Greek artists - Greek painters - Yannis Stavrou - Modern Greek Artists

Rage against the dying of the light - Merry Christmas & Happy New Yera

2011-12-26T16:02:00.009+02:00

Merry Christmas & Happy New Year!

Rage, rage against the dying of the light...

Dylan Thomas

Do not go gentle into that good night

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light

* The greeting card is based on Yannis Stavrou's painting "Pomegranate in a Bowl"

60 new bookmarks based on Yannis Stavrou's paintings...

2011-11-11T15:11:00.004+02:00

The new bookmarks from Yannis Stavrou's paintings

Landscape, portraits, marine art, still life, seascapes: some of the sixty bookmarks-based on Yannis Stavrou paintings - that have been edited by POLITEIA Bookshops for 2011 - 2012.

http://www.politeianet.gr

with usura hath no man a painted paradise...

2011-11-07T09:44:00.011+02:00

Piero de la Franscesca (1422-1492)

They have brought whores for Eleusis

Corpses are set to banquet

at behest of usura...

Ezra Pound

Canto XLV -With Usura

With usura hath no man a house of good stone

each block cut smooth and well fitting

that design might cover their face,

with usura

hath no man a painted paradise on his church wall

harpes et luz

or where virgin receiveth message

and halo projects from incision,

with usura

seeth no man Gonzaga his heirs and his concubines

no picture is made to endure nor to live with

but it is made to sell and sell quickly

with usura, sin against nature,

is thy bread ever more of stale rags

is thy bread dry as paper,

with no mountain wheat, no strong flour

with usura the line grows thick

with usura is no clear demarcation

and no man can find site for his dwelling.

Stonecutter is kept from his tone

weaver is kept from his loom

WITH USURA

wool comes not to market

sheep bringeth no gain with usura

Usura is a murrain, usura

blunteth the needle in the maid’s hand

and stoppeth the spinner’s cunning. Pietro Lombardo

came not by usura

Duccio came not by usura

nor Pier della Francesca; Zuan Bellin’ not by usura

nor was ‘La Calunnia’ painted.

Came not by usura Angelico; came not Ambrogio Praedis,

Came no church of cut stone signed: Adamo me fecit.

Not by usura St. Trophime

Not by usura Saint Hilaire,

Usura rusteth the chisel

It rusteth the craft and the craftsman

It gnaweth the thread in the loom

None learneth to weave gold in her pattern;

Azure hath a canker by usura; cramoisi is unbroidered

Emerald findeth no Memling

Usura slayeth the child in the womb

It stayeth the young man’s courting

It hath brought palsey to bed, lyeth

between the young bride and her bridegroom

CONTRA NATURAM

They have brought whores for Eleusis

Corpses are set to banquet

at behest of usura.

Thou art as I, a bright sun fallen low...

2011-09-01T18:28:00.008+03:00

Autumn through the poet's eyes...

Yannis Stavrou, Autumn, oil on canvas
(detail)

Charles Baudelaire

Sonnet of Autumn

They say to me, thy clear and crystal eyes:
"Why dost thou love me so, strange lover mine?"
Be sweet, be still! My heart and soul despise
All save that antique brute-like faith of thine;

And will not bare the secret of their shame
To thee whose hand soothes me to slumbers long,
Nor their black legend write for thee in flame!
Passion I hate, a spirit does me wrong.

Let us love gently. Love, from his retreat,
Ambushed and shadowy, bends his fatal bow,
And I too well his ancient arrows know:

Crime, horror, folly. O pale marguerite,
Thou art as I, a bright sun fallen low,
O my so white, my so cold Marguerite.

Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867)

Sonnet d'automne

Ils me disent, tes yeux, clairs comme le cristal:
«Pour toi, bizarre amant, quel est donc mon mérite?»
— Sois charmante et tais-toi! Mon coeur, que tout irrite,
Excepté la candeur de l'antique animal,

Ne veut pas te montrer son secret infernal,
Berceuse dont la main aux longs sommeils m'invite,
Ni sa noire légende avec la flamme écrite.
Je hais la passion et l'esprit me fait mal!

Aimons-nous doucement. L'Amour dans sa guérite,
Ténébreux, embusqué, bande son arc fatal.
Je connais les engins de son vieil arsenal:

Crime, horreur et folie! — Ô pâle marguerite!
Comme moi n'es-tu pas un soleil automnal,
Ô ma si blanche, ô ma si froide Marguerite?

looking at the moon...

2011-07-18T14:47:00.014+03:00

Yannis Stavrou, Moon Shine, Thessaloniki, oil on canvas

The clouds come and go,
providing a rest for all
the moon viewers...

Japanese Poetry, Haiku

Matsuo Basho (1644-1694)

A cuckoo cries
and through a thicket of bamboo
the late moon shines

None is travelling
Here along this way but I,
This autumn evening.

The first day of the year:
thoughts come - and there is loneliness;
the autumn dusk is here.

An old pond
A frog jumps in -
Splash!

Lightening -
Heron's cry
Stabs the darkness

Clouds come from time to time -
and bring to men a chance to rest
from looking at the moon.

In the cicada's cry
There's no sign that can foretell
How soon it must die.

Poverty's child -
he starts to grind the rice,
and gazes at the moon.

Won't you come and see
loneliness? Just one leaf
from the kiri tree.

Temple bells die out.
The fragrant blossoms remain.
A perfect evening!

Husking rice
a child squints up
to view the moon

A field of cotton--
as if the moon
had flowered.

The clouds come and go,
providing a rest for all
the moon viewers

From time to time
The clouds give rest
To the moon beholders..

Winter garden,
the moon thinned to a thread,
insects singing.

There is no sin except stupidity...

2011-07-15T12:31:00.009+03:00

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation...

Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

Oscar Wilde

Aphorisms

Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong.

There is no sin except stupidity.

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike.

Most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes.

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.

An excellent man; he has no enemies; and none of his friends like him.

An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.

Anybody can be good in the country. There are no temptations there.

Arguments are extremely vulgar, for everyone in good society holds exactly the same opinion.

Arguments are to be avoided: they are always vulgar and often convincing.

Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.

As long as a woman can look ten years younger than her own daughter, she is perfectly satisfied.

As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.

Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship.

Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same.

Biography lends to death a new terror.

By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, journalism keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.

Children begin by loving their parents; after a time they judge them; rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.

Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.

Conversation about the weather is the last refuge of the unimaginative.

Death and vulgarity are the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away.

Deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.

Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.

Do you really think it is weakness that yields to temptation? I tell you that there are terrible temptations which it requires strength, strength and courage to yield to.

A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.

A gentleman is one who never hurts anyone's feelings unintentionally.

A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.

A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her.

A man can't be too careful in the choice of his enemies.

A man who does not think for himself does not think at all.

A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction.

A poet can survive everything but a misprint.

A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.

A true friend stabs you in the front.

A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament.

Ah, well, then I suppose I shall have to die beyond my means.

Alas, I am dying beyond my means.

All art is quite useless.

All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his.

Always forgive your enemies - nothing annoys them so much.

Ambition is the germ from which all growth of nobleness proceeds.

Ambition is the last refuge of the failure.

America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.

To them it is I send my farewell cry...

2011-07-13T16:51:00.006+03:00

Anna Akhamatova (1889-1966)
Portrait by Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin (1922)

Anna Akhmatova

Dedication

Before this sorrow mountains bow,
the vast river’s ceased to flow,
the ever-strong prison bolts
hold the ‘convict crews’ now,
abandoned to deathly longing.
For someone the sun glows red,
for someone the wind blows fresh –
but we know none of that, instead
we only hear the soldier’s tread,
keys scraping against our flesh.
Rising as though for early mass,
through the city of beasts we sped,
there met, breathless as the dead,
sun low, a mistier Neva. Far ahead,
hope singing still, as we passed.
Sentence given…tears pour out,
she thought she knew all separation,
in pain, blood driven from the heart,
as if she’s hurled to earth, apart,
yet walks…staggers…is in motion…
Where now my chance-met friends
of those two years satanic flight?
What Siberian storms do they resist,
and in what frosted lunar orb exist?
To them it is I send my farewell cry.

In my own land, I’m in a far domain...

2011-06-02T14:50:00.008+03:00

I’m dying of thirst beside the fountain,
Hot as fire, and with chattering teeth:
In my own land, I’m in a far domain:
Near the flame, I shiver beyond belief:
Bare as a worm, dressed in a furry sheathe,
I smile in tears, wait without expectation...

François Villon (1431-1463)

Francois Villon

Ballade: Du Concours de Blois

I’m dying of thirst beside the fountain,
Hot as fire, and with chattering teeth:
In my own land, I’m in a far domain:
Near the flame, I shiver beyond belief:
Bare as a worm, dressed in a furry sheathe,
I smile in tears, wait without expectation:
Taking my comfort in sad desperation:
I rejoice, without pleasures, never a one:
Strong I am, without power or persuasion,
Welcomed gladly, and spurned by everyone.

Nothing is sure for me but what’s uncertain:
Obscure, whatever is plainly clear to see:
I’ve no doubt, except of everything certain:
Science is what happens accidentally:
I win it all, yet a loser I’m bound to be:
Saying: ‘God give you good even!’ at dawn,
I greatly fear I’m falling, when lying down:
I’ve plenty, yet I’ve not one possession,
I wait to inherit, yet I’m no heir I own,
Welcomed gladly, and spurned by everyone.

I never take care, yet I’ve taken great pain
To acquire some goods, but have none by me:
Who’s nice to me is one I hate: it’s plain,
And who speaks truth deals with me most falsely:
He’s my friend who can make me believe
A white swan is the blackest crow I’ve known:
Who thinks he’s power to help me, does me harm:
Lies, truth, to me are all one under the sun:
I remember all, have the wisdom of a stone,
Welcomed gladly, and spurned by everyone.

Merciful Prince, may it please you that I’ve shown
There’s much I know, yet without sense or reason:
I’m partial, yet I hold with all men, in common.
What more can I do? Redeem what I’ve in pawn,
Welcomed gladly, and spurned by everyone.

Ballade du concours de Blois

Je meurs de seuf auprès de la fontaine,
Chaud comme feu, et tremble dent à dent ;
En mon pays suis en terre lointaine ;
Lez un brasier frissonne tout ardent ;
Nu comme un ver, vêtu en président,
Je ris en pleurs et attends sans espoir ;
Confort reprends en triste désespoir ;
Je m'éjouis et n'ai plaisir aucun ;
Puissant je suis sans force et sans pouvoir,
Bien recueilli, débouté de chacun.

Rien ne m'est sûr que la chose incertaine ;
Obscur, fors ce qui est tout évident ;
Doute ne fais, fors en chose certaine ;
Science tiens à soudain accident ;
Je gagne tout et demeure perdant ;
Au point du jour dis : " Dieu vous doint bon soir ! "
Gisant envers, j'ai grand paour de choir ;
J'ai bien de quoi et si n'en ai pas un ;
Echoite attends et d'homme ne suis hoir,
Bien recueilli, débouté de chacun.

De rien n'ai soin, si mets toute ma peine
D'acquérir biens et n'y suis prétendant ;
Qui mieux me dit, c'est cil qui plus m'ataine,
Et qui plus vrai, lors plus me va bourdant ;
Mon ami est, qui me fait entendant
D'un cygne blanc que c'est un corbeau noir ;
Et qui me nuit, crois qu'il m'aide à pourvoir ;
Bourde, verté, aujourd'hui m'est tout un ;
Je retiens tout, rien ne sait concevoir,
Bien recueilli, débouté de chacun.

Prince clément, or vous plaise savoir
Que j'entends mout et n'ai sens ne savoir :
Partial suis, à toutes lois commun.
Que sais-je plus ? Quoi ? Les gages ravoir,
Bien recueilli, débouté de chacun.

No verse belongs to me...

2011-05-30T09:58:00.010+03:00

Good poets pass away one day
not because they die
of heart failure or cancer
but because on their eyelids sprout
horrendous flowers...

Yannis Varveris, (1955-25/5/2011)

Yannis Varveris

My Head

No verse belongs to me. My friends operated them all on.
My upright friends Brassens and Ferre. And the others.
And this is no head, it’s hate.
And mum’s plastic lilies I laid at the Polytechnic gate.*
This is no head that doesn’t know a bow from an arrow.
Not even killing would be a pleasure
I wouldn’t know what weapon I used.
This is no head that smokes
strips of belly dancers
flesh and bones of ideas and wiles away the time.
So I took a chisel and gave it the works
fought the good fight at last
shod in shabby sandals, no socks, and resolute curly hair.
But still my verses are unreadable;
inside and out all my poems
are zebra-striped and I the warder.
As outside so inside I found
the mote of Sartre
in their eyes
and in my eyes I found the same wolf
suckling without consuming me.

What more can a poem need
than thread through the needle’s eye
• in fact at night my room is full of threads –
even Homer managed it, I muse;
but where’s the needle that will prick my languid temples?
*Alludes to the uprising of the students of the National Technical University in November 1973, which was quelled by the military junta.

Hostia

There’s the house.
Around, mum’s water plants
blossoms for the bosom.
In the freezer some jolly little snakes
enabling me to change tongue
each time I vanquish flesh.

We should visit living poets

We should visit living poets
especially if we happen to dwell in the same town
drop in on them from time to time
because as we spend our quiet lives
certain that they too are alive – though maybe forgotten –
we hear the sad news.

Good poets pass away one day
not because they die
of heart failure or cancer
but because on their eyelids sprout
horrendous flowers.

At first they delve in medical books
then they consult the optician
ask botanists and gardeners
science gives up
offers vague cautious words
passersby and neighbours cross themselves.

Thus the poets gradually withdraw
to the seclusion of their homes
listening to old records
writing little
less and less
mediocre stuff.
Meantime in this confinement
the horrendous flowers begin to wilt
and wither
and the poets no longer go out
not even to the nearby kiosk for cigarettes.
They sit shrunken by the fireplace
seeking answers from the fire
which eventually throws out a spark
first landing on the dry petals
then on the dry stems
all over the body
and the entire house
the surroundings
brighten for a single moment

and they are burnt to ashes.

(translated from Greek by Yannis Goumas)

Foolishness, error, sin, niggardliness...

2011-05-23T14:49:00.006+03:00

Foolishness, error, sin, niggardliness,
Occupy our minds and work on our bodies...

Dedicated to our days and to the contemporary world...

Hieronymus Bosch, Christ carrying the cross (1450-1516)

Charles Baudelaire

To the Reader

(Translation By Eli Siegel)

Foolishness, error, sin, niggardliness,
Occupy our minds and work on our bodies,
And we feed our mild remorse,
As beggars nourish their vermin.

Our sins are insistent, our repentings are limp;
We pay ourselves richly for our admissions,
And we gaily go once more on the filthy path
Believing that by cheap fears we shall wash away all our sins.

On the pillow of evil it is Satan Trismegistus
Who soothes a long while our bewitched mind,
And the rich metal of our determination
Is made vapor by that learned chemist.

It is the Devil who holds the reins which make us go!
In repulsive objects we find something charming;
Each day we take one more step towards Hell-
Without being horrified-across darknesses that stink .

Like a beggarly sensualist who kisses and eats
The martyred breast of an ancient strumpet,
We steal where we may a furtive pleasure
Which we handle forcefully like an old orange.

Tight, swarming, like a million worms,
A population of Demons carries on in our brains,
And, when we breathe, Death into our lungs
Goes down, an invisible river, with thick complaints.

If rape, poison, the dagger, arson,
Have not as yet embroidered with their pleasing designs
The recurrent canvas of our pitiable destinies,
It is that our spirit, alas, is not brave enough.

But among the jackals, the panthers, the bitch-hounds,
The apes, the scorpions, the vultures, the serpents,
The monsters screeching, howling, grumbling, creeping,
In the infamous menagerie of our vices,

There is one uglier, wickeder, more shameless!
Although he makes no large gestures nor loud cries
He willingly would make rubbish of the earth
And with a yawn swallow the world;

He is Ennui!-His eye filled with an unwished-for tear,
He dreams of scaffolds while puffing at his hookah.
You know him, reader, this exquisite monster,
-Hypocrite reader,-my likeness,-my brother!

About the known Universe...

2011-05-19T12:11:00.004+03:00

The Known Universe takes viewers from the Himalayas through our atmosphere and the inky black of space to the afterglow of the Big Bang.

Every star, planet, and quasar seen in the film is possible because of the world's most complete four-dimensional map of the universe, the Digital Universe Atlas that is maintained and updated by astrophysicists at the American Museum of Natural History. The new film, created by the Museum, is part of an exhibition, Visions of the Cosmos: From the Milky Ocean to an Evolving Universe, at the Rubin Museum of Art in Manhattan through May 2010.

Data: Digital Universe, American Museum of Natural History
http://www.haydenplanetarium.org/universe/

Visualization Software: Uniview by SCISS

Director: Carter Emmart
Curator: Ben R. Oppenheimer
Producer: Michael Hoffman
Executive Producer: Ro Kinzler
Co-Executive Producer: Martin Brauen
Manager, Digital Universe Atlas: Brian Abbott

Music: Suke Cerulo

For more information visit http://www.amnh.org

I am thinking of the stars that would claim this privilege...

