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Sibel mou, it's a little bit long, but how could I resist fulfilling your wish huh?
My dear Bliss, I bet that you have already read this poem, probably more times than I have, but I think reading it again can only be a pleasure, right?
**this translation comes from a different source, thus you'll find some differences between the part of the poem i have published above and the same part in this version**
The Monogram – Odysseas Elytis
I.
Fate will turn elsewhere the lines
Of the palm, like a switchman
Time will consent for a moment
How otherwise, since men love each other
The sky will act out our innards
And innocence will strike the world
With the sharpness of the black of death.
II.
I mourn the sun and I mourn the years that come
Without us and I sing the others that have passed
If that is true
The bodies spoken to and the boats strumming sweetly
The guitars flickering underwater
The “believe me†and the “don’t†there
Once in the music, once in the air
The two little animals, our hands
That sought to climb secretly one on the other
The pot of baby’s breath through open yard gates
And the pieces of seas coming together
Behind the hedgerows, above the stone walls
The anemone that lay in your hand
The mauve trembled three times for three days above the waterfalls
If these are true I sing
The wooden beam and the square weaving
On the wall, the Mermaid with unbraided dress
The cat who watched us in the darkness
A child with incense and the red cross
The hour evening falls on the rocks’ inaccessibility
I mourn the garment that I touched and the world came to me
III.
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 streets
How to pluck jasmine flowers – and I have the power
To blow and move you asleep
Through moonlight 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 “ehâ€
Around the neck around the bay
Always we the light and the shadow
Always you the little star and always I the dark boat
Always you the harbour and always I the beacon on the right
The wet dockwall and the gleam on the oars
High in the house with the vine arbours
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, do you hear me
It’s too early yet in this world my love
To speak of you and me.
IV.
It’s too early yet in this world, do you hear me?
The monsters have not yet been tamed, do you hear me
My lost blood and the pointed, do you hear me
Knife
Like a ram that runs amid the skies
And snaps the boughs of the stars, do you hear me
It’s me, do you hear me
I love you, do you hear me
I hold you and I lead you and I dress you
In Ophelia’s white bridal gown, do you hear me
Where do you leave me, where are you going and who, do you hear me
Holds your hand over the floods
The day will come, do you hear me
The enormous lianas and the lava of volcanoes
Will bury us and thousands of years later, do you hear me
They’ll make us luminous fossils, do you hear me
For the heartlessness of men to shine, do you hear me
Over them
And throw us away in thousands of pieces, do you hear me
In the waters one by one, do you hear me
I count my bitter pebbles, do you hear me
And time is a great church, do you hear me
Where sometimes the figures, do you hear me
Of Saints
Weep real tears, do you hear me
The bells open on high, do you hear me
A deep passage for me to pass through
The angels wait with candles and funeral psalms
I go nowhere, do you hear me
Either no one or we two together, do you hear me
This flower of tempest and, do you hear me
Of love
Once and for always we cut it, do you hear me
And it cannot come into bloom otherwise, do you hear me
In another earth, in another star, do you hear me
The soil, the very air we touched
And no more, do you hear me
And no gardener was so fortunate in other times
To put forth a flower amid such a winter, do you hear me
And such northwinds, only we, do you hear me
In the middle of the sea
From only the wish for love, do you hear me
Raised a whole island, do you hear me
With caves and capes and flowering cliffs
Listen, listen
Who speaks to the waters and who weeps, can you listen?
Who seeks the other, who cries out – do you listen?
It’s I who cry out and it’s I who weep, do you hear me
I love you, I love you, do you hear me.
V.
Of you I have spoken in olden times
With wise wet nurses and with veteran rebels
Whence comes your sorrow of the wild beast
The reflection on your face of trembling water
And why, then, am I destined to come near you
I who don’t want love but want the wind
But want the gallop of the bareback standing sea
And no one had heard of you
For you neither dittany nor mushroom
In Crete’s high places nothing
Only for you God agreed to guide my hand
This way, that way, heedful of the whole round
Of the face’s shore, the bays, the hair
On the hill wavering left there
Your body with the stance of the solitary pine tree
Eyes of pride and of the translucent
Depths, inside the house with the old breakfront
With it’s yellow lace and cypress wood
Alone I wait for where you’ll first appear
High on the roof terrace or behind the yard’s flagstones
With the horse of the Saint and the egg of the Resurrection
As from a ruined wall painting
Big as small life wanted you
To fit the stentorian volcano glow into the little candle
So that no one might have seen or heard
Anything in the wilderness the ruined houses
Neither the ancestor buried at the yard wall’s edge
Of you, nor the old lady with all her herbs
For you only I, perhaps, and the music
That I push down inside me but it returns stronger
For you the unformed breast of twelve years
Turned to the future with its red crater
For you the bitter fragrance like a pin
You find within the body that pricks the memory
And here the soil, here the doves, here our ancient earth.
VI.
I’ve seen much and the earth to my mind seems more beautiful
More beautiful in the golden vapours
The sharp stone, more beautiful
The violets of isthmuses and the roofs amid the waves
More beautiful the rays where without stepping your pace
Above the sea’s mountains invincible as the Goddess of Samothrace
Thus I have looked at you and that’s enough
For all time to become innocent
In the wake your passage leaves my soul
Follows like an inexperienced dolphin
And plays with the white and the azure!
Victory, Victory where I’ve been vanquished
Before love and with it
For the passion flower and the hibiscus
Go, go even if I’ve been lost
Alone, and let the sun you hold be a newborn babe
Alone, and let me be the homeland that mourns
Let the world I sent to hold the laurel leaf for you be
Alone, the wind strong and alone the very round
Pebble in the blink of the dark depths
The fisherman who lifted up and cast back again into time Paradise!
VII.
In Paradise I’ve marked an island out
Identical to you and a house by the sea
With a big bed and a little door
I’ve cast an echo into the bottomless deeps
To see myself each morning when I arise
To see half of you pass in the water
And half for which I weep in Paradise.
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