Poetic-Verses from ATHANASE
The Myth of Er the Pamhylian
The Myth of Er the Pamphylian
For Nicolas Fleurot
Aitia helomenou, theos anaitos
(The blame is who chooses: God is blameless)
Plato, The Republic
Trees grow in your sleep,
crimson medlars, peach trees dressed in soft snow,
cherry trees that dance in the seditious waves of the blue sky!
Then comes a music on measured steps advancing
wrapped in saffron robes, in a gauze of small bells.
A music with the fragile face of a young girl
crowned with olive branches,
smiling, floating, harmonious
like the lapping of a stream
against a bank of welcoming pebbles.
And you don't know where you are,
in what country, under what sky red with shyness,
among the quiet rustling of grass so green
and so fresh it might have come from a
Persian drawing.
And like that rebel Critias, your private conviction is
that the omnipresent gods are the invention
of a cunning man who wants to control
the immense appetite of his fellows
through a fear cannot resist
and a guilt with the finger of a harrow.
Then, suddenly you awake up.
Your face is flooded with sown tears,
alone, abandoned on the burning breast of silence,
thrown like an ear of corn into a bed of shadows.
You jump up trembling from where you lay, shout out
and turn your face inside yourself :
there, where another shining face,
a wonderful clear bright face
welcomes the small amethyst seeds of your tears
and transforms them into a thousand little paths of light,
into a thousand straight and living columns of peace.
And like Er, once you're back,
you tell your docile books
what you saw in the land of the dead.
Translated from the French by Norton Hodges
For Nicolas Fleurot
Aitia helomenou, theos anaitos
(The blame is who chooses: God is blameless)
Plato, The Republic
Trees grow in your sleep,
crimson medlars, peach trees dressed in soft snow,
cherry trees that dance in the seditious waves of the blue sky!
Then comes a music on measured steps advancing
wrapped in saffron robes, in a gauze of small bells.
A music with the fragile face of a young girl
crowned with olive branches,
smiling, floating, harmonious
like the lapping of a stream
against a bank of welcoming pebbles.
And you don't know where you are,
in what country, under what sky red with shyness,
among the quiet rustling of grass so green
and so fresh it might have come from a
Persian drawing.
And like that rebel Critias, your private conviction is
that the omnipresent gods are the invention
of a cunning man who wants to control
the immense appetite of his fellows
through a fear cannot resist
and a guilt with the finger of a harrow.
Then, suddenly you awake up.
Your face is flooded with sown tears,
alone, abandoned on the burning breast of silence,
thrown like an ear of corn into a bed of shadows.
You jump up trembling from where you lay, shout out
and turn your face inside yourself :
there, where another shining face,
a wonderful clear bright face
welcomes the small amethyst seeds of your tears
and transforms them into a thousand little paths of light,
into a thousand straight and living columns of peace.
And like Er, once you're back,
you tell your docile books
what you saw in the land of the dead.
Translated from the French by Norton Hodges
Comment On This Poem --- Vote for this poem
The Myth of Er the Pamhylian
The Myth of Er the Pamhylian