2011-04-27T10:11:00.003+03:00

Alexandros Baras
(1906-1990)

THE CLEOPATRA, THE SEMIRAMIS AND THE THEODORA

Once every week,
on a given day,
and always at the same hour,
three handsome ships,
the Cleopatra, the Semiramis, and the Theodora,
leave their berth
at nine o’clock
for Piraeus always,
for Brindisi and for Trieste
always.

Without manoeuvres or fuss
or hesitation
or unnecessary blowing on the whistle,
they put out to sea,
the Cleopatra, the Semiramis, and the Theodora,
like certain well-bred people
who take leave of their hosts
without uncouth and superfluous
handshaking.

They leave their berth
at nine o’clock,
for Piraeus always,
for Brindisi and for Trieste
always – rain or shine.
They sail
to daub the blue waters
of the Aegean and the Mediterranean

with smoke.
They sail to cast their lights
like topazes on the sea
at night.
They sail
laden with passengers and luggage….

The Cleopatra, the Semiramis, and the Theodora,
for years now
on the same route,
arriving on the same day
sailing at the same hour.

They resemble white-collar workers
who have become such time machines
that an office door
might come tumbling down
if they were to miss work
even for a single day.

(If the route is always the same
what if it is across an entire Mediterranean
or from one house to another neighbourhood?)
The Cleopatra, the Semiramis, and the Theodora
for a long time now and for many years
have felt the tyranny of boredom,
ploughing always the same route,
mooring always at the same ports.

If I were a Captain,
Yes – si j’etais roit! –
if I were a Captain
on the Cleopatra, the Semiramis, the Theodora,
if I were a Captain
with four gold stripes,
abandoned on this same route

year after year,
on a moonlit night,
in the middle of the sea,
I would climb to the bridge deck
and while the music from the first class saloon
played on,
with my best uniform,
my gold stripes
and shiny decorations,
I would trace a most perfect curve
from the bridge deck
into the water,
gold braid and all,
like a shooting star,
like a hero of inexplicable death.

ANN ARBOR REVIEW (USA), No. 10/11, 1970.
MUNDUS ARTIUM (USA), Vol. V, No. 3, 1972.
NEW GREECE, Athens, 1975.
HELLENIC QUARTERLY (Athens), No. 6, Autumn 2000.

THREE LAMPS

Three powerful lamps – the three together
produce a thousand candlepower of blinding light –
placed in the vertices
of an isosceles triangle
which forms between them on the ceiling
of this fashionable café – the only one
that will put up with us night after night –

What were we saying? – three powerful lamps
let out certain insolent
electric light cries
as they converse with each other.
(Now how three lamps can talk,
how they can cry out
without uttering a single sound,
only I and my friends
who sit with me
know it,
that is why we are such close
and inseparable friends at night.)

Three lamps… three cries….
Usually when we speak of cries
the term “sky-high” may be applied.
But here we cannot use it.
They cannot reach sky-high
since the impenetrable ceiling,
a concrete barrier, prevents them
from rising skywards,
and so they break against it
and fall on our senses
with immense cruelty!

Again, even if there were no question
of the term’s inadequacy,
even if these three cursed lamps
shone in the open air,
their cries would still not reach sky-high:

I am thinking of the stars
that would claim this privilege,
especially if it were July
• a beautiful, clear July night –
I am thinking of the stars’ all-powerful
illuminating rivalry,
the stars that aeons and aeons ago
formed a Trust,
the largest Trust, of light.

CAVE (New Zealand), No. 6. No date printed.

Happy Easter!

2011-04-21T16:06:00.005+03:00

Greek Easter & Greek poets...

Odysseus Elytis (1911-1996)

Odysseus Elytis

Drinking the sun of Corinth

Drinking the sun of Corinth
Reading the marble ruins
Striding across vineyards and seas
Sighting along the harpoon
A votive fish that slips away
I found the leaves that the sun’s psalm memorizes
The living land that passion joys in opening.

I drink water, cut fruit,
Thrust my hand into the wind’s foliage
The lemon trees water the summer pollen
The green birds tear my dreams
I leave with a glance
A wide glance in which the world is recreated
Beautiful from the beginning to the dimensions of the heart!

The tears of rivers flow always...

2011-03-30T16:14:00.005+03:00

Andreas Embirikos

Insight of Morning Hours

For Yves Tanguy

Natural inclination
The dove of our heartbeat spreads it around
The tears of rivers flow always
They are tears of unconcealable happiness
They are lakes where snow-white storks lived long ago
No south-westerly settles in the sugar-canes
And even if at a gunshot the clouds lift
And rise into thinner layers
Where the corvettes spread the sails
Down on the earth a shadow searches for its lost body
The weather in the valley which stole it from her
Thickens the mists that hide it
The lake’s treasures are restless, their fur rises
Seaweed and elemental matter stir in the depths
A jellyfish weeps for yesterday’s transparency
Which will return with the first fishing-light
Before winter sets in
Before anyone thinks of lighting the beacon
Under which a blonde woman considers her future
The lighthouse-keeper bends to her lips and kisses them
As mariners kiss their symplegades.

Andreas Embirikos (1901-1975)

The Caryatids

For Yiorgos Gounaropoulos

O the breasts of youth
O the pallid waters of the fig-eaters
The cobblestones echo with the steps of morning people
Thicket of strength with your scarlet trees
Youth senses your significance
And springs up already at your edges
Feathery tresses frisk between the breasts of young girls
Who walk half-naked through your narrow streets
Their curls more lovely than those of Absalom
Amber drips between the locks
And the dark-haired ones hold ebony leaves
Ferrets sniff at their steps
The forest responds
The forest is a swarm of ants with lance-bearing legions
Here even the skylarks are stripping off their shadows
The railways cannot be heard
The day sighs
One of the her young daughters is playing with her breasts
No slap will do any good
A deer passes by holding in its mouth
The three cherries it found between the breasts of youth
The evening here is warm
The trees wrap themselves in their quietude
Now and then rocks of silence fall slowly into the clearing
Like light before it turns to day.

Our art: the ego’s most horrible disguise...

2011-03-22T14:24:00.016+02:00

I always climb towards horror with greasy boots,
starving now from flame
fluently secular
fluently
in tears...

Human Figures by Prehistoric Artists
(Algeria, Tassili N'Ajjer)

Nikos Karouzos

Dross of Immortality

I always climb towards horror with greasy boots,
starving now from flame
fluently secular
fluently
in tears
eternal chorographer of
my diction
and unquestioned
garment.
Badly spent illumination in
mauve and other delays,
of an ignoble
horizon
barking the creed of the dog,
or an unbecominghallucinatory
Universe,
pharaonic queen through
mathematical piousness.
I am what’s
involuntary of existence
my physique is not a flower, it
is rawness,
I am disposed toward a thousand years
even if I fall eternally on bloody seconds;
the winds have pointed me out.

May 1989

Nikos Karouzos (1926-1990)

I Penetrated Matter Howling

Two seas pursue me: life and death two currents which, damn
them, are in my heart . . .
I am trying to find in my dog-
drunk head
/second possessive pronoun/intelligence – can’t be found. I didn’t petrify anything. Lets play the winds let’s sweetly
play the damned.
What a sensuously-seasoned
infant the poem and poor Jesus
wearing orange stained underwear is hung up every
year in spring.
Our art: the ego’s most
horrible disguise.

Sorrow & sympathy for Japan...

2011-03-13T18:43:00.008+02:00

Hoping for the quickest possible recovery in Japan...

Dedicated to Japanes friends...

From time to time

The clouds give rest

To the moon beholders...

Katsushika Hokusai, The Great Wave of Kanagawa, print (1826-1833)

Japanese Haiku

Matsuo Basho
(1644-1694

Moonlight slants through

The vast bamboo grove:

A cuckoo cries

Ah, summer grasses!

All that remains

Of the warriors dreams.

Along this road

Goes no one;

This autumn evening.

From time to time

The clouds give rest

To the moon beholders..

The butterfly is perfuming

It's wings in the scent

as my unfading nightlight in memory...

2011-03-09T13:32:00.006+02:00

When you reach that other world, don't become a cloud,
don't become a cloud, and the bitter star of dawn,
so that your mother knows you, waiting at her door...

Nikos Gatsos (1911-1992)

Nikos Gatsos

Rosewater

When you reach that other world, don't become a cloud,
don't become a cloud, and the bitter star of dawn,
so that your mother knows you, waiting at her door.
Take a wand of willow, a root of rosemary,
a root of rosemary, and be a moonlit coolness
falling in the midnight in your thirsting courtyard.
I gave you rosewater to drink, you gave me poison,
eaglet of the frost, hawk of the desert.

Dark Mother

I brought you up with soil and water
a young swallow to be and yet a wild creature,
to have you as my alphabet-book in the times
and as my unfading nightlight in memory.

But you, looking for the source of dreams
near the Virgin Mary,
developed wings, refused the land
our dark, our first mother.

Oh, flowers and moss, Oh, enemy of death...

2011-03-04T09:30:00.004+02:00

The sad moon in summer, the dragging anchor, took your dreams, hills, trees, light, waters, darkness, not dim thoughts but truths, severed from the mind that suddenly decided, time and all future evil...

Salvatore Quasimodo (1901-1968)

Salavatore Quasimodo

Enemy of Death

You should not have
ripped out your image
taken from us, from the world,
a portion of beauty.
What can we do
we enemies of death,
bent to your feet of rose,
your breast of violet?
Not a word, not a scrap
of your last day, a No
to earth’s things, a No
to our dull human record.
The sad moon in summer,
the dragging anchor, took
your dreams, hills, trees,
light, waters, darkness,
not dim thoughts but truths,
severed from the mind
that suddenly decided,
time and all future evil.
Now you are shut
behind heavy doors
enemy of death.

Who cries?
You have blown out beauty
with a breath, torn her,
dealt her the death-wound,
without a tear
for her insensate shadow’s
spreading over us.
Destroyed solitude,
and beauty, failed.
You have signalled
into the dark,
inscribed your name in air,
your No
to everything that crowds here
and beyond the wind.
I know what you were
looking for in your new dress.
I understand the unanswered question.
Neither for you nor us, a reply.
Oh, flowers and moss,
Oh, enemy of death.

I am my own landscape...

2011-02-22T12:38:00.003+02:00

I am my own landscape,
I watch myself journey - Various, mobile, and alone.
Here where I am I can’t feel myself...

Fernando Pessôa (1888-1935)

Fernando Pessoa

I don’t know how many souls I have

I don’t know how many souls I have.
I’ve changed at every moment.
I always feel like a stranger.
I’ve never seen or found myself.
From being so much, I have only soul.
A man who has soul has no calm.
A man who sees is just what he sees.
A man who feels is not who he is.

Attentive to what I am and see,
I become them and stop being I.
Each of my dreams and each desire
Belongs to whoever had it, not me.
I am my own landscape,
I watch myself journey -
Various, mobile, and alone.
Here where I am I can’t feel myself.

That’s why I read, as a stranger,
My being as if it were pages.
Not knowing what will come
And forgetting what has passed,
I note in the margin of my reading
What I thought I felt.
Rereading, I wonder: “Was that me?”
God knows, because he wrote it.

Não sei quantas almas tenho

Não sei quantas almas tenho.
Cada momento mudei.
Continuamente me estranho.
Nunca me vi nem achei.
De tanto ser, só tenho alma.
Quem tem alma não tem calma.
Quem vê é só o que vê.
Quem sente não é quem é.

Atento ao que sou e vejo,
Torno-me eles e não eu.
Cada meu sonho ou desejo,
É do que nasce, e não meu.
Sou minha própria paisagem,
Assisto à minha passagem,
Diverso, móbil e só.
Não sei sentir-me onde estou.

Por isso, alheio, vou lendo
Como páginas, meu ser.
O que segue não prevendo,
O que passou a esquecer.
Noto à margem do que li
O que julguei que senti.
Releio e digo, «Fui eu?»
Deus sabe, porque o escreveu.

Una casa portuguesa, Amalia Rodrigues

Only memories waking...

2011-02-11T10:03:00.007+02:00

Yannis Stavrou, Four Red Ships, oil on canvas

Only memories waking
That sleep so light a sleep...

Sarah Teasdale

It is not a Word

It is not a word spoken,
Few words are said;
Nor even a look of the eyes
Nor a bend of the head,

But only a hush of the heart
That has too much to keep,
Only memories waking
That sleep so light a sleep.

Only in Sleep

Only in sleep I see their faces,
Children I played with when I was a child,
Louise comes back with her brown hair braided,
Annie with ringlets warm and wild.

Only in sleep Time is forgotten --
What may have come to them, who can know?
Yet we played last night as long ago,
And the doll-house stood at the turn of the stair.

The years had not sharpened their smooth round faces,
I met their eyes and found them mild --
Do they, too, dream of me, I wonder,
And for them am I too a child?

After the first death, there is no other...

2011-02-01T13:54:00.004+02:00

Paul Gauguin, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? / oil on canvas

Dylan Thomas

A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London

Never until the mankind making
Bird beast and flower
Fathering and all humbling darkness
Tells with silence the last light breaking
And the still hour
Is come of the sea tumbling in harness

And I must enter again the round
Zion of the water bead
And the synagogue of the ear of corn
Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound
Or sow my salt seed
In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn

The majesty and burning of the child's death.
I shall not murder
The mankind of her going with a grave truth
Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath
With any further
Elegy of innocence and youth.

Deep with the first dead lies London's daughter,
Robed in the long friends,
The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,
Secret by the unmourning water
Of the riding Thames.
After the first death, there is no other.

The streets are garlanded and the palms advance...

2011-01-31T14:08:00.009+02:00

Apollinaire's Calligramme

Guillaume Apollinaire

One Evening

(Alcools: Un Soir)

An eagle descends from this sky white with archangels

And you sustain me

Let them tremble a long while all these lamps

Pray pray for me

The city’s metallic and it’s the only star

Drowned in your blue eyes

When the tramways run spurting pale fire

Over the twittering birds

And all that trembles in your eyes of my dreams

That a lonely man drinks

Under flames of gas red like a false dawn

O clothed your arm is lifted

See the speaker stick his tongue out at the listeners

A phantom has committed suicide

The apostle of the fig-tree hangs and slowly rots

Let us play this love out then to the end

Bells with clear chimes announce your birth

See

The streets are garlanded and the palms advance

Towards thee

Guillame Apollinaire (1880-1918)

Un Soir

Un aigle descendit de ce ciel blanc d'archanges
Et vous soutenez-moi
Laisserez-vous trembler longtemps toutes ces lampes
Priez priez pour moi La ville est métallique et c'est la seule étoile
Noyée dans tes yeux bleus
Quand les tramways roulaient jaillissaient des feux pâles
Sur des oiseaux galeux Et tout ce qui tremblait dans tes yeux de mes songes
Qu'un seul homme buvait
Sous les feux de gaz roux comme la fausse oronge
O vêtue ton bras se lovait Vois l'histrion tire la langue aux attentives
Un fantôme s'est suicidé
L'apôtre au figuier pend et lentement salive
Jouons donc cet amour aux dés Des cloches aux sons clairs annonçaient ta naissance
Vois
Les chemins sont fleuris et les palmes s'avancent
Vers toi

The Shock Doctrine...

2011-01-27T12:01:00.002+02:00

In THE SHOCK DOCTRINE, Naomi Klein explodes the myth that the global free market triumphed democratically. Exposing the thinking, the money trail and the puppet strings behind the world-changing crises and wars of the last four decades, The Shock Doctrine is the gripping story of how America’s “free market” policies have come to dominate the world-- through the exploitation of disaster-shocked people and countries.

At the most chaotic juncture in Iraq’s civil war, a new law is unveiled that would allow Shell and BP to claim the country’s vast oil reserves…. Immediately following September 11, the Bush Administration quietly out-sources the running of the “War on Terror” to Halliburton and Blackwater…. After a tsunami wipes out the coasts of Southeast Asia, the pristine beaches are auctioned off to tourist resorts.... New Orleans’s residents, scattered from Hurricane Katrina, discover that their public housing, hospitals and schools will never be reopened…. These events are examples of “the shock doctrine”: using the public’s disorientation following massive collective shocks – wars, terrorist attacks, or natural disasters -- to achieve control by imposing economic shock therapy. Sometimes, when the first two shocks don’t succeed in wiping out resistance, a third shock is employed: the electrode in the prison cell or the Taser gun on the streets.

Based on breakthrough historical research and four years of on-the-ground reporting in disaster zones, The Shock Doctrine vividly shows how disaster capitalism – the rapid-fire corporate reengineering of societies still reeling from shock – did not begin with September 11, 2001. The book traces its origins back fifty years, to the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman, which produced many of the leading neo-conservative and neo-liberal thinkers whose influence is still profound in Washington today. New, surprising connections are drawn between economic policy, “shock and awe” warfare and covert CIA-funded experiments in electroshock and sensory deprivation in the 1950s, research that helped write the torture manuals used today in Guantanamo Bay.

