Pandelis Boukalas [Greece]

 

Hectors
 
Life hauls us by the tongue.
So that no howl is heard.
So we can’t taste the relief of groaning.
It finds us ready.
Each time we stick out our tongue to it
mockingly
irrationally certain planners of our future
life grabs it
and hauls us
over the bloody dust of truth
wrecked Hectors shattered.
With our hasty mind painting a zero
spilled on the dust.
Each time the vain I will. escapes through our
                teeth
death grabs us
and hauls us by the tongue.
 
But songs are made even without a tongue.
And our mind folds the zero
over the dust.
Makes an infinity of it.
Hectors finally victorious.
Because wholesomely mortal.
Their whole body a glorious heel
A heel of which war makes a tongue
unyielding.
 
(Translated by Angelos Sakkis)
 
 

In the constellation of Lyre
 
My eyes could hear the music
before it even touches my ear.
It was tasted everywhere.
In the blue breeze of the sea
and in the rush of rivers.
In the laughing whisper of the trees
and flowers.
In the blooming gardens
which from their great beauty
they were raised in holy places of honor
and without a statue of any god
within them or altar.
In the nightingale the sleepless all-night song,
consolation of my own vigilance,
when I counted loves and wounds.
Equal numbers.
And dawn was coming
and found me my lyre playing,
to fight to shape with my bitterness
pleasant and happy melodies.
I couldn’t do it every time.
When the adored Aphrodite
refused my prayers and incense,
with the arbitrary stubbornness of the gods,
the pain grinded my body and burned it,
but the mind, ah, the mind freezes.
As if I was already cut in half.
Double. But alone.
And let the standing hours mock me.
Empty.
A torture worse than Sisyphus.
How do you climb a rugged mountain
the time that without love bogs down and is spent,
a mountain too?
No. Solitude is not the place of man.
Love is. Serenity and delirium together,
in the same breath.
Unstable fire and stormy sea.
 
The nine strings of my lyre
had been appointed by father Orpheus –
as many as the Muses,
so judged his reverence.
They say that his beautiful head,
wild cut thrown
by women of madness,
and his lyre together,
they arrived in my hometown Lesvos
from Thrace,
following the road of the Evros river
and then the sea.
This is how the waters of my island were sanctified
and his wind learned to sing,
great school.
I also studied there,
and became music.
Orpheus’ head, though severed,
for nine days he did not stop weaving keens.
And only when he fell silent
the ancestors buried her with respect
and they raised a temple of honor.
They say the nine-string lyre
Zeus sent her among the stars,
hearing the pleas of the Muses,
of Orpheus’ mother above all, Calliope.
I see this constellation every night,
and listen to its music.
And when pain or lust wears me down,
even in the light of day I count its stars clearly
and my mind embraces and beautifies it.
Nine.
One by one I tenderly name them:
Gogyla
Atthida
Gyrino
Irini
Avanthis
Anaktoria
Diki
Mnisidiki
My Arignota.
 
My sparrows.
Just like falcons.
 
(Translated by Dinos Siotis)
 
 

Author’s Bionote:
 
*Pandelis Boukalas (1957) is a writer, translator and journalist. He has published ten books of poetry, two theatrical plays, one volume of books reviews and two volumes of his by-line articles in “Kathimerini”. He has translated Aeschylus, Sappho, Euripides, Aristophanes, Theocritus, Vion as well as funerary inscriptions, drinking verses and satirical inscriptions from the “Palatine Anthology”. In the series “I take pen to write: Essays on folk song”, he has published four volumes. He was awarded in Greece the State Poetry Prize in 2010, the State Essay & Criticism Prize in 2017 and the State Grand Prize for Letters in 2024.