, the floor
To cry out of you and so my own voice strikes me
To smell of you and so men turn wild
Because men can’t endure the untried
The brought from elsewhere and it’s early, hear me
It’s too early yet in this world my love
To speak of you and me.
Monogram III
It’s too early yet in this world, hear me?
The monsters have not yet been tamed, hear me
My lost blood and the pointed, hear me
Knife
Like a ram that runs amid the skies
And snaps the boughs of the stars, hear me
It’s I, hear me
I love you, hear me
I hold you and lead you and dress you
In Ophelia’s white bridal gown, hear me
Where do you leave me, where are you going and who, hear me
Who holds your hand over the floods
The day will come, hear me
The enormous lianas and the lava of volcanoes
Will bury us and thousands of years later, hear me
They’ll make us luminous fossils, hear me
For the heartlessness of men to shine, hear me
Over them
And throw us away in thousands of pieces, hear me
In the waters one by one, hear me
I count my bitter pebbles, hear me
And time is a great church, hear me
Where sometime the figures, hear me
Of Saints
Weep real tears, hear me
The bells open on high, hear me
A deep passage for me to pass through
The angels wait with candles and funeral psalms
I go nowhere, hear me
Either no one or we two together, hear me
This flower of tempest and, hear me
Of love
Once and for always we cut it, hear me
And it cannot come into bloom otherwise, hear me
In another earth, in another star, hear me
The soil, the very air we touched
Are no more, hear me
And no gardener was so fortunate in other times
To put forth a flower amid such a winter, hear me
And such northwinds, only we, hear me In the middle of the sea
From only the wish for love, hear me Raised a whole island, hear me
With caves and capes and flowering cliffs
Listen, listen
Who speaks to the waters and who weeps – hear?
Who seeks the other, who cries out – hear?
It’s I who cry out and it’s I who weep, hear me
I love you, I love you, hear me
Monogram IV Translated by Jeffrey Carson and Nicos Sarris
I have mapped out an island In Paradise
That looks like you and a house by the sea
With a large bed and a small door
I have cast a sound into the bottomless depths of the sea
To look at myself each morning when I arise
And see the half of you passing over the watery floor
As I weep for your other half in paradise
Monogram VII
Greek poet Odysseas Elytis was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1979
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1979/press.html
Odysseas Elytis was the poet of the Aegean Sea and Sun. The blue Aegean sea and the unaltered azure sky of the Greek islands, the glorious infinite light, the white small houses, the olive trees and the churches, ancient amphorae and ruins, summer high noons and the winds define the scene where life is liberated and triumphant, mystical and deeply meaningful. The influence of the sea and the sun is diffused in almost all his poems.
To be a Greek and a part of its twenty-five-century-old literary tradition was to Elytis a matter of great pride. His words, upon acceptance of the Nobel Prize, gave evidence of this deep regard for his people and country: "I would like to believe that with this year's decision, the Swedish Academy wants to honor in me Greek poetry in its entirety. I would like to think it also wants to draw the attention of the world to a tradition that has gone on since the time of Homer, in the embrace of Western civilization."
Odysseas Elytis wrote about his poetry:“I consider poetry a source of innocence full of revolutionary forces. It is my mission to direct these forces against a world my conscience cannot accept, precisely so as to bring that world through continual metamorphoses into greater harmony with my dreams. I am referring here to a contemporary kind of magic whose leads to the discovery of our true reality. It is for this reason that I believe, to the point of idealism, that I am moving in a direction which has never been attempted until now. In the hope of obtaining a freedom from all constraints and the justice which could be identified with absolute light, I am an idolater who, without wanting to do so, arrives at Christian sainthood. There was always the oriental side which occupied an important place in the Greek spirit. Throughout antiquity oriental values were assimilated. There exists an oriental side in the Greek which should not be neglected. It is for this reason that make the distinction”
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1979/elytis-lecture.html
He said: 'I never was a disciple of the surrealist school. I found certain congenial elements there, which I adapted to the Greek light. Europeans and Westerners always find mystery in obscurity, in the night, while we Greeks find it in light, which is for us an absolute'
Elytis was born Odysseus Alepoudelis, in the city of Heraklion, on the island of Crete. To avoid any association to his wealthy family of soap manufacturers, he later changed his surname to reflect those things he most treasured. Frank J. Prial of the New York Times explained that the poet's pseudonymous name was actually "a composite made up of elements of Ellas, the Greek word for Greece; elpidha, the word for hope; eleftheria, the word for freedom, and Eleni, the name of a figure that, in Greek mythology, personifies beauty and sensuality."