The Shock Doctrine follows the application of these ideas through our contemporary history, showing in riveting detail how well-known events of the recent past have been deliberate, active theatres for the shock doctrine, among them: Pinochet’s coup in Chile in 1973, the Falklands War in 1982, the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Asian Financial crisis in 1997 and Hurricane Mitch in 1998.

A man's worth has its season, like fruit...

2011-01-24T12:46:00.006+02:00

Few people have the wisdom to prefer the criticism that would do them good, to the praise that deceives them...

About human nature - one of the greatest minds

François VI duke de La Rochefoucauld
(1613-1680)

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Aphorisms

(some of his 504 aphorisms found in his book "Réflexions ou sentences et maximes morales")

It is not enough to have great qualities; We should also have the management of them.

It is not in the power of even the most crafty dissimulation to conceal love long, where it really is, nor to counterfeit it long where it is not.

It is often laziness and timidity that keep us within our duty while virtue gets all the credit.

It is with an old love as it is with old age a man lives to all the miseries, but is dead to all the pleasures.

It is with true love as it is with ghosts; everyone talks about it, but few have seen it.

It takes nearly as much ability to know how to profit by good advice as to know how to act for one's self.

It's easier to be wise for others than for ourselves.

It's the height of folly to want to be the only wise one.

Mediocre minds usually dismiss anything which reaches beyond their own understanding.

Jealously is always born with love but it does not die with it.

Jealousy contains more of self-love than of love.

Jealousy is bred in doubts. When those doubts change into certainties, then the passion either ceases or turns absolute madness.

Jealousy is not so much the love of another as the love of ourselves.

Jealousy lives upon doubts. It becomes madness or ceases entirely as soon as we pass from doubt to certainty.

Jealousy springs more from love of self than from love of another.

Love can no more continue without a constant motion than fire can; and when once you take hope and fear away, you take from it its very life and being.

Love often leads on to ambition, but seldom does one return from ambition to love.

Many men are contemptuous of riches; few can give them away.

Men give away nothing so liberally as their advice.

Men often pass from love to ambition, but they seldom come back again from ambition to love.

A great many men's gratitude is nothing but a secret desire to hook in more valuable kindnesses hereafter.

A man is sometimes as different from himself as he is from others.

A man's worth has its season, like fruit.

A refusal of praise is a desire to be praised twice.

A true friend is the greatest of all blessings, and that which we take the least care of all to acquire.

A wise man thinks it more advantageous not to join the battle than to win.

A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant.

Absence diminishes mediocre passions and increases great ones, as the wind extinguishes candles and fans fires.

All the passions make us commit faults; love makes us commit the most ridiculous ones.

As great minds have the faculty of saying a great deal in a few words, so lesser minds have a talent of talking much, and saying nothing.

As it is the characteristic of great wits to say much in few words, so small wits seem to have the gift of speaking much and saying nothing.

As one grows older, one becomes wiser and more foolish.

Before we set our hearts too much upon anything, let us examine how happy they are, who already possess it.

Being a blockhead is sometimes the best security against being cheated by a man of wit.

Conceit causes more conversation than wit.

Confidence contributes more to conversation than wit.

Decency is the least of all laws, but yet it is the law which is most strictly observed.

Every one speaks well of his own heart, but no one dares speak well of his own mind.

Everyone complains of his memory, and nobody complains of his judgment.

Few people have the wisdom to prefer the criticism that would do them good, to the praise that deceives them.

No, I regret nothing, all I regret is having been born...

2011-01-21T15:03:00.005+02:00

Samuel Beckett (1906-1989)

No, I regret nothing, all I regret is having been born, dying is such a long tiresome business I always found...

Samuel Beckett

Aphorisms

All I know is what the words know, and dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning and a middle and an end, as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead.

Birth was the death of him.

Do we mean love, when we say love?

Dublin university contains the cream of Ireland: Rich and thick.

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.

Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.

Go on failing. Go on. Only next time, try to fail better.

Habit is a great deadener.

I can't go on. I'll go on.

I have my faults, but changing my tune is not one of them.

I shall state silences more competently than ever a better man spangled the butterflies of vertigo.

I write about myself with the same pencil and in the same exercise book as about him. It is no longer I, but another whose life is just beginning.

If I had the use of my body, I would throw it out the window.

If you do not love me I shall not be loved If I do not love you I shall not love.

In the landscape of extinction, precision is next to godliness.

It is right that he too should have his little chronicle, his memories, his reason, and be able to recognize the good in the bad, the bad in the worst, and so grow gently old down all the unchanging days, and die one day like any other day, only shorter.

James Joyce was a synthesizer, trying to bring in as much as he could. I am an analyzer, trying to leave out as much as I can.

Just under the surface I shall be, all together at first, then separate and drift, through all the earth and perhaps in the end through a cliff into the sea, something of me. A ton of worms in an acre, that is a wonderful thought, a ton of worms, I believe it.

Let me go to hell, that's all I ask, and go on cursing them there, and them look down and hear me, that might take some of the shine off their bliss.

No, I regret nothing, all I regret is having been born, dying is such a long tiresome business I always found.

Comments & Greek artists: Papadiamantis, the greatest Greek author...

2011-01-17T12:42:00.014+02:00

Alexandros Papadiamantis
(March 4, 1851 - January 3, 1911)

The greatest Greek writer of the 19th century - The so called Greek Dostoyefski...

1oo years from his death

Alexandros Papadiamantis (1851-1911)

The following text is written by his translaton from Greek Irene Voulgaris

Alexandros Papadiamantis the most compassionate and authentic Greek author

“Papadiamantis” (“Papa” meaning priest and “Diamantis” being the colloquial version of “Adamantios”), the way his father, Diamantis, was addressed, was the pen name the writer chose. Young Alexandros, or “Alekos” as his father called him, was raised in a poor family in Skiathos, a small island in the Aegean Sea, with the pure orthodox Christian spirit and “fear of God”. He was born in 1851 to Adamantios Emmanuel, a poor parson, a descendant of priests and seamen, and Angeliki Moraitidi who came from an aristocratic family of the island. He was one of nine children of whom two died very young. In those times, priests did not receive monthly salaries and pensions from the Greek State, so his father had to make a living by farming.
From an early age Papadiamantis showed his love for knowledge and his unique empathy. His longing for higher studies led him to leave his island in pursuit of a proper education and a career in literature in Athens. His constant economic difficulties however, did not allow him to complete his formal studies for he had to work to support himself. Throughout his life he kept returning to his beloved island whenever he could no longer stand the affectation of manners and the vanity of city life. There, he wrote some of his masterpieces and his quiet spirit rested for a while close to the translucent, sparkling emerald-blue sea, the “flaxen-haired shepherds” and his own kin, before resuming his solitary life in the capital.

In spite of the enormous adversities he faced, or perhaps because of them, he persevered and educated himself by auditing lectures of his choice at the School of Philosophy of the University of Athens and by teaching himself English and French. It is no exaggeration to say that Papadiamantis educated himself attaining a higher level of understanding of Greek literature and philosophy from Homer and Plato to his contemporaries, of patristic and literary works of the Christian Orthodox Church, of history and politics than that of his lecturers and professors at the University. A lover of reading from the original, he devoured centuries of notable works and his sharp intellect did not compromise whenever grave issues threatening his values arose, to the point of publicly criticizing established professors and theologians.

At the beginning he worked as a private tutor and a newspaper and magazine contributor and then also as a translator. Being an ardent lover of literature soon he immersed deeply into reading works of great authors of his time, in English and French such as Rudyard Kipling, Mark Twain, Emile Zola, William Blake, Alphonse Daudet and Guy de Maupassant. His knowledge of these foreign languages improved so rapidly that soon he started translating English, French and American authors into Greek for magazines and journals where his wonderful translations were published, along with his own works, in instalments.

With what he earned, the writer could have lived decently. Nevertheless, he barely managed to pay for his room's rent or for his meager meals at a tavern, as he used to give most of his money to the needy. He hardly ever bought new shoes or clothes, partly justifying, regarding his appearance, the fact that his acquaintances referred to him as “a monk living in the world”. Nevertheless, this is precisely what has set him apart from other writers; for Papadiamantis was a man who felt the pain of those mourning, the hunger and the bitter cold of the poor, the longing of the immigrant to return home, the despair of the deserted wife, the suffering and helplessness of the poor widows and orphans, the ways of those who entertain evil thoughts. He lived his stories and his stories contain this stark reality, in a way few stories ever do. In this respect, Alexandros Papadiamantis is for Greece what Charles Dickens is for Britain. The main difference between the two great writers is, apart from the fact that Dickens’s childhood was much more painful than Papadiamantis’s, that while Dickens got married, had a big family, made a fortune out of his writing, was highly appraised by his contemporaries on both sides of the Atlantic and enjoyed publicity, Papadiamantis remained a single, lonely, poor man, despised by most of his peers and avoided being in the public eye at all costs.

His father hoped that he would become a high school teacher and that he would make some money to help his four sisters get a dowry so that they would get married; a young girl was not considered an eligible wife in those times, unless she had a dowry. He never married himself; neither did he have any relationship with any women. He led a secluded, spartan life devoted to writing, to translating, and to singing psalms as a “chanter on the right” (the one on the left was his cousin Alexandros Moraitides, also a writer) in the chapel of St Elisseos in Plaka, the old district of Athens. Papa-Nicolas Planas was the priest there then; the legendary, loving shepherd of humble attitude who came from another Aegean island, Naxos, and was canonized by the Christian Orthodox Church in the last decade of the 20th century. Like the monks on the Holy Mountain where Papadiamantis had spent some months with a friend who became a monk and like Papa Nicolas, the writer never showed off but preferred to remain unnoticed. He even shunned publicity when recognition came a little before his death. Such was the ascetic, humble spirit and life of this extraordinary literary figure and such was the place he frequented.
Although his incredibly authentic, lyrical and soul piercing writing remains hitherto, almost a hundred years after his passing away, unsurpassed, and even though scholars have only recently discovered the equally unparalleled beauty of his literary translations, and lectures and films and events dedicated to his memory and to his works abound all over Greece, his talent was not recognized by the majority of the prominent literary critics of his time. He was despised by most of the established literary figures among his contemporaries, who have already been forgotten, for although he chose to write in their language, the language of the upper class and of the aristocracy, the “katharevousa”, his themes dealt primarily with the outcasts of the civilized society, with the poor, with the badly hit by fate widows and hungry orphans, with evil witches and saints, with the passionate beauty of the sea and of the rural countryside, with the mundane struggle of the unprivileged creatures to survive in the midst of disease, death, poverty and social exploitation and exclusion. Thus, the only ones who complimented his works in his lifetime were his fellow-journalists and the “demotikistes”, the writers who wrote in the people's spoken language, the “demotic”. “Demotikistes” chose to write in this version of Greek so that their works could reach the uneducated people who did not understand and could not afford to learn “katharevousa”. They felt close to Papadiamantis spiritually, but they were separated from him by their different linguistic choice as he only wrote the dialogues in “demotic” but used a very rich and eloquent “katharevousa” for the rest of his stories. Among those few who had publicly recognized that his works were of a rare literary, human and moral value as they reflected his living, compassionate spirit and his love for the poor and unjustly suffering, were the distinguished and esteemed poet and critic Kostis Palamas and his friend, the publisher of the newspaper "Akropolis", Vlasios Gabrielidis. The latter wrote about Papadiamantis among other things:

“He is not an ordinary storyteller; he is a spiritual and moral laborer who fights for progress, for awareness and for justice...”

However, after his death in 1911 of pneumonia, he was unanimously acclaimed as the best Greek author modern Greece had offered, as “the Saint of Greek Letters!” Some critics even went so far as to claim that it would be difficult for next generations to produce an author of the same or an even better caliber. The present reality of the beginning of the new millennium has exceeded their prediction; no Greek writer has come close to the deeply human, and nature loving power of his works, or to his rich, uniquely expressive language, let alone equals it.
Papadiamantis wrote about two hundred short stories and about fifty studies and articles. He also wrote three novelettes, “The Murderess”, which has been translated into many languages, “Christos Milionis”, and the “Rosy Seashores”. He also wrote three novels, “The Emigrant”, “The Merchants of the Nations” and “The Gypsy Girl”. Some of his works have been turned into films.

After his death and the subsequent sudden awareness of the critics regarding the merit of his literary work, his stories were painstakingly collected from thousands of newspaper and magazine issues and they were bound in volumes and so were his novels. After all his works were published in multi-volume editions, the critics were astonished not only by the quality but also by the quantity of his work. Scholars are still studying his lesser known stories, discovering unknown ones and their social and historical settings. Their latest discovery is a large number of anonymous translations which must be his; the date, the language, and the expressive and stylistic choices reveal the identity of the translator.
A
part from prose, Papadiamantis also wrote poems. From the time he was a little boy he occasionally resorted to putting his feelings to paper in verse and he has thus left us some beautiful poems in which so many feelings, experiences and reveries are expressed so eloquently in so few words, that one marvels at the combination! Again, his poetry was underestimated by his contemporaries, but now this hidden treasure has been found and taken out of its trunk by some amateur singers who have turned them into beautiful ballads. Here is one of them:

‘night of suffering’

When my poor eyes
will you close in silence,
offering sleep an’ bitter rest
to me…

Hearken how the nightingale
has crouched in solitude,
listen, listen to the owlet
ending its dirge…

And the stars, withered
lilies of God,
keep turning off an’ falling down
from heavenly lowlands…

And the fishing lamp’s gone
somewhere in the bleak haven,
glimmering the sea’s depths an’
being mirrored on the shore.

(Translated by Irene Voulgaris)

Click the above image to read Papadiamantis short story
The Demons in the Ravine

Comments & Greek artists, painters: And not just for myself I pray to Lord, But for them all, who stood in that line...

2011-01-14T00:12:00.009+02:00

Not under foreign skies protection Or saving wings of alien birth – I was then there – with whole my nation – There, where my nation, alas! was.

Anna Akmatova

Among the greatest poets of the 20th century...

(from)
Requiem

Instead of a Preface

In the awful days of the Yezhovschina I passed seventeen months in the outer waiting line of the prison visitors in Leningrad. Once, somebody ‘identified’ me there. Then a woman, standing behind me in the line, which, of course, never heard my name, waked up from the torpor, typical for us all there, and asked me, whispering into my ear (all spoke only in a whisper there):
“And can you describe this?”
And I answered:
“Yes, I can.”
Then the weak similarity of a smile glided over that, what had once been her face.

April 1, 1957; Leningrad

Anna Akmatova (1889-1966)

Dedication

The high crags decline before this woe,
The great river does not flow ahead,
But they’re strong – the locks of a jail, stone,
And behind them – the cells, dark and low,
And the deadly pine is spread.
For some one, somewhere, a fresh wind blows,
For some one, somewhere, wakes up a dawn –
We don’t know, we’re the same here always,
We just hear the key’s squalls, morose,
And the sentry’s heavy step alone;
Got up early, as for Mass by Easter,
Walked the empty capital along
To create the half-dead peoples’ throng.
The sun downed, the Neva got mister,
But our hope sang afar its song.
There’s a sentence… In a trice tears flow…
Now separated, cut from us,
As if they’d pulled out her heart and thrown
Or pushed down her on a street stone –
But she goes… Reels… Alone at once.
Where are now friends unwilling those,
Those friends of my two years, brute?
What they see in the Siberian snows,
In a circle of the moon, exposed?
To them I send my farewell salute.

Epilogue

I

I’ve known how, at once, shrink back the faces,
How fear peeps up from under the eyelids,
How suffering creates the scriptural pages
On the pale cheeks its cruel reigning midst,
How the shining raven or fair ringlet
At once is covered by the silver dust,
And a smile slackens on the lips, obedient,
And deathly fear in the dry snicker rustles.
And not just for myself I pray to Lord,
But for them all, who stood in that line, hardest,
In a summer heat and in a winter cold,
Under the wall, so red and so sightless.

Comments & Greek artists, modern Greek artists: Oedipus' child Descends into the loveless dust...

2011-01-08T17:58:00.005+02:00

William Butler Yeats

From The 'Antigone'

Overcome -- O bitter sweetness,
Inhabitant of the soft cheek of a girl --
The rich man and his affairs,
The fat flocks and the fields' fatness,
Mariners, rough harvesters;
Overcome Gods upon Parnassus;

Overcome the Empyrean; hurl
Heaven and Earth out of their places,
That in the Same calamity
Brother and brother, friend and friend,
Family and family,
City and city may contend,
By that great glory driven wild.

Pray I will and sing I must,
And yet I weep -- Oedipus' child
Descends into the loveless dust.

Comments & Greek artists, Greek painting: to have sailed across the diverse seas of the world...

2011-01-07T12:04:00.006+02:00

and to have seen nothing, or almost nothing
except the face of a girl from Buenos Aires
a face that does not want you to remember it...

