Odysseus Elytis Poems

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"Calendar of an Invisible April"
Translation from Greek: Marios Dikaiakos


"The wind was wistling continuously, it was 
getting darker, and that distant voice was 
incessantly reaching my ears : "an entire life"...
"an entire life"...
On the opposite wall, the shadows of the 
trees were playing cinema"

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"It seems that somewhere people are celebrating;
although there are no houses or human beings
I can listen to guitars...Read more of this...

Drinking Corinthian Sun 
Translated by Jeffrey Carson and Nikos Sarris 

Drinking Corinthian sun
Reading the old marbles
Striding through vineyard seas
Aiming the harpoon
At a votive fish that slips away
I found the leaves the sun's psalm learns by heart
The living shore desire rejoices
To open 

I drink water I cut fruit
I thrust my hand in the wind's foliage
Lemon trees irrigate the summer pollen
Green birds...Read more of this...

LATE MIDNIGHT my room is moving in the
neighborhood shining like an emerald.
Someone searches it, but truth eludes him
constantly. How to imagine that it is
placed lower

Much lower

That death too, has its own Red sea." ...Read more of this...

O body of summer, naked, burnt
Eaten away by oil and salt
Body of rock and shudder of the heart
Great ruffling wind in the osier hair
Breath of basil above the curly pubic mound
Full of stars and pine needles
Body, deep vessel of the day! ...Read more of this...

If you are of the Atreides go
elsewhere to shout aloud.
Such fire doesn't kindle the sun
here where conscience rose and
took on a maiden's real body. ...Read more of this...

Translation from Greek: Marios Dikaiakos

I know that all this is worthless and that the language
I speak doesn't have an alphabet

Since the sun and the waves are a syllabic script
which can be deciphered only in the years of sorrow and exile

And the motherland a fresco with successive overlays
frankish or slavic which, should you try to restore,
you are immediately sent to prison...Read more of this...

Heleni
Translated by Daphne on May 17th, 1995


By the first drop of rain the summer died 
The words that had bore those stary nights got wet
All those words that had one sole destination You!
Where will our hands reach now that weather no longer cares for us
Where will our eyes rest now that the distant lines got dispersed in the clouds
Now that...Read more of this...