Beauty and the Illiterate

by Odysseas Elytis *

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 of the night—the blowing

rosemary and the murmur of smoke from the kilns—

at sea's entry, wakeful

Otherly beauty!

Only the waves' words half-guessed or in a rustle, and others

resembling the dead's that startle in the cypress, strange

zodiacs that lit up her magnetic moon-turned head.

And one

Unbelievable cleanliness allowed, to great depth in her, the real

landscape to be seen,

Where, near the river, the dark ones fought against the Angel,

exactly showing how she's born, Beauty

Or what we otherwise call tear.

And long as her thinking lasted, you could feel it overflow the

glowing sight bitterly in the eyes and the huge, like an

ancient prostitute's, cheekbones

Stretched to the extreme points of the Large Dog and of the Virgin.

"Far from the pestilential city I dreamed of her deserted place

where a tear may have no meaning and the only light be

from the flame that ravishes all that for me exists.

"Shoulder-to-shoulder under what will be, sworn to extreme silence

and the co-ruling of the stars,

"As if I didn't know yet, the illiterate, that there exactly, in extreme

silence are the most repellent thuds

"And that, since it became unbearable inside a man's chest, solitude

dispersed and seeded stars!"

For Efessos 

Freely beside me the vineyards are running and unbridled

Remains the sky. Wildfires trade pinecones and one

Donkey bolts uphill

for a little cloud

St. Heracleitos's day and something's up

That even noses can't diagnose:

Tricks of a shoeless wind snagging the hem

Of Fate's nightgown and leaving

Us in the open air of capricorns

exposed

Secretly I go with all the loot in my mind

For a life unbowed from the beginning. No candles no

chandeliers

Only a gold anemone's engagement for a diamond

Feeling its way to where? Asking what? Our moon's half-

shadow needs

You to console even the graves

Homoethnic or not. The crux is that the scent of earth

Lost even to bloodhounds

With its weeds onions and creeks

Must be restored to its idiom

So what! A word contains you peasant of night's green

Efessos! Forefather sulphur phosphorus your fourteenth

generation

Inside the orange groves gold words

Sharing the scalpel's chisel

Tents as yet unpitched

others midair

Lost poles suddenly grinding. Sermons

Rise from the seafloor of the facing coves

Twin scythes for theater or temple

Fresh valley springs and other curly streams

Of thus and so. If ever wisdom

Planned circles of clover and dog grass

Another world might live just as before

your fingerprint

Letters will exist. People will read and grab

History's tail once more. Just let the vineyards gallop and the sky

remain

Unbridled as children want it

With roosters and pinecones and blue kites

flags

On Saint Heracleitos's day

child's is the kingdom.

Translated by Olga Broumas 

* Greek poet and winner of the 1979 Nobel Prize for Literature.