Jorge Luis Borges

Elegy

Oh destiny of Borges
to have sailed across the diverse seas of the world
or across that single and solitary sea of diverse names,
to have been a part of Edinburgh, of Zurich, of the two Cordobas,
of Colombia and of Texas,
to have returned at the end of changing generations
to the ancient lands of his forebears,
to Andalucia, to Portugal and to those counties
where the Saxon warred with the Dane and they mixed their blood,
to have wandered through the red and tranquil labyrinth of London,
to have grown old in so many mirrors,
to have sought in vain the marble gaze of the statues,
to have questioned lithographs, encyclopedias, atlases,
to have seen the things that men see,
death, the sluggish dawn, the plains,
and the delicate stars,
and to have seen nothing, or almost nothing
except the face of a girl from Buenos Aires
a face that does not want you to remember it.
Oh destiny of Borges,
perhaps no stranger than your own.

Comments & Greek artists, Greek painters: A thing of beauty is a joy for ever...

2011-01-04T08:08:00.005+02:00

John Keats

(from)
Endymion
Book I

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing
A flowery band to bind us to the earth,
Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth
Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,
Of all the unhealthy and o’er-darkened ways
Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits. Such the sun, the moon,
Trees old and young, sprouting a shady boon
For simple sheep; and such are daffodils
With the green world they live in; and clear rills
That for themselves a cooling covert make
’Gainst the hot season; the mid forest brake,
Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms:
And such too is the grandeur of the dooms
We have imagined for the mighty dead;
All lovely tales that we have heard or read:
An endless fountain of immortal drink,
Pouring unto us from the heaven’s brink.

Comments & Greek artists: Happy New Year!

2011-01-01T16:19:00.004+02:00

Happy New Year!

Comments & Greek artists, Greek painting: But I never heard any noise or sound of builders...

2010-12-30T11:21:00.004+02:00

Konstantinos Kavafis

Walls

Without consideration, without pity, without shame
they have built great and high walls around me.

And now I sit here and despair.
I think of nothing else: this fate gnaws at my mind;

for I had many things to do outside.
Ah why did I not pay attention when they were building the walls.

But I never heard any noise or sound of builders.
Imperceptibly they shut me from the outside world

Comments & Greek artists, Greek painting: They came dressed up as "friends"...

2010-12-29T17:13:00.003+02:00

Odysseas Elytis

They Came

They came
dressed up as “friends,”
came countless times, my enemies,
trampling the primeval soil.
And the soil never blended with their heel.
They brought
The Wise One, the Founder, and the Geometer,
Bibles of letters and numbers,
every kind of Submission and Power,
to sway over the primeval light.
And the light never blended with their roof.
Not even a bee was fooled into beginning the golden game,
not even a Zephyr into swelling the white aprons.
On the peaks, in the valleys, in the ports
they raised and founded
mighty towers and villas,
floating timbers and other vessels;
and the Laws decreeing the pursuit of profit
they applied to the primeval measure.
And the measure never blended with their thinking.
Not even a footprint of a god left a man on their soul,
not even a fairy’s glance tried to rob them of their speech.
They came
dressed up as “friends,”
came countless times, my enemies,
bearing the primeval gifts.
And their gifts were nothing else
but iron and fire only.
To the open expecting fingers
only weapons and iron and fire.
Only weapons and iron and fire.

Comments & Greek artists: Merry Christmas...

2010-12-24T09:04:00.008+02:00

MERRY CHRISTMAS

The Twelve Days of Christmas

On the first day of Christmas my true love gave to me
a partridge in a pear tree.

On the second day of Christmas my true love gave to me
Two turtle doves and a partridge in a pear tree.

On the third day of Christmas my true love gave to me
Three French hens, two turtle doves and a partridge in a pear tree.

On the fourth day of Christmas my true love gave to me
Four calling birds,
three French hens, two turtle doves and a partridge in a pear tree.

On the fifth day of Christmas my true love gave to me
Five golden ring, four calling birds,
three French hens, two turtle doves and a partridge in a pear tree.

On the sixth day of Christmas my true love gave to me
Six geese a-laying, five golden ring, four calling birds,
three French hens, two turtle doves and a partridge in a pear tree.

On the seventh day of Christmas my true love gave to me
Seven swan a-swimming,
six geese a-laying, five golden ring, four calling birds,
three French hens, two turtle doves and a partridge in a pear tree.

On the eighth day of Christmas my true love gave to me
Eight sheep a-milking, seven swan a-swimming,
six geese a-laying, five golden ring, four calling birds,
three French hens, two turtle doves and a partridge in a pear tree.

On the ninth day of Christmas my true love gave to me
Nine drummers drumming, eight sheep a-milking, seven swan a-swimming,
six geese a-laying, five golden ring, four calling birds,
three French hens, two turtle doves and a partridge in a pear tree.

On the tenth day of Christmas my true love gave to me
Ten ladies dancing,
nine drummers drumming, eight sheep a-milking, seven swan a-swimming,
six geese a-laying, five golden ring, four calling birds,
three French hens, two turtle doves and a partridge in a pear tree.

On the eleventh day of Christmas my true love gave to me
Eleven lords a-leaping, ten ladies dancing,
nine drummers drumming, eight sheep a-milking, seven swan a-swimming,
six geese a-laying, five golden ring, four calling birds,
three French hens, two turtle doves and a partridge in a pear tree.

On the twelfth day of Christmas my true love gave to me
Twelve fiddlers fiddling, eleven lords a-leaping, ten ladies dancing,
nine drummers drumming, eight sheep a-milking, seven swan a-swimming,
six geese a-laying, five golden ring, four calling birds,
three French hens, two turtle doves and a partridge in a pear tree.

Comments & Greek artists, modern Greek artists: The Night is in my Interest...

2010-12-23T07:44:00.010+02:00

the night is in my interest.
First of all, it reduces ambition; moreover,
it corrects thoughts; then,
it collects the grief and makes it more bearable...

Nikos Karouzos

Suspension

In the sky, possibilities
are naught but thrilling.
As I was hanging in the air
holding on to a pure white cloud
on a mythic screen of the imagination,
I observed the quotations
of the elements of my blood
and heard a dazzling musical act
practically non-human
on the left of the geographical map
at the point at which Mt. Terror lies
always wreathed in lightning
and blinding storms.
I went up there once.
There I first heard the song
that said: we belong to water.
And on the other side Ecclesiastes shined.
For some time now I’ve known that the blood
contains all the mystery
which is given through signs
to the human mind, and complete discontinuity.
The circulation perhaps?
queried the brilliant pathologist.
And suddenly
Leonardo came to mind
who knew what exquisite information derives from the body.

Nikos Karouzos (1926-1990)

The Night is in my Interest

Indeed the night is in my interest.
First of all, it reduces ambition; moreover,
it corrects thoughts; then,
it collects the grief and makes it more bearable;
it dissects the silence with respect; in the gardens
it stresses smell,
but above all, night envelops.

Comments & Greek artists, Greek painters: O World! O Life! O Time! On whose last steps I climb...

2010-12-17T15:19:00.005+02:00

Poetry & Greek artists, contemporary Greek painters

Yannis Stavrou, Attica Landscape, oil on canvas

Percy Shelley

A Lament

O World! O Life! O Time!
On whose last steps I climb,
Trembling at that where I had stood before;
When will return the glory of your prime?
No more -Oh, never more!

Out of the day and night
A joy has taken flight:
Fresh spring, and summer, and winter hoar
Move my faint heart with grief, but with delight
No more -Oh, never more!

Comments & Greek artists, Greek painting: My verses, children of my blood...

2010-12-16T16:28:00.006+02:00

Greek poetry & Greek painting, Greek artists

Kostas Karyotakis
Wounded Gods
My Verses

My verses, children of my blood.
They speak, but I supply the words
like fragments of my heart,
I offer them like tears from my eyes. They go with bitter smiles
when I recount so much of life.
I girdle them with sun and day and sun
for when I'm overtaken by the night. They fix the limits of the sky and earth.
And yet my sons still wonder what is missing
always bored, worn down,
the only mother they have known is Grief. I pour out the laughter of the sweetest tune,
the aimless passion of the flute;
to them I am an unsuspecting king
who's lost his people's love. They waste away, they fade away, yet
never cease their quiet lamentation.
Pass by, Mortal, with averted gaze;
Lethe, carry me in your boat to bathe.

Comments & Greek artists, Greek painting: there where we now remain unsubstantial, bending...

2010-12-15T17:35:00.005+02:00

Greek poets & Greek artists, modern Greek painters

or perhaps no, nothing is left but the weight
the nostalgia for the weight of a living existence
there where we now remain unsubstantial, bending
like the branches of a terrible willow-tree...

Giorgos Seferis

The King of Asine

All morning long we looked around the citadel*

starting from the shaded side, there where the sea,
green and without luster—breast of a slain peacock—
received us like time without an opening in it.
Veins of rock dropped down from high above,
twisted vines, naked, many-branched, coming alive
at the water’s touch, while the eye following them
struggled to escape the tiresome rocking,
losing strength continually.

On the sunny side a long empty beach
and the light striking diamonds on the huge walls.
No living thing, the wild doves gone
and the king of Asine, whom we’ve been trying to find for
two years now,
unknown , forgotten by all, even by Homer,
only one word in the Iliad and that uncertain,
thrown here like the gold burial mask.
You touched it, remember its sound? Hollow in the light
like a dry jar in dug earth:
the same sound that our oars make in the sea.
The king of Asine a void under the mask
everywhere with us everywhere with us, under a name:
“Αsίνην te... Αsίνην te...”
and his children statues
and his desires the fluttering of birds, and the wind
in the gaps between his thoughts, and his ships
anchored in a vanished port:
under the mask a void.

Behind the large eyes the curved lips the curls
carved in relief on the gold cover of our existence
a dark spot that you see traveling like a fish
in the dawn calm of the sea:
a void everywhere with us.
And the bird that flew away last winter
with a broken wing:
abode of life,
and the young woman who left to play
with the dogteeth of summer
and the soul that sought the lower world squeaking
and the country like a large plane-leaf swept along by the
torrent of the sun
with the ancient monuments and the contemporary sorrow.

And the poet lingers, looking at the stones, and asks himself
does there really exist
among these ruined lines, edges, points, hollows, and curves
does there really exist
here where one meets the path of rain, wind, and ruin
does there exist the movement of the face, shape of the
tenderness
of those who’ve shrunk so strangely in our lives,
those who remained the shadow of waves and thoughts with
the sea’s boundlessness
or perhaps no, nothing is left but the weight
the nostalgia for the weight of a living existence
there where we now remain unsubstantial, bending
like the branches of a terrible willow-tree heaped in
permanent despair
while the yellow current slowly carries down rushes up-
rooted in the mud
image of a form that the sentence to everlasting bitterness
has turned to stone:
the poet a void.

Shieldbearer, the sun climbed warring,
and from the depths of the cave a startled bat
hit the light as an arrow hits a shield:
“Αsίνην te...Αsίνην te...” Would that it were the king
of Asine
we’ve been searching for so carefully on this acropolis
sometimes touching with our fingers his touch upon
the stones.

Asine, summer ´38—Athens. Jan. ´40

Comments & Greek artists, modern Greek artists: Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance...

2010-12-14T15:14:00.007+02:00

Nocturnal landscapes & Greek artists, Greek painters

When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance...

John Keats

When I Have Fears

When I have fears that I may cease to be

Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,

Before high-piled books, in charactery,

Hold like rich garners the full ripen'd grain;

When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face,

Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,

And think that I may never live to trace

Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;

And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,

That I shall never look upon thee more,

Never have relish in the faery power

Of unreflecting love;--then on the shore

Of the wide world I stand alone, and think

Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

John Keats (1795-1821)

Bright Star

Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art -
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like Nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors -
No - yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever - or else swoon to death.

Comments & Greek artists, Greek painters: little that is "good" about human beings...

2010-12-13T16:58:00.012+02:00

Aphorisms & Greek artists, contemporary Greek painters

Yannis Stavrou, Still Life, oil on canvas

Still life is better...

On Humans...

I have found little that is "good" about human beings on the whole. In my experience most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or to none at all. That is something that you cannot say aloud, or perhaps even think.

It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct.

Sigmund Freud

Comments & Greek artists, contemporary Greek artists: Your phantom is like the immortal sun!

2010-12-09T18:15:00.003+02:00

The sunlight has darkened the flame of the candles;
Thus, ever triumphant, resplendent soul!
Your phantom is like the immortal sun!

Charles Baudelaire

L'Aube spirituelle

Quand chez les débauchés l'aube blanche et vermeille
Entre en société de l'Idéal rongeur,
Par l'opération d'un mystère vengeur
Dans la brute assoupie un ange se réveille.

Des Cieux Spirituels l'inaccessible azur,
Pour l'homme terrassé qui rêve encore et souffre,
S'ouvre et s'enfonce avec l'attirance du gouffre.
Ainsi, chère Déesse, Etre lucide et pur,

Sur les débris fumeux des stupides orgies
Ton souvenir plus clair, plus rose, plus charmant,
À mes yeux agrandis voltige incessamment.

Le soleil a noirci la flamme des bougies;
Ainsi, toujours vainqueur, ton fantôme est pareil,
Ame resplendissante, à l'immortel soleil!

Spiritual Dawn

When debauchees are roused by the white, rosy dawn,
Escorted by the Ideal which gnaws at their hearts
Through the action of a mysterious, vengeful law,
In the somnolent brute an Angel awakens.

The inaccessible blue of Spiritual Heavens,
For the man thrown to earth who suffers and still dreams,
Opens and yawns with the lure of the abyss.
Thus, dear Goddess, Being, lucid and pure,

Over the smoking ruins of stupid orgies,
Your memory, clearer, more rosy, more charming,
Hovers incessantly before my widened eyes.

The sunlight has darkened the flame of the candles;
Thus, ever triumphant, resplendent soul!
Your phantom is like the immortal sun!

— William Aggeler, The Flowers of Evil (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954)

Comments & Greek artists, Greek painters: This song for mariners and all their ships...

2010-12-07T17:44:00.005+02:00

Walt Whitman
In cabin'd ships, at sea

In cabin'd ships, at sea,
The boundless blue on every side expanding,
With whistling winds and music of the waves--the large imperious
waves--In such,
Or some lone bark, buoy'd on the dense marine,
Where, joyous, full of faith, spreading white sails,
She cleaves the ether, mid the sparkle and the foam of day, or under
many a star at night,
By sailors young and old, haply will I, a reminiscence of the land,
be read,
In full rapport at last.

Here are our thoughts--voyagers' thoughts,
Here not the land, firm land, alone appears, may then by them be
said; 10
The sky o'erarches here--we feel the undulating deck beneath our
feet,
We feel the long pulsation--ebb and flow of endless motion;
The tones of unseen mystery--the vague and vast suggestions of the
briny world--the liquid-flowing syllables,
The perfume, the faint creaking of the cordage, the melancholy
rhythm,
The boundless vista, and the horizon far and dim, are all here,
And this is Ocean's poem.

Then falter not, O book! fulfil your destiny!
You, not a reminiscence of the land alone,
You too, as a lone bark, cleaving the ether--purpos'd I know
not whither--yet ever full of faith, 20
Consort to every ship that sails--sail you!
Bear forth to them, folded, my love--(Dear mariners! for you I fold
it here, in every leaf;)
Speed on, my Book! spread your white sails, my little bark, athwart
the imperious waves!
Chant on--sail on--bear o'er the boundless blue, from me, to every
shore,
This song for mariners and all their ships.

Comments & Greek artists, contemporary Greek artists: In the garden the chrysanthemums were dying...

2010-12-01T13:37:00.005+02:00

Kostas Karyotakis

In the garden the chrysanthemums were dying

In the garden the chrysanthemums were dying
like desires when you came. Calmly
you laughed, like little white flowers.
Silent, I made a sweetest song
out of the darkness deep within me
and the petals sing it up above you.

(translated by Peter J. King & Andrea Christofidou)

Comments & Greek artists, Greek painters: Motionless, I stay and go: I am a pause...

2010-11-29T16:38:00.007+02:00

Octavio Paz

Between going and staying

Between going and staying
the day wavers,
in love with its own transparency.
The circular afternoon is now a bay
where the world in stillness rocks.

All is visible and all elusive,
all is near and can’t be touched.

Paper, book, pencil, glass,
rest in the shade of their names.

Time throbbing in my temples repeats
the same unchanging syllable of blood.

The light turns the indifferent wall
into a ghostly theater of reflections.

I find myself in the middle of an eye,
watching myself in its blank stare.

The moment scatters. Motionless,
I stay and go: I am a pause.

Comments & Greek artists, Greek painting: When I was in my younger days, I sailed...

2010-11-28T17:54:00.008+02:00

Umberto Saba

Ulysses

When I was in my younger days, I sailed
The coastlines of Dalmatia. Isles appeared
In bloom along the billows where sporadic
Birds hung in intent hunger over prey.
Those algae-slippery isles were glittering
Emeralds in gold sunlight. When a high
Tide and the night extinguished them, sails slipped
Leeward to deeper waters to evade
That perfidy. Today I am a king
Of no man's land. The harbor light is lit
For other men. I turn once more to sea
Impelled by an indomitable spirit,
By an excruciating love for life.

Umberto Saba (1883-1957)

Work

Once
my life was easy. The earth
gave me flowers fruit in abundance. Now I loosen ground that is dry and hard.
My spade
bangs against stones in the underbrush. I must
excavate far down. Like someone searching for treasure.

Comments & Greek artists, Greek painters: Man is a god when he dreams and a beggar when he thinks...