I have brought my life as far as this
To this point when the youth on the rocks,
Ever by the sea
Ever restless with the sea, breast
To breast with the wind
Where can a man go
When is nothing but a man
Reckoning in dews his green moments,
In waters his visions of his hearing,
In winds his pangs of remorse
Oh Life
Of a child who becomes a man
Ever by the sea
When the sun teaches him
To take a breathe there
Where vanishes the seagull's shadow
I have brought my life as far as this,
Stone vowed to the liquid element
Further off than the islands,
Lower than the waves
Neighbor to the anchors
-When the keels pass a new obstacle
And tear it with passion and conquer it
And hope with all her dolphin dawns
Gain of the sun in a man's heart-
The nets of doubt draw in
A figure of salt painfully chisled
Indifferent, white
Turning to the sea the void of the eyes
Sustaining the infinite.
http://img.pathfinder.gr/clubs/files_3/106359/4.pdf
Prosanatolismoi, 1940 - Orientations
© Translation: Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard
ORIENTATIONS published in 1936, was Elytis's first volume of poetry. Filled with images of light and purity, the work earned for its author the title of the "sun-drinking poet." Edmund Keeley, a frequent translator of Elytis's work, observed that these "first poems offered a surrealism that had a distinctly personal tone and a specific local habitation. The tone was lyrical, humorous, fanciful, everything that is young." In a review of a later work, The Sovereign Sun, a writer for the Virginia Quarterly Review echoed Keeley's eloquent praise: "An intuitive poet, who rejects pessimism and engages in his surrealistic images the harsh realities of life, Elytis is a voice of hope and naked vigor. There is light and warmth, an awakening to self, body, and spirit, in Elytis."
The poet, however, disagreed with such descriptions of his work. He suggested that "my theory of analogies may account in part for my having been frequently called a poet of joy and optimism. This is fundamentally wrong. I believe that poetry on a certain level of accomplishment is neither optimistic nor pessimistic. It represents rather a third state of the spirit where opposites cease to exist. There are no more opposites beyond a certain level of elevation. Such poetry is like nature itself, which is neither good nor bad, beautiful nor ugly; it simply 'is'. Such poetry is no longer subject to habitual everyday distinctions."
Elytis's work, To axion esti ("Worthy It Is"), came after a period of more than ten years of silence. Widely held to be his chef d'oeuvre, it is a poetic cycle of alternating prose and verse patterned after the ancient Byzantine liturgy. As in his other writings, Elytis depicted the Greek reality through an intensely personal tone. Keeley, the translator of the volume into English, suggested that To axion esti "can perhaps be taken best as a kind of spiritual autobiography that attempts to dramatize the national and philosophical extensions of the poet's personal sensibility. Elytis's strategy in this work . . . is to present an image of the contemporary Greek consciousness through the developing of a persona that is at once the poet himself and the voice of his country."
The blood of love has robed me in purple
And joys never seen before have covered me in shade.
I've become corroded in the south wind of humankind
Mother far away, my Everlasting Rose.
On the open sea they lay in wait for me,
With triple-masted men-of-war they bombarded me,
My sin that I too had a love of my own
Mother far away, my Everlasting Rose.
Once in July her large eyes
Half-opened, deep down my entrails, to light up
The virgin life for a single moment
Mother far away, my Everlasting Rose.
And since that day the wrath of ages
Has turned on me, shouting out the curse:
"He who saw you, let him live in blood and stone"
Mother far away, my Everlasting Rose.
Once again I took the shape of my native country,
I grew and flowered among the stones.
And the blood of killers I redeem with light
Mother far away, my Everlasting Rose.
THE AXION ESTI, by Odysseus Elytis (1911-1996) Translated by Edmund Keeley and George Savidis
Elytis poem - Monogram
The Monogram was written between 1969 and 1971 in Paris by the self-exiled poet. Ιt is considered to be one of the world's masterpieces of dramatic love poetry
The Monogram stands as a celebration of Elytis’ following own words: I introduced to poetry a new method of understanding the world through the senses... To me the senses do not necessarily carry erotic implications, as they have an air of holiness. Furthermore we can say that every reader who reads The Monogram may discover the endless dimensions of love; thus he comes closer, in a way, to immortality
Ανθ’ ημών η αγάπη – Instead of us is Love
“This is why I write. Because poetry starts where death does not have the last word. It is the end of one life and the beginning of another, which is similar to the first one, but it goes very deep, to the utmost point that the soul could trace, at the borders of antitheses, there where the Sun and Hades touch each other. The endless impetus toward the physical light which is the Word and the non-created light which is God”