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Diogenes

Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke (Κατερίνα Αγγελάκη-Ρουκ; February 22, 1939 – January 21, 2020)

 

Translated by Peter Dreyer

 

By the day I perish in the barrel

I have no imitators in the dark.

Mother’s tabernacle has hardened

still I inhabit it

seeing that I was never born

but merely exist

and hurt each time

I touch the walls of the world.

Sprinkled with a few crumbs of light

for hours on end I watch the skin breathe

and more,

and more irascible lines of my fate

lines without future in the palm

because I have never hoped

never begun to weave

lies a

round the nakedness

of my death.

An aged embryo

wrapped in black stuff

daily the cloth unfurled

and it came up to my eyes.

Each day

I twist and turn, groan,

bite my tail

within these 24 hours

I say goodbye, pray for

just so much space and energy

so much passion

so much, no more

until tomorrow.

This day secured

moves

and changes color, light,

murders me, and I study it

humiliates me and I accept it.

I learn in the space of a span,

at a single ring of age.

 

There is nothing beyond the barrel,

creaking in the north wind

crackling in the heat

I roll on, roll on

with my celestial space about me

beyond the specific.

No one has ever moved

in the eternity of Nature;

I remember genesis

like last year’s fiesta,

about me the sun describes,

the orbit of a bug,

always about me

and I the grilled center

live as though I knew

sleep as if I had made answer

dream in my sleep

of my dead

dying again,

wake and doubt,

sink back into the wooden gut.

Orphaned thus in the gloom,

the counsel of friends is lost me

in the larynx of the night owl

with its unattainable wisdom

it cries “transitory”

things always adopt

me transitorily.

Prettily mirrored the world

in the round eye of the cow

as with her four legs she marks out the meadow definitively

but I have lost

the magic of appearances

and the depth that draws downward

joins with the seed

beyond death.



This translation was previously published in The Other Voice: Twentieth-Century Women's Poetry in Translation (New York: Norton, 1976), 178–80; https://moderngreekliterature.org/texts/155?from_search=true

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Photo by Peter Dreyer

 Cyclops by Christos Saccopoulos, used by kind permission of the sculptor.

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