2010-11-23T15:19:00.012+02:00

What has always made a hell on earth has been that man has tried to make it his heaven...

Friedrich Hölderlin

In My Boyhood Days

In my boyhood days
Often a god would save me
From the shouts and from the rods of men;
Safe and good then I played
With the orchard flowers
And the breezes of heaven
Played with me.

And as you make glad
The hearts of the plants
When toward you they stretch
There delicate arms.

So you made glad my heart,
Father Helios, and like Endymion
I was your darling,
Holy Luna.

O all you loyal,
Kindly gods!
Would that you knew how
My soul loved you then.

True, at that time I did not
Evoke you by name yet, and you
Never named me, as men use names,
As though they knew one another.

Yet I knew you better
Than ever I have known men,
I understood the silence of Aether,
But human words I΄ve never understood.

I was reared by the euphony
Of the rustling copse
And learned to love
Amid the flowers.

I grew up in the arms of the gods.

from In Lovely Blue

Like the stamen inside a flower

The steeple stands in lovely blue

And the day unfolds around its needle;

The flock of swallows that circles the steeple

Flies there each day through the same blue air

That carries their cries from me to you;

We know how high the sun is now

As long as the roof of the steeple glows,

The roof that’s covered with sheets of tin;

Up there in the wind, where the wind is not

Turning the vane of the weathercock,

The weathercock silently crows in the wind.

Quotes

What has always made a hell on earth has been that man has tried to make it his heaven.

We are nothing; what we search for is everything.

Man is a god when he dreams and a beggar when he thinks.

We were eager to have done and trusted to luck.

Comments & Greek artists, modern Greek artists: I Had Been Leaving Coast of Misty Albion...

2010-11-21T15:35:00.007+02:00

Marina Tsvetaeva

I Had Been Leaving Coast of Misty Albion

"I had been leaving coast of misty Albion."
How divine they are - this sadness and this height!
I see the dingy waves fall down and rise on,
The dingy firmament... I know that all by hart.

I see the youth that leaned upon the high mast's rope,
As beautiful as if he were by fairies born,
Wrapped in a coat. O! Let every virgin sob!
Cry, manhood! Cry, my misty Albion!

It's done! He is alone between these sky and flow!
There is a school for you who have been ‘gainst schools all!
And in a fatal heart, pierced with a star's arrow,
There enters in the king of fatal winds - Aeoll!

The roar of dingy waves is making the new ballad
Of wonderful his death from stars that libeled him on
Cry, Youth! Cry, Love! Cry, World! O, sob my dear Aellad!
Cry, little Ada! Cry, my misty Albion!

Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941)

The Seafarer

Rock me down, o starry skiff!
My head tired from waves, so stiff!

Very long I look for abode, –
My head tired from passions, hot:

Laurels – hymns – hydras – heroes, brazed, –
My head tired from senseless plays!

Lay me down mid leaves and grass, –
My head tired from ceaseless wars.

From Mirror's Plane Where...

From mirror's plane where clouds flow
In a dreamy way
I tried to force a path you go,
The final quay.

I see a mast in salty breeze --
You stand by side...
You go by train -- a dusky heath
Yields evening plight...

The evening heath is set in dew,
Crows are bold...
I bless you: let you go to
Four sides of world!

Comments & Greek artists, painters: The appeal of the artist...

2010-11-18T17:18:00.009+02:00

Art and truth. Art and human nature. Art and temperament...

The appeal of the artist...

Joseph Conrad

About the work of art
from the preface of The Nigger Of The 'Narcissus'

A work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should
carry its justification in every line. And art itself may be defined
as a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to
the visible universe, by bringing to light the truth, manifold and one,
underlying its every aspect. It is an attempt to find in its forms, in
its colours, in its light, in its shadows, in the aspects of matter and
in the facts of life what of each is fundamental, what is enduring and
essential--their one illuminating and convincing quality--the very truth
of their existence. The artist, then, like the thinker or the scientist,
seeks the truth and makes his appeal. Impressed by the aspect of the
world the thinker plunges into ideas, the scientist into facts--whence,
presently, emerging they make their appeal to those qualities of our
being that fit us best for the hazardous enterprise of living. They
speak authoritatively to our common-sense, to our intelligence, to
our desire of peace or to our desire of unrest; not seldom to our
prejudices, sometimes to our fears, often to our egoism--but always
to our credulity. And their words are heard with reverence, for their
concern is with weighty matters: with the cultivation of our minds and
the proper care of our bodies, with the attainment of our ambitions,
with the perfection of the means and the glorification of our precious
aims.

Joseph Conrad (1857-1924)

It is otherwise with the artist.

Confronted by the same enigmatical spectacle the artist descends within
himself, and in that lonely region of stress and strife, if he be
deserving and fortunate, he finds the terms of his appeal. His appeal is
made to our less obvious capacities: to that part of our nature which,
because of the warlike conditions of existence, is necessarily kept out
of sight within the more resisting and hard qualities--like the
vulnerable body within a steel armour. His appeal is less loud, more
profound, less distinct, more stirring--and sooner forgotten. Yet its
effect endures forever. The changing wisdom of successive generations
discards ideas, questions facts, demolishes theories. But the artist
appeals to that part of our being which is not dependent on wisdom; to
that in us which is a gift and not an acquisition--and, therefore, more
permanently enduring. He speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder,
to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity,
and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with all
creation--and to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that
knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts, to the solidarity
in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in
fear, which binds men to each other, which binds together all
humanity--the dead to the living and the living to the unborn.

It is only some such train of thought, or rather of feeling, that can
in a measure explain the aim of the attempt, made in the tale which
follows, to present an unrestful episode in the obscure lives of a few
individuals out of all the disregarded multitude of the bewildered, the
simple and the voiceless. For, if any part of truth dwells in the
belief confessed above, it becomes evident that there is not a place of
splendour or a dark corner of the earth that does not deserve, if only
a passing glance of wonder and pity. The motive then, may be held to
justify the matter of the work; but this preface, which is simply
an avowal of endeavour, cannot end here--for the avowal is not
yet complete. Fiction--if it at all aspires to be art--appeals to
temperament. And in truth it must be, like painting, like music, like
all art, the appeal of one temperament to all the other innumerable
temperaments whose subtle and resistless power endows passing events
with their true meaning, and creates the moral, the emotional atmosphere
of the place and time. Such an appeal to be effective must be an
impression conveyed through the senses; and, in fact, it cannot be made
in any other way, because temperament, whether individual or collective,
is not amenable to persuasion. All art,' therefore, appeals primarily to
the senses, and the artistic aim when expressing itself in written words
must also make its appeal through the senses, if its highest desire is
to reach the secret spring of responsive emotions. It must strenuously
aspire to the plasticity of sculpture, to the colour of painting, and to
the magic suggestiveness of music--which is the art of arts. And it is
only through complete, unswerving devotion to the perfect blending of
form and substance; it is only through an unremitting never-discouraged
care for the shape and ring of sentences that an approach can be made to
plasticity, to colour, and that the light of magic suggestiveness may be
brought to play for an evanescent instant over the commonplace surface
of words: of the old, old words, worn thin, defaced by ages of careless
usage.

Comments & Greek artists, modern Greek artists: Throughout the course of the generations men constructed the night....

2010-11-11T18:10:00.005+02:00

Jorge Luis Borges

History of Night

Throughout the course of the generations
men constructed the night.
At first she was blindness;
thorns raking bare feet,
fear of wolves.
We shall never know who forged the word
for the interval of shadow
dividing the two twilights;
we shall never know in what age it came to mean
the starry hours.
Others created the myth.
They made her the mother of the unruffled Fates
that spin our destiny,
thev sacrificed black ewes to her, and the cock
who crows his own death.
The Chaldeans assigned to her twelve houses;
to Zeno, infinite words.
She took shape from Latin hexameters
and the terror of Pascal.
Luis de Leon saw in her the homeland
of his stricken soul.
Now we feel her to be inexhuastible
like an ancient wine
and no one can gaze on her without vertigo
and time has charged her with eternity.

And to think that she wouldn't exist
except for those fragile instruments, the eyes.

Comments & Greek artists, Greek painters: Under the brown fog of a winter noon...

2010-11-09T14:59:00.008+02:00

Unreal City
Under the brown fog of a winter noon...

T.S. Eliot
The Waste Land
to Ezra Pound, "Il miglior fabbro"

(from) III. The Fire Sermon

The river's tent is broken; the last fingers of leaf
Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind
Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed.
Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song. The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers,
Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends
Or other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed.
And their friends, the loitering heirs of City directors;
Departed, have left no addresses.
By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept ...
Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song,
Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long.
But at my back in a cold blast I hear
The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear.
A rat crept softly through the vegetation
Dragging its slimy belly on the bank
While I was fishing in the dull canal
On a winter evening round behind the gashouse
Musing upon the king my brother's wreck
And on the king my father's death before him.
White bodies naked on the low damp ground
And bones cast in a little low dry garret,
Rattled by the rat's foot only, year to year.
But at my back from time to time I hear
The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring
Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring.
O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter
And on her daughter
They wash their feet in soda water

Et O ces voix d'enfants, chantant dans la coupole!

Twit twit twit
Jug jug jug jug jug jug

So rudely forc'd.
Tereu

T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)

Unreal City
Under the brown fog of a winter noon
Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant
Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants
C.i.f. London: documents at sight,
Asked me in demotic French
To luncheon at the Cannon Street Hotel
Followed by a weekend at the Metropole.

At the violet hour, when the eyes and back
Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits
Like a taxi throbbing waiting,
I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,
Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see
At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives
Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea,
The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights
Her stove, and lays out food in tins.
Out of the window perilously spread
Her drying combinations touched by the sun's last rays,
On the divan are piled (at night her bed)
Stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays.
I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs
Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest -
I too awaited the expected guest.
He, the young man carbuncular, arrives,
A small house agent's clerk, with one bold stare,
One of the low on whom assurance sits
As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.
The time is now propitious, as he guesses,
The meal is ended, she is bored and tired,
Endeavours to engage her in caresses
Which are still unreproved, if undesired.
Flushed and decided, he assaults at once;
Exploring hands encounter no defence;
His vanity requires no response,
And makes a welcome of indifference.
(And I Tiresias have foresuffered all
Enacted on this same divan or bed;
I who have sat by Thebes below the wall
And walked among the lowest of the dead.)
Bestows one final patronising kiss,
And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit...
She turns and looks a moment in the glass,
Hardly aware of her departed lover;
Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass:
'Well now that's done: and I'm glad it's over.'
When lovely woman stoops to folly and
Paces about her room again, alone,
She smoothes her hair with automatic hand,
And puts a record on the gramophone.
'This music crept by me upon the waters'
And along the Strand, up Queen Victoria Street.
O City city, I can sometimes hear
Beside a public bar in Lower Thames Street,
The pleasant whining of a mandoline
And a clatter and a chatter from within
Where fishmen lounge at noon: where the walls
Of Magnus Martyr hold
Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold.

The river sweats
Oil and tar
The barges drift
With the turning tide
Red sails
Wide
To leeward, swing on the heavy spar.
The barges wash
Drifting logs
Down Greenwich reach
Past the Isle of Dogs.

Weialala leia
Wallala leialala

Elizabeth and Leicester
Beating oars
The stern was formed
A gilded shell
Red and gold
The brisk swell
Rippled both shores
Southwest wind
Carried down stream
The peal of bells
White towers

Weialala leia
Wallala leialala

Comments & Greek artists: We understood the private catastrophe, The personal loss, the general misery...

2010-11-08T12:20:00.005+02:00

Greek landscapes & Greek artists, modern Greek artists

Yannis Stavrou, Ships in Thessaloniki's Port, oil on canvas

How how can I ever return, to the soft quiet seasons?
Night stay with us, stop sun, hold season, let the day not come,
let the spring not come...

T. S. Eliot

Murder in the Cathedral

Chorus

Clean the air! clean the sky! wash the wind! take stone from stone and wash them.
The land is foul, the water is foul, our beasts and outselves are defiled with blood.
A rain of blood has blinded my eyes. Where is England?
where is Kent? where is Canterbury?
O far far far far in the past; and I wander in a land of barren boughs:
if I break them, they bleed; I wander in a land of dry stones:
if I touch them they bleed.
How how can I ever return, to the soft quiet seasons?
Night stay with us, stop sun, hold season, let the day not come,
let the spring not come.
Can I look at the day and its common things, and see them all smeared with blood,
through a curtain of falling blood?
We did not wish anything to happen.
We understood the private catastrophe,
The personal loss, the general misery,
Living and partly living;
The terror by night that ends in daily action,
The terror by day that ends in sleep;
But the talk in the market-place, the hand on the broom,
The night-time heaping of the ashes,
The fuel laid on the fire at daybreak,
These acts marked a limit to our suffering.
Every horror had its definition,
Every sorrow had a kind of end:
In life there is not time to grieve long.
But this, this is out of life, this is out of time,
An instant eternity of evil and wrong.
We are soiled by a filth that we cannot clean, united to
supernatural vermin,
It is not we alone, it is not the house, it is not the city that is
defiled,
But the world that is wholly foul.
Clean the air! clean the sky! wash the wind! take the stone
from the stone, take the skin from the arm, take the
muscle from the bone, and wash them. Wash the stone,
wash the bone, wash the brain, wash the soul, wash
them wash them!

Comments & Greek artists, modern Greek artists: We walked beside the sea, After a day which perished silently of its own glory...

2010-11-07T14:25:00.006+02:00

Seascapes & Greek artists, Greek painters, modern Greek artists

Yannis Stavrou, Port, Thessaloniki IV, oil on canvas

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

A Sea-Side Walk

We walked beside the sea,
After a day which perished silently
Of its own glory---like the Princess weird
Who, combating the Genius, scorched and seared,
Uttered with burning breath, 'Ho! victory!'
And sank adown, an heap of ashes pale;
So runs the Arab tale.

The sky above us showed
An universal and unmoving cloud,
On which, the cliffs permitted us to see
Only the outline of their majesty,
As master-minds, when gazed at by the crowd!
And, shining with a gloom, the water grey
Swang in its moon-taught way.

Nor moon nor stars were out.
They did not dare to tread so soon about,
Though trembling, in the footsteps of the sun.
The light was neither night's nor day's, but one
Which, life-like, had a beauty in its doubt;
And Silence's impassioned breathings round
Seemed wandering into sound.

O solemn-beating heart
Of nature! I have knowledge that thou art
Bound unto man's by cords he cannot sever---
And, what time they are slackened by him ever,
So to attest his own supernal part,
Still runneth thy vibration fast and strong,
The slackened cord along.

For though we never spoke
Of the grey water anal the shaded rock,---
Dark wave and stone, unconsciously, were fused
Into the plaintive speaking that we used,
Of absent friends and memories unforsook;
And, had we seen each other's face, we had
Seen haply, each was sad.

Comments & Greek artists, contemporary Greek artists: Joy of night, oh sonorous lights...

2010-11-03T18:12:00.004+02:00

Greek poets & Greek artists, modern Geek artists, painters

Yannis Stavrou, Nocturnal, oil on canvas

Time approaches visions
on tiptoe...

Nikos Karouzos

Poem on a Tape Recorder

Joy of night, oh sonorous lights,
marvelous evening
the colored noise of the city
divided up my loneliness, sometimes yellow,
orange, blue, and now red
dyeing my gait pure green.
Love had white marks.
Stop. Rewind.
The turmoil bore the white marks of the world.
The clouds invisible.
No.
The angel radiates like marble
in the deserts of the moon, in the honeysuckle white
death is duped and the night
is amused with shooting stars.
No, no.
Time approaches visions
on tiptoe.
Greed!
I should have further submerged
the grief within my soul.
No.
The cricket ornaments expanses.
The night comes down the stairway of darkness
sits on the passion of Mary.
All alone the busts breathe in the gardens.
Stop. Everything is erased.
I want to escape from words.
I’m sick of it.
Better it would be to listen to what on the next balcony
two perennial old ladies are saying;
sitting there by the hour.

comments & Greek artists, painters:The ship swayed under a cloudless sky...

2010-11-02T15:39:00.013+02:00

Ships & Greek artists, contemporary Greek artists, painters

Yannis Stavrou, On Waves, oil on canvas

The ship swayed under a cloudless sky,
like an angel, dazed by radiant light...

Charles Baudelaire

A Voyage to Cythera

My heart like a bird was fluttering joyously
And soaring freely around the rigging;
Beneath a cloudless sky the ship was rolling
Like an angel drunken with the radiant sun.

What is this black, gloomy island? — It's Cythera,
They tell us, a country celebrated in song,
The banal Eldorado of old bachelors.
Look at it; after all, it is a wretched land.

— Island of sweet secrets, of the heart's festivals!
The beautiful shade of ancient Venus
Hovers above your seas like a perfume
And fills all minds with love and languidness.

Fair isle of green myrtle filled with full-blown flowers
Ever venerated by all nations,
Where the sighs of hearts in adoration
Roll like incense over a garden of roses

Or like the eternal cooing of wood-pigeons!
— Cythera was now no more than the barrenest land,
A rocky desert disturbed by shrill cries.
But I caught a glimpse of a singular object!

