STAMATIS POLENAKIS
FAREWELL TO THE DANUBIAN WAVES
Of the ever so many views thet passed before my eyes
i want to remember only one:
the sight of that bridge cut in two
as the train crossed the Balkans
Spring is in the air and the flowers
on the brows of the dead are blooming
(nothing blossoms any more except for
the flowers on the brows of the dead)
( transl. by Yannis Goumas)
FAREWELL TO ANTON PAVLOVICH CHEKHOV
This photograph was taken many years ago, on the estate of the retired professor Sherebriakov, all the people facing us are long dead, Astrov never returned , nor did Sophia Alexandrovna and Vanya ever rest, nothing has changed since, the future is a rough road which, if you follow to the end, leads straight to the past, this poem can but end here, history will resume another day, history is surely joking, a common fate joins us all, and if we were to live a while longer, we`d see the Czar shovelling the snow in Ekaterinenburg.
( transl. by Yannis Goumas)
FAREWELL TO MILENA YESHENSKA
Yet more farewells: in ports, on empty wharves, on the brigdes of sinking ships, in mirrors of old, on a street in Vienna whose name you are now trying to remember, in those letters of Franz Kafka whice weren`t lost but pass from hand to hand, and finally: the last goodbye you wave as the trains are leaving, taking us away for good.
( transl. by Yannis Goumas)
FAREWELL TO NASTASIA FILIPPOVNA
Only for a moment your beauty passed
before the mirrors of death
O Nastasia Filippovna!
Now we are all in the same boat, sailing
unto the dark.
( transl. by Yannis Goumas)
FAREWELL AND RETURN
And further down a scribbled note
i am referring to the last phrase written
in the margin of her notebook
by Anna Magdalena Bach on a quiet
summer night
of the year 1752:
Remember, remember, oh my soul
the years that passed like clouds.
MY FATHERS BROKEN WATCH
To what purpose, I wonder, this incomprehensible
persistence of the hands
in circling blindly around a clockface
shattered centuries ago and to what purpose
the obsessive attentiveness
of the craftsman to detail
to what purpose the poet`s persistance
in plucking out his eyes into the dark
struggling to reconstruct the complex
mechanics of the poem
when entire populations are exchanged in the precise manner
that pawn is swapped for pawn on a vacant chessboard.
“The blue horses by Franz Mark”, Odos Panos, 2007
Translated by Konstantine Matsoukas
ERGO SUM
I still exist: means that i a dreaming of the dark flow of time, the rainy days, what nights are left to me, the net of fate that entraps me, I dream of nonchalant voyages on steamships and long rivers i have no more courage to cross. Someone takes my place and writes this poem. The days go slowly by, empty come and go the rafts on the Missisipi.
Translation by Yiannis Goumas
MEMORY OF HENRIETTE
If you ever happen to pass by here, on your way to another world, another life, think of the Stimming Inn still standing on the lakeshore, think of the rippling waves and the dark boats casting off, think of all those who were with us lost forever
in this world`s twilight, think: time is sand on our fingers.
Translation by Yiannis Goumas
MANUSCRIPT FOUND IN A DEAD MAN`S POCKET
I, Rodion Romanovich Rascolnikov, a poor student in Petrograd, dreamt of a pitch-dark stairway descending to the depths of the earth, I dreamt of thousands of spiders spinning their web in abandoned warehouses, I saw myself standing in front of a distorted mirror, the axe overhanging for a second before sticking hard into a tree`s aged trunk, and the old woman`s blooodshot eyes shining in the dark. This world couldn`t have been created in the image of God; never will it exist again; and humanity as a whole is nothing but a macabre demoniac dance.
Translation by Yiannis Goumas
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