By Kostas Koutsourelis.
Library
In this mausoleum of words
every page guards
an uncertain memory,
a dusty immortality
Sometimes
in hours unpredictible
a stranger leafs slowly through the emptiness
and from the bottom of the pages
a frozen music
starts crackling
Translated by Sapphire/Ramona Lofton
Contradictions
The lips of the summer
on the snow
The sea’s look
which dries
Cities deeprooted
blown by the wind
The saliva of the night
on the neck of the day
Lissom watches
handicapped years
Of an unbroken smile
the ruinous image
The gift that was given to you
and does not belong to you
The defeat that needed
the victory
The drought of my thought
and the swamps of your body
The sudden shiver
of the old nightmare
Translated by Sapphire/Ramona Lofton
Praeludium
At the threshold of night
I pilot words through sacred lights
And shadows ancestral.
There’s nothing left for me to do
But turn in full sail, yet slow,
Bloodless but purple,
To your arms again.
You and only you know,
Being page white,
That should I wish this fight
With you to win – and not like
So many others hide, a deserter,
In the crevices of your body,
Or fall prey to your famished embrace,
Indeed, a shameful successor
Of a divine dominion…
If all this I do not wish,
Now is the time
To defend your porous face
With sounds and vocals for strongholds
And like an armed beauty
Shine in ink all over.
Translated by George Trialonis
The Other Side Of The Page
Midday acrid, languid
The keys strike and hiss
Dragging arrows and wounds to the page
Falling on the grey
With blow faint and disagreeable
The phrases breath breathlessly
Until suddenly the gaze spreads out and opens
Beyond the coppices of time
Sliding into an invisible bed
And from the banks of the breast timidly
The fingers arouse the verses
That a sleepless guard reads syllable by syllable
Who’s the guard, who’s the God
That is spinning our words, who is it dwells
On the other side of the page
And when I wake uninvolved and immaterial
In the profusion of the hours, that endless
Moments passed my watch tells me
And neither voices nor silences nor gamboling
Are now gathered in by hearing, the eyes
Now find no colors in what they see
Only shadows and bits of words
Which arrived and were sowed in front of me
By hands I no longer know
Translated by Philip Ramp
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kostas Koutsourelis is a Greek poet, translator and academic born in Athens in 1967. He has published two poetry books and translated eight, mainly of a literary and philosophical background. He has taught literary translation in the European Translation Centre and on the Postgraduate Programs of the Universities of Athens and Thessalonica.