It was not a temple in the shade of a grove
Where the youthful priestess, amorous of flowers,
Was walking, her body hot with hidden passion,
Half-opening her robe to the passing breezes;

But behold! as we passed, hugging the shore
So that we disturbed the saa-birds with our white sails,
We saw it was a gallows with three arms
Outlined in black like a cypress against the sky.

Ferocious birds perched on their feast were savagely
Destroying the ripe corpse of a hanged man;
Each plunged his filthy beak as though it were a tool
Into every corner of that bloody putrescence;

The eyes were two holes and from the gutted belly
The heavy intestines hung down along his thighs
And his torturers, gorged with hideous delights,
Had completely castrated him with their sharp beaks.

Below his feet a pack of jealous quadrupeds
Prowled with upraised muzzles and circled round and round;
One beast, larger than the others, moved in their midst
Like a hangman surrounded by his aides.

Cytherean, child of a sky so beautiful,
You endured those insults in silence
To expiate your infamous adorations
And the sins which denied to you a grave.

Ridiculous hanged man, your sufferings are mine!
I felt at the sight of your dangling limbs
The long, bitter river of my ancient sorrows
Rise up once more like vomit to my teeth;

Before you, poor devil of such dear memory
I felt all the stabbing beaks of the crows
And the jaws of the black panthers who loved so much
In other days to tear my flesh to shreds.

— The sky was charming and the sea was smooth;
For me thenceforth all was black and bloody,
Alas! and I had in that allegory
Wrapped up my heart as in a heavy shroud.

On your isle, O Venus! I found upright only
A symbolic gallows from which hung my image...
O! Lord! give me the strength and the courage
To contemplate my body and soul without loathing!

(William Aggeler, The Flowers of Evil - Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954)

Un Voyage à Cythère

Mon coeur, comme un oiseau, voltigeait tout joyeux
Et planait librement à l'entour des cordages;
Le navire roulait sous un ciel sans nuages;
Comme un ange enivré d'un soleil radieux.

Quelle est cette île triste et noire? — C'est Cythère,
Nous dit-on, un pays fameux dans les chansons
Eldorado banal de tous les vieux garçons.
Regardez, après tout, c'est une pauvre terre.

— Île des doux secrets et des fêtes du coeur!
De l'antique Vénus le superbe fantôme
Au-dessus de tes mers plane comme un arôme
Et charge les esprits d'amour et de langueur.

Belle île aux myrtes verts, pleine de fleurs écloses,
Vénérée à jamais par toute nation,
Où les soupirs des coeurs en adoration
Roulent comme l'encens sur un jardin de roses

Ou le roucoulement éternel d'un ramier!
— Cythère n'était plus qu'un terrain des plus maigres,
Un désert rocailleux troublé par des cris aigres.
J'entrevoyais pourtant un objet singulier!

Ce n'était pas un temple aux ombres bocagères,
Où la jeune prêtresse, amoureuse des fleurs,
Allait, le corps brûlé de secrètes chaleurs,
Entrebâillant sa robe aux brises passagères;

Mais voilà qu'en rasant la côte d'assez près
Pour troubler les oiseaux avec nos voiles blanches,
Nous vîmes que c'était un gibet à trois branches,
Du ciel se détachant en noir, comme un cyprès.

De féroces oiseaux perchés sur leur pâture
Détruisaient avec rage un pendu déjà mûr,
Chacun plantant, comme un outil, son bec impur
Dans tous les coins saignants de cette pourriture;

Les yeux étaient deux trous, et du ventre effondré
Les intestins pesants lui coulaient sur les cuisses,
Et ses bourreaux, gorgés de hideuses délices,
L'avaient à coups de bec absolument châtré.

Sous les pieds, un troupeau de jaloux quadrupèdes,
Le museau relevé, tournoyait et rôdait;
Une plus grande bête au milieu s'agitait
Comme un exécuteur entouré de ses aides.

Habitant de Cythère, enfant d'un ciel si beau,
Silencieusement tu souffrais ces insultes
En expiation de tes infâmes cultes
Et des péchés qui t'ont interdit le tombeau.

Ridicule pendu, tes douleurs sont les miennes!
Je sentis, à l'aspect de tes membres flottants,
Comme un vomissement, remonter vers mes dents
Le long fleuve de fiel des douleurs anciennes;

Devant toi, pauvre diable au souvenir si cher,
J'ai senti tous les becs et toutes les mâchoires
Des corbeaux lancinants et des panthères noires
Qui jadis aimaient tant à triturer ma chair.

— Le ciel était charmant, la mer était unie;
Pour moi tout était noir et sanglant désormais,
Hélas! et j'avais, comme en un suaire épais,
Le coeur enseveli dans cette allégorie.

Dans ton île, ô Vénus! je n'ai trouvé debout
Qu'un gibet symbolique où pendait mon image...
— Ah! Seigneur! donnez-moi la force et le courage
De contempler mon coeur et mon corps sans dégoût!

Comments &Greek artists, Greek painting: as night falls in autumn...

2010-11-01T12:36:00.003+02:00

Autumn landscapes & Greek artists, Greek painting, Greek painters

Yannis Stavrou, Autmn Landscape, oil on canvas

Miltos Sachtouris

Autumn

What’s the girl looking for
in the darkness of the chair?
quickly
as night falls in autumn
she undresses
with clouds before her eyes
with the rain inside her head
with the needle in her heart
she removes the stockings
removes the flowers
discards the halo

outside the time’s leaves
are dyed in blood

Comments & Greek artists: In the long ago land that glided the dark door wide...

2010-10-31T14:52:00.004+02:00

Poets & Greek artists, modern Greek painters

Yannis Stavrou, Winter's Evening, Thessaloniki V, oil on canvas

Dylan Thomas

A Winter's Tale

It is a winter's tale
That the snow blind twilight ferries over the lakes
And floating fields from the farm in the cup of the vales,
Gliding windless through the hand folded flakes,
The pale breath of cattle at the stealthy sail,

And the stars falling cold,
And the smell of hay in the snow, and the far owl
Warning among the folds, and the frozen hold
Flocked with the sheep white smoke of the farm house cowl
In the river wended vales where the tale was told.

Once when the world turned old
On a star of faith pure as the drifting bread,
As the food and flames of the snow, a man unrolled
The scrolls of fire that burned in his heart and head,
Torn and alone in a farm house in a fold

Of fields. And burning then
In his firelit island ringed by the winged snow
And the dung hills white as wool and the hen
Roosts sleeping chill till the flame of the cock crow
Combs through the mantled yards and the morning men

Stumble out with their spades,
The cattle stirring, the mousing cat stepping shy,
The puffed birds hopping and hunting, the milkmaids
Gentle in their clogs over the fallen sky,
And all the woken farm at its white trades,

He knelt, he wept, he prayed,
By the spit and the black pot in the log bright light
And the cup and the cut bread in the dancing shade,
In the muffled house, in the quick of night,
At the point of love, forsaken and afraid.

He knelt on the cold stones,
He wept form the crest of grief, he prayed to the veiled sky
May his hunger go howling on bare white bones
Past the statues of the stables and the sky roofed sties
And the duck pond glass and the blinding byres alone

Into the home of prayers
And fires where he should prowl down the cloud
Of his snow blind love and rush in the white lairs.
His naked need struck him howling and bowed
Though no sound flowed down the hand folded air

But only the wind strung
Hunger of birds in the fields of the bread of water, tossed
In high corn and the harvest melting on their tongues.
And his nameless need bound him burning and lost
When cold as snow he should run the wended vales among

The rivers mouthed in night,
And drown in the drifts of his need, and lie curled caught
In the always desiring centre of the white
Inhuman cradle and the bride bed forever sought
By the believer lost and the hurled outcast of light.

Deliver him, he cried,
By losing him all in love, and cast his need
Alone and naked in the engulfing bride,
Never to flourish in the fields of the white seed
Or flower under the time dying flesh astride.

Listen. The minstrels sing
In the departed villages. The nightingale,
Dust in the buried wood, flies on the grains of her wings
And spells on the winds of the dead his winter's tale.
The voice of the dust of water from the withered spring

Is telling. The wizened
Stream with bells and baying water bounds. The dew rings
On the gristed leaves and the long gone glistening
Parish of snow. The carved mouths in the rock are wind swept strings.
Time sings through the intricately dead snow drop. Listen.

It was a hand or sound
In the long ago land that glided the dark door wide
And there outside on the bread of the ground
A she bird rose and rayed like a burning bride.
A she bird dawned, and her breast with snow and scarlet downed.

Look. And the dancers move
On the departed, snow bushed green, wanton in moon light
As a dust of pigeons. Exulting, the grave hooved
Horses, centaur dead, turn and tread the drenched white
Paddocks in the farms of birds. The dead oak walks for love.

The carved limbs in the rock
Leap, as to trumpets. Calligraphy of the old
Leaves is dancing. Lines of age on the stones weave in a flock.
And the harp shaped voice of the water's dust plucks in a fold
Of fields. For love, the long ago she bird rises. Look.

And the wild wings were raised
Above her folded head, and the soft feathered voice
Was flying through the house as though the she bird praised
And all the elements of the slow fall rejoiced
That a man knelt alone in the cup of the vales,

In the mantle and calm,
By the spit and the black pot in the log bright light.
And the sky of birds in the plumed voice charmed
Him up and he ran like a wind after the kindling flight
Past the blind barns and byres of the windless farm.

In the poles of the year
When black birds died like priests in the cloaked hedge row
And over the cloth of counties the far hills rode near,
Under the one leaved trees ran a scarecrow of snow
And fast through the drifts of the thickets antlered like deer,

Rags and prayers down the knee-
Deep hillocks and loud on the numbed lakes,
All night lost and long wading in the wake of the she-
Bird through the times and lands and tribes of the slow flakes.
Listen and look where she sails the goose plucked sea,

The sky, the bird, the bride,
The cloud, the need, the planted stars, the joy beyond
The fields of seed and the time dying flesh astride,
The heavens, the heaven, the grave, the burning font.
In the far ago land the door of his death glided wide,

And the bird descended.
On a bread white hill over the cupped farm
And the lakes and floating fields and the river wended
Vales where he prayed to come to the last harm
And the home of prayers and fires, the tale ended.

The dancing perishes
On the white, no longer growing green, and, minstrel dead,
The singing breaks in the snow shoed villages of wishes
That once cut the figures of birds on the deep bread
And over the glazed lakes skated the shapes of fishes

Flying. The rite is shorn
Of nightingale and centaur dead horse. The springs wither
Back. Lines of age sleep on the stones till trumpeting dawn.
Exultation lies down. Time buries the spring weather
That belled and bounded with the fossil and the dew reborn.

For the bird lay bedded
In a choir of wings, as though she slept or died,
And the wings glided wide and he was hymned and wedded,
And through the thighs of the engulfing bride,
The woman breasted and the heaven headed

Bird, he was brought low,
Burning in the bride bed of love, in the whirl-
Pool at the wanting centre, in the folds
Of paradise, in the spun bud of the world.
And she rose with him flowering in her melting snow.

Comments & Greek artists, modern Greek artists: Where the corvettes spread the sails Down on the earth a shadow searches for its lost body...

2010-10-27T17:09:00.004+03:00

Ships in Greek painting, Greek artists, painters

Yannis Stavrou, Piraeus Port II,oil on canvas

Andreas Embirikos

Insight of Morning Hours

Natural inclination
The dove of our heartbeat spreads it around
The tears of rivers flow always
They are tears of unconcealable happiness
They are lakes where snow-white storks lived long ago
No south-westerly settles in the sugar-canes
And even if at a gunshot the clouds lift
And rise into thinner layers
Where the corvettes spread the sails
Down on the earth a shadow searches for its lost body
The weather in the valley which stole it from her
Thickens the mists that hide it
The lake’s treasures are restless, their fur rises
Seaweed and elemental matter stir in the depths
A jellyfish weeps for yesterday’s transparency
Which will return with the first fishing-light
Before winter sets in
Before anyone thinks of lighting the beacon
Under which a blonde woman considers her future
The lighthouse-keeper bends to her lips and kisses them
As mariners kiss their symplegades.

Comments & modern Greek artists, painters: Shall I compare thee to a summer's day...

2010-10-25T17:01:00.008+03:00

Poetry & Greek artists, modern Greek painters

Yannis Stavrou, Portait of a Young Woman, oil on canvas

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate...

William Shakespeare

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course, untrimmed;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,
Nor shall death brag thou wand'rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to Time thou grow'st.
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

From fairest creatures we desire increase

From fairest creatures we desire increase,
That thereby beauty's rose might never die,
But as the riper should by time decease,
His tender heir might bear his memory;
But thou contracted to thine own bright eyes,
Feed'st thy light's flame with self-substantial fuel,
Making a famine where abundance lies,
Thyself thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel.
Thou that art now the world's fresh ornament,
And only herald to the gaudy spring,
Within thine own bud buriest thy content,
And tender churl mak'st waste in niggarding.
Pity the world, or else this glutton be:
To eat the world's due, by the grave and thee.

Comments & Greek artists, painters: it's later than you think...

2010-10-24T15:44:00.005+03:00

Poetry & contemporary Greek artists, Greek artists

Yannis Stavrou, Portrait of a woman, oil on canvas

Oh, inspire me, Muse, I pray...

Robert William Service

It is later than you think

Lone amid the cafe's cheer,
Sad of heart am I to-night;
Dolefully I drink my beer,
But no single line I write.
There's the wretched rent to pay,
Yet I glower at pen and ink:
Oh, inspire me, Muse, I pray,
It is later than you think!

Hello! there's a pregnant phrase.
Bravo! let me write it down;
Hold it with a hopeful gaze,
Gauge it with a fretful frown;
Tune it to my lyric lyre . . .
Ah! upon starvation's brink,
How the words are dark and dire:
It is later than you think.

Weigh them well. . . . Behold yon band,
Students drinking by the door,
Madly merry, bock in hand,
Saucers stacked to mark their score.
Get you gone, you jolly scamps;
Let your parting glasses clink;
Seek your long neglected lamps:
It is later than you think.

Look again: yon dainty blonde,
All allure and golden grace,
Oh so willing to respond
Should you turn a smiling face.
Play your part, poor pretty doll;
Feast and frolic, pose and prink;
There's the Morgue to end it all,
And it's later than you think.

Yon's a playwright -- mark his face,
Puffed and purple, tense and tired;
Pasha-like he holds his place,
Hated, envied and admired.
How you gobble life, my friend;
Wine, and woman soft and pink!
Well, each tether has its end:
Sir, it's later than you think.

See yon living scarecrow pass
With a wild and wolfish stare
At each empty absinthe glass,
As if he saw Heaven there.
Poor damned wretch, to end your pain
There is still the Greater Drink.
Yonder waits the sanguine Seine . . .
It is later than you think.

Lastly, you who read; aye, you
Who this very line may scan:
Think of all you planned to do . . .
Have you done the best you can?
See! the tavern lights are low;
Black's the night, and how you shrink!
God! and is it time to go?
Ah! the clock is always slow;
It is later than you think;
Sadly later than you think;
Far, far later than you think.

Comments & Greek artists, modern Greek painters: I like a look of Agony...

2010-10-20T17:18:00.007+03:00

Literature & Greek artists, modern Greek painters

Yannis Stavrou, Night patrol, oil on canvas

Emily Dickinson

I like a look of Agony

I like a look of Agony,
Because I know it's true—
Men do not sham Convulsion,
Nor simulate, a Throe—

The Eyes glaze once—and that is Death—
Impossible to feign
The Beads upon the Forehead
By homely Anguish strung.

If the foolish, call them "flowers"

If the foolish, call them "flowers"—
Need the wiser, tell?
If the Savants "Classify" them
It is just as well!

Those who read the "Revelations"
Must not criticize
Those who read the same Edition—
With beclouded Eyes!

Could we stand with that Old "Moses"—
"Canaan" denied—
Scan like him, the stately landscape
On the other side—

Doubtless, we should deem superfluous
Many Sciences,
Not pursued by learned Angels
In scholastic skies!

Low amid that glad Belles lettres
Grant that we may stand,
Stars, amid profound Galaxies—
At that grand "Right hand"!

Comments & Greek artists, Greek painters: three handsome ships leave their berth at nine o’clock...

2010-10-17T10:11:00.004+03:00

Ships in Greek painting, Greek artists

Yannis Stavrou, Bleu blanc rouge - Port, oil on canvas

They sail to cast their lights
like topazes on the sea
at night.
They sail
laden with passengers and luggage…

Alexandros Baras

The Cleopatra, the Semiramis and the Theodora

They leave their berth
at nine o’clock,
for Piraeus always,
for Brindisi and for Trieste
always – rain or shine.
They sail
to daub the blue waters
of the Aegean and the Mediterranean

with smoke.
They sail to cast their lights
like topazes on the sea
at night.
They sail
laden with passengers and luggage….

The Cleopatra, the Semiramis, and the Theodora,
for years now
on the same route,
arriving on the same day
sailing at the same hour.

They resemble white-collar workers
who have become such time machines
that an office door
might come tumbling down
if they were to miss work
even for a single day.

