Poems (1945-1971) Paperback - 2006

Excerpt

The Difficult Sunday

Since morning I’ve gazed up at a better bird since morning I’ve enjoyed the snake coiled at my neck
Broken cups on the carpets crimson flowers the fortune-teller’s cheeks when she lifts the skirts of fate something will sprout from this joy a new blossomless tree a pure new eyelid or a worshipped word that won’t have kissed forgetting on the mouth
Outside the bells clang outside unimaginable friends are waiting for me they’ve hoisted a dawn high and wave it around 5 such fatigue such fatigue a yellow dress – an embroidered eagle – a green parrot – I close my eyes – caws always always always the band plays false melodies such passionate eyes such women such loves such cries such loves friend love blood friend give me your hand how cold
It was freezing I no longer know what time they all died leaving me with a dismembered friend and a bloody branch for company

Media reviews

Karen Emmerich’s poignant, eloquent versions of Sachtouris reveal not only the disturbing intensity of the original but also a remarkable diction and poetic pacing of her own. —Harold Bloom

I would say, ‘Cut these poems and they’ll bleed,’ but they are already bleeding – a poet’s evidence of world and civil wars, a military junta and dictatorship. We might call these the poem’s noir, in which the poet manages to fashion a bloody and beau- tiful reflection of strange times. In this important translation, each poem is a house made of flesh, and we wander stunned by all that can happen in words. —Eleni Sikelianos

As Karen Emmerich suggests in her judicious postscript to this fine translation of an important – if inadequately acknowledged – Greek poet, Miltos Sachtouris’s rather nightmarish view of the world emerges from his response to a cruel contem- porary history and his need to evoke its hidden reality. In volume after volume, this view depends on what the translator aptly identifies as a fragmentary mode of expression and a paralogical perspective, represented by repeated images made up of primary colors and apparently simple diction, both gaining increasing resonance by persistent repetition in a poetic landscape haunted by shadowy presences. —Edmund Keeley