If I were a Captain,
Yes – si j’etais roit! –
if I were a Captain
on the Cleopatra, the Semiramis, the Theodora,
if I were a Captain
with four gold stripes,
abandoned on this same route

(translated by Yannis Goumas)

Comments & Greek artists, painters: hope your road is a long one, full of adventure, full of discovery...

2010-10-15T11:30:00.005+03:00

Journey & Greek seascapes, contemporary Greek artists

Yannis Stavrou, Port of Piraeus, oil on canvas

Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you wouldn't have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now...

Konstantinos Kavafis

Ithaka

As you set out for Ithaka
hope your road is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
angry Poseidon-don't be afraid of them:
you'll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
wild Poseidon-you won't encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.

Hope your road is a long one.
May there be many summer mornings when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you enter harbors you're seeing for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind-
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to learn and go on learning from their scholars.

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you're destined for.
But don't hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you're old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you've gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.
Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you wouldn't have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won't have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you'll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

Comments & Greek painting, Greek artists: Waiting for the Barbarians...

2010-10-14T16:28:00.005+03:00

Greek poets & Greek artists, moden Greek artists

Yannis Stavrou, Acropolis II, oil on canvas

And now, what's going to happen to us without barbarians?
They were, those people, a kind of solution...

Konstantinos Kavafis

Waiting for the Barbarians

What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?

The barbarians are due here today.

Why isn't anything happening in the senate?
Why do the senators sit there without legislating?

Because the barbarians are coming today.
What laws can the senators make now?
Once the barbarians are here, they'll do the legislating.

Why did our emperor get up so early,
and why is he sitting at the city's main gate
on his throne, in state, wearing the crown?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and the emperor is waiting to receive their leader.
He has even prepared a scroll to give him,
replete with titles, with imposing names.

Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today
wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?
Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,
and rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?
Why are they carrying elegant canes
beautifully worked in silver and gold?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and things like that dazzle the barbarians.

Why don't our distinguished orators come forward as usual
to make their speeches, say what they have to say?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and they're bored by rhetoric and public speaking.

Why this sudden restlessness, this confusion?
(How serious people's faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home so lost in thought?

Because night has fallen and the barbarians have not come.
And some who have just returned from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.

And now, what's going to happen to us without barbarians?
They were, those people, a kind of solution.

Comments & Greek artists: Woman portaits in poetru & Greek painting...

2010-10-13T11:42:00.016+03:00

Woman portraits by poets & Greek artists

Yannis Stavrou, Portrait of a woman, oil on canvas

Percy Bysshe Shelley

And like a dying lady, lean and pale

And like a dying lady, lean and pale,
Who totters forth, wrapp'd in a gauzy veil,
Out of her chamber, led by the insane
And feeble wanderings of her fading brain,
The moon arose up in the murky East,
A white and shapeless mass—

Art thou pale for weariness

Art thou pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless
Among the stars that have a different birth,
And ever changing, like a joyless eye
That finds no object worth its constancy?

One word is too often profaned

I.
One word is too often profaned
For me to profane it,
One feeling too falsely disdained
For thee to disdain it;
One hope is too like despair
For prudence to smother,
And pity from thee more dear
Than that from another.

II.
I can give not what men call love,
But wilt thou accept not
The worship the heart lifts above
And the Heavens reject not,--
The desire of the moth for the star,
Of the night for the morrow,
The devotion to something afar
From the sphere of our sorrow?

Comments & Greek artists, painters: The eye languidly learns to illumine the invisible, exerts itself to see things...

2010-10-12T15:35:00.009+03:00

Greek poets & Greek artists, contemporary Greek artists

Yannis Stavrou, Man & Tree, oil on canvas

Haris Vlavianos

Pascal's Will

The eye languidly
learns to illumine the invisible,
exerts itself to see things
the moment when their essence flees,
the moment when withdrawn from their temporary form
they lose the (holy) aura of presence.

II

Just before he closed his eyes
he asked his sister
to stitch inside his coat’s lining,
(without even looking at it),
the note that contained
the “incontestable proof
of God’s existence”,
convinced that upon opening it
he would see His merciful,
almighty face.

III

The glacial figure of the philosopher
impressed upon his sister’s gaze,
(we can visualize the scene,
the space where it unravels),
and the forsaken – forever now –
content of its last-minute thought.

IV

The night casually spreading
on his lifeless body
has aptly interpreted
his last wish:
not as the need
of a self-centered believer
eager to disclose the truth
that he has just invented
but as the desire
to hand over to the progeny
the void letter
of a dignifying,
profoundly human gesture.

V

The inevitable knowledge of a new reality.
And the mind that now rests
(reconciled with the perpetual music of concepts)
inside its ethereal creations.
The vindication of the thinker that alone,
without the blessings of the specters,
has brought to the world the measures
of his own annihilation.

Comments & Greek artists: No one will tell our fate...

2010-10-11T14:45:00.005+03:00

Greek poetry & Greek painting, Greek artists, modern Greek painters

Yannis Stavrou, Thessaloniki ΙΙΙ, oil on canvas

No one will tell our fate, and that is that,
We ourselves will tell the sun’s fate, and that is that...

Odysseas Elytis

This Wind that Loiters

This wind that loiters among the quinces
This insect that sucks the vines
This stone that the scorpion wears next to his skin
And these sheaves on the threshing floor
That play the giant to small barefoot children.

The images of the Resurrection
On walls that the pine trees scratched with their fingers
This whitewash that carries the noonday on its back
And the cicadas, the cicadas in the ears of the trees.

Great summer of chalk
Great summer of cork
The red sails slanting in gusts of wind
On the sea-floor white creatures, sponges
Accordions of the rocks
Perch from the fingers even of bad fishermen
Proud reefs on the fishing lines of the sun.

No one will tell our fate, and that is that,
We ourselves will tell the sun’s fate, and that is that.

Comments & contemporary Greek artists: by this distant northern sea...

2010-10-08T07:48:00.003+03:00

Sea & Greek artists, modern Greek artists, Greek painting

Yannis Stavrou, Thermaikos, Thessaloniki, oil on canvas

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Agaean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea...

Matthew Arnold

Dover Beach

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the A gaean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Matthew Arnold (1822-1888)

Apolo Mousagetes

Through the black, rushing smoke-bursts,
Thick breaks the red flame;
All Etna heaves fiercely
Her forest-clothed frame.

Not here, O Apollo!
Are haunts meet for thee.
But, where Helicon breaks down
In cliff to the sea,

Where the moon-silver'd inlets
Send far their light voice
Up the still vale of Thisbe,
O speed, and rejoice!

On the sward at the cliff-top
Lie strewn the white flocks,
On the cliff-side the pigeons
Roost deep in the rocks.

In the moonlight the shepherds,
Soft lull'd by the rills,
Lie wrapped in their blankets
Asleep on the hills.

--What forms are these coming
So white through the gloom?
What garments out-glistening
The gold-flower'd broom?

What sweet-breathing presence
Out-perfumes the thyme?
What voices enrapture
The night's balmy prime?

'Tis Apollo comes leading
His choir, the Nine.
--The leader is fairest,
But all are divine.

They are lost in the hollows!
They stream up again!
What seeks on this mountain
The glorified train?--

They bathe on this mountain,
In the spring by their road;
Then on to Olympus,
Their endless abode.

--Whose proase do they mention?
Of what is it told?--
What will be for ever;
What was from of old.

First hymn they the Father
Of all things; and then,
The rest of immortals,
The action of men.

The day in his hotness,
The strife with the palm;
The night in her silence,
The stars in their calm.

Comments & Greek artists: the famous Greek afternoon of some Greek City...

2010-10-07T11:20:00.006+03:00

Poetry & Greek artists, contemporary Greek artists

Yannis Stavrou, Sunset in Thessaloniki, oil on canvas

robed & long gold haired in
the famous Greek afternoon
of some Greek City...

Jack Kerouac

Daydreams for Ginsberg

I lie on my back at midnight
hearing the marvelous strange chime
of the clocks, and know it's mid-
night and in that instant the whole
world swims into sight for me
in the form of beautiful swarm-
ing m u t t a worlds-
everything is happening, shining
Buhudda-lands,
bhuti

blazing in faith, I know I'm
forever right & all's I got to
do (as I hear the ordinary
extant voices of ladies talking
in some kitchen at midnight
oilcloth cups of cocoa
cardore to mump the
rinnegain in his
darlin drain-) i will write
it, all the talk of the world
everywhere in this morning, leav-
ing open parentheses sections
for my own accompanying inner
thoughts-with roars of me
all brain-all world
roaring-vibrating-I put
it down, swiftly, 1,000 words
(of pages) compressed into one second
of time-I'll be long
robed & long gold haired in
the famous Greek afternoon
of some Greek City
Fame Immortal & they'll
have to find me where they find
the t h n u p f t of my
shroud bags flying
flag yagging Lucien
Midnight back in their
mouths-Gore Vidal'll
be amazed, annoyed-
my words'll be writ in gold
& preserved in libraries like
Finnegans Wake & Visions of Neal

Comments & Greek artists, painters: love took her in his big boat...

2010-10-06T08:37:00.012+03:00

love took her in his big boat
and she shoveled the ocean
in a scalding joy...

Anne Sexton

End, Middle, Beginning

There was an unwanted child.
Aborted by three modern methods
she hung on to the womb,
hooked onto I
building her house into it
and it was to no avail,
to black her out.

At her birth
she did not cry,
spanked indeed,
but did not yell-
instead snow fell out of her mouth.

As she grew, year by year,
her hair turned like a rose in a vase,
and bled down her face.
Rocks were placed on her to keep
the growing silent,
and though they bruised,
they did not kill,
though kill was tangled into her beginning.

They locked her in a football
but she merely curled up
and pretended it was a warm doll's house.
They pushed insects in to bite her off
and she let them crawl into her eyes
pretending they were a puppet show.

Later, later,
grown fully, as they say,
they gave her a ring,
and she wore it like a root
and said to herself,
'To be not loved is the human condition,'
and lay like a stature in her bed.

Then once,
by terrible chance,
love took her in his big boat
and she shoveled the ocean
in a scalding joy.

Then,
slowly,
love seeped away,
the boat turned into paper
and she knew her fate,
at last.
Turn where you belong,
into a deaf mute
that metal house,
let him drill you into no one.

Anne Sexton (1928-1974)

45 Mercy Street

In my dream,
drilling into the marrow
of my entire bone,
my real dream,
I'm walking up and down Beacon Hill
searching for a street sign -
namely MERCY STREET.
Not there.

I try the Back Bay.
Not there.
Not there.
And yet I know the number.
45 Mercy Street.
I know the stained-glass window
of the foyer,
the three flights of the house
with its parquet floors.
I know the furniture and
mother, grandmother, great-grandmother,
the servants.
I know the cupboard of Spode
the boat of ice, solid silver,
where the butter sits in neat squares
like strange giant's teeth
on the big mahogany table.
I know it well.
Not there.

Where did you go?
45 Mercy Street,
with great-grandmother
kneeling in her whale-bone corset
and praying gently but fiercely
to the wash basin,
at five A.M.
at noon
dozing in her wiggy rocker,
grandfather taking a nap in the pantry,
grandmother pushing the bell for the downstairs maid,
and Nana rocking Mother with an oversized flower
on her forehead to cover the curl
of when she was good and when she was...
And where she was begat
and in a generation
the third she will beget,
me,
with the stranger's seed blooming
into the flower called Horrid.

I walk in a yellow dress
and a white pocketbook stuffed with cigarettes,
enough pills, my wallet, my keys,
and being twenty-eight, or is it forty-five?
I walk. I walk.
I hold matches at street signs
for it is dark,
as dark as the leathery dead
and I have lost my green Ford,
my house in the suburbs,
two little kids
sucked up like pollen by the bee in me
and a husband
who has wiped off his eyes
in order not to see my inside out
and I am walking and looking
and this is no dream
just my oily life
where the people are alibis
and the street is unfindable for an
entire lifetime.

Pull the shades down -
I don't care!
Bolt the door, mercy,
erase the number,
rip down the street sign,
what can it matter,
what can it matter to this cheapskate
who wants to own the past
that went out on a dead ship
and left me only with paper?

Not there.

I open my pocketbook,
as women do,
and fish swim back and forth
between the dollars and the lipstick.
I pick them out,
one by one
and throw them at the street signs,
and shoot my pocketbook
into the Charles River.
Next I pull the dream off
and slam into the cement wall
of the clumsy calendar
I live in,
my life,
and its hauled up
notebooks.

Comments & Greek artists, modern Greek painters: On the deck of a ship, rising, falling...

2010-10-05T11:21:00.014+03:00

Poems & Greek artists, contemporary Greek artists

Yannis Stavrou, On Waves, oil on canvas

In the pull of the wind I stand, lonely,
On the deck of a ship, rising, falling,
Wild night around me, wild water under me,
Whipped by the storm, screaming and calling...

Sara Teasdale

At Midnight

Now at last I have come to see what life is,
Nothing is ever ended, everything only begun,
And the brave victories that seem so splendid
Are never really won.

Even love that I built my spirit's house for,
Comes like a brooding and a baffled guest,
And music and men's praise and even laughter
Are not so good as rest.

Sara Teasdale (1884-1993)

At Night

Love said, "Wake still and think of me,"
Sleep, "Close your eyes till break of day,"
But Dreams came by and smilingly
Gave both to Love and Sleep their way.

At Sea

In the pull of the wind I stand, lonely,
On the deck of a ship, rising, falling,
Wild night around me, wild water under me,
Whipped by the storm, screaming and calling.

Earth is hostile and the sea hostile,
Why do I look for a place to rest?
I must fight always and die fighting
With fear an unhealing wound in my breast.

Comments & Greek artists, modern Greek artists: If I were able to live my life anew

2010-10-04T17:33:00.008+03:00

Literature & Greek painting, Greek artists, Greek painters

Yannis Stavrou, Sunset in Thessaloniki, oil on canvas

take more trips,
contemplate more sunsets,
climb more mountains, swim more rivers...

Jorge Luis Borges

Instantes

Si pudiera vivir nuevamente mi vida,
en la próxima trataría de cometer más errores.
No intentaría ser tan perfecto, me relajaría más.
Sería más tonto de lo que he sido,
de hecho tomaría muy pocas cosas con seriedad.
Sería menos higiénico.
Correría más riesgos,
haría más viajes,
contemplaría más atardeceres,
subiría más montañas, nadaría más ríos.
Iría a más lugares adonde nunca he ido,
comería más helados y menos habas,
tendría más problemas reales y menos imaginarios.

Yo fui una de esas personas que vivió sensata
y prolíficamente cada minuto de su vida;
claro que tuve momentos de alegría.
Pero si pudiera volver atrás trataría
de tener solamente buenos momentos.

Por si no lo saben, de eso está hecha la vida,
sólo de momentos; no te pierdas el ahora.

Yo era uno de esos que nunca
iban a ninguna parte sin un termómetro,
una bolsa de agua caliente,
un paraguas y un paracaídas;
si pudiera volver a vivir, viajaría más liviano.

Si pudiera volver a vivir
comenzaría a andar descalzo a principios
de la primavera
y seguiría descalzo hasta concluir el otoño.
Daría más vueltas en calesita,
contemplaría más amaneceres,
y jugaría con más niños,
si tuviera otra vez vida por delante.

Pero ya ven, tengo 85 años…
y sé que me estoy muriendo.

Instants

If I were able to live my life anew,
In the next I would try to commit more errors.
I would not try to be so perfect, I would relax more.
I would be more foolish than I’ve been,
In fact, I would take few things seriously.
I would be less hygienic.
I would run more risks,
take more trips,
contemplate more sunsets,
climb more mountains, swim more rivers.
I would go to more places where I’ve never been,
I would eat more ice cream and fewer beans,
I would have more real problems and less imaginary ones.

I was one of those people that lived sensibly
and prolifically each minute of his life;
Of course I had moments of happiness.
If I could go back I would try
to have only good moments.

Because if you didn’t know, of that is life made:
only of moments; Don’t lose the now.

I was one of those that never
went anywhere without a thermometer,
a hot-water bottle,
an umbrella, and a parachute;
If I could live again, I would travel lighter.

If I could live again,
I would begin to walk barefoot from the beginning of spring
and I would continue barefoot until autumn ends.
I would take more cart rides,
contemplate more dawns,
and play with more children,
If I had another life ahead of me.

But already you see, I am 85,
and I know that I am dying.

Comments & Greek artists, Greek painters: in the dawn of a most stormy life...

2010-10-02T07:23:00.005+03:00

Poetry & Greek artists, Greek painters

Yannis Stavrou, On Waves, oil on canvas

Edgar Allan Poe

Alone

From childhood's hour I have not been
As others were---I have not seen
As others saw---I could not bring
My passions from a common spring.
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow; I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone;
And all I lov'd, I loved alone.
Then---in my childhood---in the dawn
Of a most stormy life---was drawn
From ev'ry depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still:
From the torrent, or the fountain,
From the red cliff of the mountain,
From the sun that 'round me roll'd
In its autumn tint of gold---
From the lightning in the sky
As it pass'd me flying by---
From the thunder and the storm,
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view.

Comments & Greek artists, Greek painters: leave the balcony open...

2010-09-29T13:14:00.007+03:00

Poetry & Greek artists, contemporary Greek artists

Yannis Stavrou, Still Life, oil on canvas

Federico García Lorca

Farewell

If I die,

The little boy is eating oranges.
(From my balcony I can see him.)

The reaper is harvesting the wheat.
(From my balcony I can hear him.)

If I die,
leave the balcony open!

Little Viennese Waltz

In Vienna there are ten little girls,
a shoulder for death to cry on,
and a forest of dried pigeons.
There is a fragment of tomorrow
in the museum of winter frost.
There is a thousand-windowed dance hall.

Ay, ay, ay, ay!
Take this close-mouthed waltz.

Little waltz, little waltz, little waltz,
of itself of death, and of brandy
that dips its tail in the sea.

I love you, I love you, I love you,
with the armchair and the book of death,
down the melancholy hallway,
in the iris's darkened garret,

Ay, ay, ay, ay!
Take this broken-waisted waltz.

In Vienna there are four mirrors
in which your mouth and the ehcoes play.
There is a death for piano
that paints little boys blue.
There are beggars on the roof.
There are fresh garlands of tears.

Ay, ay, ay, ay!
Take this waltz that dies in my arms.

Because I love you, I love you, my love,
in the attic where the children play,
dreaming ancient lights of Hungary
through the noise, the balmy afternoon,
seeing sheep and irises of snow
through the dark silence of your forehead

Ay, ay, ay, ay!
Take this " I will always love you" waltz

In Vienna I will dance with you
in a costume with
a river's head.
See how the hyacinths line my banks!
I will leave my mouth between your legs,
my soul in a photographs and lilies,
and in the dark wake of your footsteps,
my love, my love, I will have to leave
violin and grave, the waltzing ribbons

Comments & Greek artists: Hypocritish reader, — my fellow, — my brother...

2010-09-28T14:36:00.004+03:00

Poetry & Greek painting, contemporary Greek artists

Yannis Stavrou, Red Ships, oil on canvas

Folly, error, sin, avarice
Occupy our minds and labor our bodies,
And we feed our pleasant remorse
As beggars nourish their vermin...

Charles Baudelaire

Au Lecteur

La sottise, l'erreur, le péché, la lésine,
Occupent nos esprits et travaillent nos corps,
Et nous alimentons nos aimables remords,
Comme les mendiants nourrissent leur vermine.

Nos péchés sont têtus, nos repentirs sont lâches;
Nous nous faisons payer grassement nos aveux,
Et nous rentrons gaiement dans le chemin bourbeux,
Croyant par de vils pleurs laver toutes nos taches.

Sur l'oreiller du mal c'est Satan Trismégiste
Qui berce longuement notre esprit enchanté,
Et le riche métal de notre volonté
Est tout vaporisé par ce savant chimiste.

C'est le Diable qui tient les fils qui nous remuent!
Aux objets répugnants nous trouvons des appas;
Chaque jour vers l'Enfer nous descendons d'un pas,
Sans horreur, à travers des ténèbres qui puent.

Ainsi qu'un débauché pauvre qui baise et mange
Le sein martyrisé d'une antique catin,
Nous volons au passage un plaisir clandestin
Que nous pressons bien fort comme une vieille orange.

Serré, fourmillant, comme un million d'helminthes,
Dans nos cerveaux ribote un peuple de Démons,
Et, quand nous respirons, la Mort dans nos poumons
Descend, fleuve invisible, avec de sourdes plaintes.

Si le viol, le poison, le poignard, l'incendie,
N'ont pas encor brodé de leurs plaisants dessins
Le canevas banal de nos piteux destins,
C'est que notre âme, hélas! n'est pas assez hardie.

Mais parmi les chacals, les panthères, les lices,
Les singes, les scorpions, les vautours, les serpents,
Les monstres glapissants, hurlants, grognants, rampants,
Dans la ménagerie infâme de nos vices,

II en est un plus laid, plus méchant, plus immonde!
Quoiqu'il ne pousse ni grands gestes ni grands cris,
Il ferait volontiers de la terre un débris
Et dans un bâillement avalerait le monde;

C'est l'Ennui! L'oeil chargé d'un pleur involontaire,
II rêve d'échafauds en fumant son houka.
Tu le connais, lecteur, ce monstre délicat,
— Hypocrite lecteur, — mon semblable, — mon frère!

To the Reader

Folly, error, sin, avarice
Occupy our minds and labor our bodies,
And we feed our pleasant remorse
As beggars nourish their vermin.

Our sins are obstinate, our repentance is faint;
We exact a high price for our confessions,
And we gaily return to the miry path,
Believing that base tears wash away all our stains.

On the pillow of evil Satan, Trismegist,
Incessantly lulls our enchanted minds,
And the noble metal of our will
Is wholly vaporized by this wise alchemist.

The Devil holds the strings which move us!
In repugnant things we discover charms;
Every day we descend a step further toward Hell,
Without horror, through gloom that stinks.

Like a penniless rake who with kisses and bites
Tortures the breast of an old prostitute,
We steal as we pass by a clandestine pleasure
That we squeeze very hard like a dried up orange.

Serried, swarming, like a million maggots,
A legion of Demons carouses in our brains,
And when we breathe, Death, that unseen river,
Descends into our lungs with muffled wails.

If rape, poison, daggers, arson
Have not yet embroidered with their pleasing designs
The banal canvas of our pitiable lives,
It is because our souls have not enough boldness.

But among the jackals, the panthers, the bitch hounds,
The apes, the scorpions, the vultures, the serpents,
The yelping, howling, growling, crawling monsters,
In the filthy menagerie of our vices,

There is one more ugly, more wicked, more filthy!
Although he makes neither great gestures nor great cries,
He would willingly make of the earth a shambles
And, in a yawn, swallow the world;

He is Ennui! — His eye watery as though with tears,
He dreams of scaffolds as he smokes his hookah pipe.
You know him reader, that refined monster,
— Hypocritish reader, — my fellow, — my brother!

(William Aggeler, The Flowers of Evil, Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954)

Comments & Greek artists, Greek painters: As one who poring on a Grecian urn scans the fair shapes some Attic hand hath made...

2010-09-27T17:48:00.006+03:00

Poets & Greek landscapes, Greek artists, modern Greek painters

Yannis Stavrou, Acropolis Landscape I, oil on canvas

Oscar Wilde

Camma

As one who poring on a Grecian urn
Scans the fair shapes some Attic hand hath made,
God with slim goddess, goodly man with maid,
And for their beauty's sake is loth to turn
And face the obvious day, must I not yearn
For many a secret moon of indolent bliss,
When in the midmost shrine of Artemis
I see thee standing, antique-limbed, and stern?

And yet--methinks I'd rather see thee play
That serpent of old Nile, whose witchery
Made Emperors drunken,--come, great Egypt, shake
Our stage with all thy mimic pageants! Nay,
I am grown sick of unreal passions, make
The world thine Actium, me thine Antony!

Comments & Greek artists, contemporary Greek artists: The night through poets & Greek artists

2010-09-24T14:12:00.008+03:00

The night through images of poets & Greek artists

Yannis Stavrou, Nocturnal, oil on canvas

We shall never know who forged the word
for the interval of shadow
dividing the two twilights...

Jorge Luis Borges

History of the Night

Throughout the course of the generations
men constructed the night.
At first she was blindness;
thorns raking bare feet,
fear of wolves.
We shall never know who forged the word
for the interval of shadow
dividing the two twilights;
we shall never know in what age it came to mean
the starry hours.
Others created the myth.
They made her the mother of the unruffled Fates
that spin our destiny,
thev sacrificed black ewes to her, and the cock
who crows his own death.
The Chaldeans assigned to her twelve houses;
to Zeno, infinite words.
She took shape from Latin hexameters
and the terror of Pascal.
Luis de Leon saw in her the homeland
of his stricken soul.
Now we feel her to be inexhuastible
like an ancient wine
and no one can gaze on her without vertigo
and time has charged her with eternity.

And to think that she wouldn't exist
except for those fragile instruments, the eyes.

Comments & Greek artists, painters: The spirits of the air live in the smells of fruit; and Joy...

2010-09-22T11:48:00.006+03:00

Poetry & Greek painting, Greek artists, modern Greek artists

Yannis Stavrou, Autumn Synthesis, oil on canvas

O Autumn, laden with fruit, and stain'd
With the blood of the grape, pass not, but sit
Beneath my shady roof; there thou may'st rest...

William Blake

To Autumn

O Autumn, laden with fruit, and stain'd
With the blood of the grape, pass not, but sit
Beneath my shady roof; there thou may'st rest,
And tune thy jolly voice to my fresh pipe,
And all the daughters of the year shall dance!
Sing now the lusty song of fruits and flowers.

'The narrow bud opens her beauties to
The sun, and love runs in her thrilling veins;
Blossoms hang round the brows of Morning, and
Flourish down the bright cheek of modest Eve,
Till clust'ring Summer breaks forth into singing,
And feather'd clouds strew flowers round her head.

'The spirits of the air live in the smells
Of fruit; and Joy, with pinions light, roves round
The gardens, or sits singing in the trees.'
Thus sang the jolly Autumn as he sat,
Then rose, girded himself, and o'er the bleak
Hills fled from our sight; but left his golden load

Comments & Greek artists, modern Greek painters: Proud from the wonted throne, superbly swaying, You, like a queen, pass out into the night...

2010-09-20T12:43:00.008+03:00

Portraits & Greek artists, Greek painters

Yannis Stavrou, Portait of a Young Woman, oil on canvas

Rupert Brooke

Day and Night

Through my heart's palace Thoughts unnumbered throng;
And there, most quiet and, as a child, most wise,
High-throned you sit, and gracious. All day long
Great Hopes gold-armoured, jester Fantasies,
And pilgrim Dreams, and little beggar Sighs,
Bow to your benediction, go their way.
And the grave jewelled courtier Memories
Worship and love and tend you, all the day.

But when I sleep, and all my thoughts go straying,
When the high session of the day is ended,
And darkness comes; then, with the waning light,
By lilied maidens on your way attended,
Proud from the wonted throne, superbly swaying,
You, like a queen, pass out into the night.

Comments & Greek artists, Greek painters: Autumn ill and adored...

2010-09-19T17:29:00.011+03:00

Poets & Greek artists, modern Greek artists

Yannis Stavrou, Autmn Landscape, oil on canvas

Guillaume Apollinaire

Autumn III
(Alcools: Automne malade)

Autumn ill and adored

You die when the hurricane blows in the roseries

When it has snowed

In the orchard trees

Poor autumn

Dead in whiteness and riches

Of snow and ripe fruits

Deep in the sky

The sparrow hawks cry

Over the sprites with green hair the dwarfs

Who’ve never been loved

In the far tree-lines

the stags are groaning

And how I love O season how I love your rumbling

The falling fruits that no one gathers

The wind the forest that are tumbling

All their tears in autumn leaf by leaf

The leaves

You press

A crowd

That flows

The life

That goes

Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918)

Automne malade

Automne malade et adoré
Tu mourras quand l'ouragan soufflera dans les roseraies
Quand il aura neigé
Dans les vergers

Pauvre automne
Meurs en blancheur et en richesse
De neige et de fruits mûrs
Au fond du ciel
Des éperviers planent
Sur les nixes nicettes aux cheveux verts et naines
Qui n'ont jamais aimé

Aux lisières lointaines
Les cerfs ont bramé

Et que j'aime ô saison que j'aime tes rumeurs
Les fruits tombant sans qu'on les cueille
Le vent et la forêt qui pleurent
Toutes leurs larmes en automne feuille à feuille
Les feuilles
Qu'on foule
Un train
Qui roule
La vie

Laura Swytak: a contemporary artist meets the Old Masters...

2010-09-17T10:24:00.015+03:00

Live Event Paintings - LAURA SWYTAK

Laura Swytak at work...

Laura Swytak is a brave, talented young artist from USA who has the courage to paint / record life events as they happened. She paints everything from weddings to golf tournaments...

Once upon a time—before photographers and videographers—painters were hired to record events as they happened. That tradition is alive thanks to Laura Swytak (a 26-year-old MICA graduate) who uses Old World oil painting techniques to capture colorful nuances of life events on canvas..

She describes her style as a little bit Spanish (Diego Velázquez), a tad German (Adolf von Menzel) and a soupçon French (Edouard Manet). "I think there's something that you can get in a painting that you really can't get in a photograph or video," she says. "My paintings capture a duration of time. It's like a collage of all these different moments." (Baltimore magazine)

Bravo to Swytak!

http://www.lauraswytak.com

Comments & Greek artists, Greek painters: Countless lives inhabit us...

2010-09-15T13:42:00.007+03:00

Writers & Greek artists, Greek painters, Greek painting

Yannis Stavrou, Two Ships, oil on canvas

O night eternal, call me your son
And take me into your arms...

Fernando Pessoa

Abdication

O night eternal, call me your son
And take me into your arms. I’m a king
Who relinquished, willingly,
My throne of dreams and tedium.

My sword, which dragged my weak arms down,
I surrendered to strong and steady hands,
And in the anteroom I abandoned
My shattered scepter and crown.

My spurs that jingled to no avail
And my useless coat of mail
I left on the cold stone steps.

I took off royalty, body and soul,
And returned to the night so calm, so old,
Like the landscape when the sun sets.

Fernando Pessoa (1885-1935)

Countless lives inhabit us

Countless lives inhabit us.
I don’t know, when I think or feel,
Who it is that thinks or feels.
I am merely the place
Where things are thought or felt.

I have more than just one soul.
There are more I’s than I myself.
I exist, nevertheless,
Indifferent to them all.
I silence them: I speak.

The crossing urges of what
I feel or do not feel
Struggle in who I am, but I
Ignore them. They dictate nothing
To the I I know: I write.

Comments & Greek artists, modern Greek painters: Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea...

2010-09-13T10:03:00.007+03:00

Images from poetry & Greek artists, Greek painters

Yannis Stavrou, Black Ship, oil on canvas

Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea,
And their masts fell down piecemeal; as they dropped
They slept on the abyss without a surge -
The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave,
The Moon, their mistress, had expired before...

Lord Byron

Darkness

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguished, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
Morn came and went -and came, and brought no day,
And men forgot their passions in the dread
Of this their desolation; and all hearts
Were chilled into a selfish prayer for light;
And they did live by watchfires -and the thrones,
The palaces of crowned kings -the huts,
The habitations of all things which dwell,
Were burnt for beacons; cities were consumed,
And men were gathered round their blazing homes
To look once more into each other's face;
Happy were those which dwelt within the eye
Of the volcanoes, and their mountain-torch;
A fearful hope was all the world contained;
Forests were set on fire -but hour by hour
They fell and faded -and the crackling trunks
Extinguished with a crash -and all was black.
The brows of men by the despairing light
Wore an unearthly aspect, as by fits
The flashes fell upon them: some lay down
And hid their eyes and wept; and some did rest
Their chins upon their clenched hands, and smiled;
And others hurried to and fro, and fed
Their funeral piles with fuel, and looked up
With mad disquietude on the dull sky,
The pall of a past world; and then again
With curses cast them down upon the dust,
And gnashed their teeth and howled; the wild birds shrieked,
And, terrified, did flutter on the ground,
And flap their useless wings; the wildest brutes
Came tame and tremulous; and vipers crawled
And twined themselves among the multitude,
Hissing, but stingless -they were slain for food;
And War, which for a moment was no more,
Did glut himself again; -a meal was bought
With blood, and each sate sullenly apart
Gorging himself in gloom: no love was left;
All earth was but one thought -and that was death,
Immediate and inglorious; and the pang
Of famine fed upon all entrails -men
Died, and their bones were tombless as their flesh;
The meagre by the meagre were devoured,
Even dogs assailed their masters, all save one,
And he was faithful to a corse, and kept
The birds and beasts and famished men at bay,
Till hunger clung them, or the drooping dead
Lured their lank jaws; himself sought out no food,
But with a piteous and perpetual moan,
And a quick desolate cry, licking the hand
Which answered not with a caress -he died.
The crowd was famished by degrees; but two
Of an enormous city did survive,
And they were enemies: they met beside
The dying embers of an altar-place
Where had been heaped a mass of holy things
For an unholy usage: they raked up,
And shivering scraped with their cold skeleton hands
The feeble ashes, and their feeble breath
Blew for a little life, and made a flame
Which was a mockery; then they lifted up
Their eyes as it grew lighter, and beheld
Each other's aspects -saw, and shrieked, and died -
Even of their mutual hideousness they died,
Unknowing who he was upon whose brow
Famine had written Fiend. The world was void,
The populous and the powerful was a lump,
Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless -
A lump of death -a chaos of hard clay.
The rivers, lakes, and ocean all stood still,
And nothing stirred within their silent depths;
Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea,
And their masts fell down piecemeal; as they dropped
They slept on the abyss without a surge -
The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave,
The Moon, their mistress, had expired before;
The winds were withered in the stagnant air,
And the clouds perished! Darkness had no need
Of aid from them -She was the Universe!