TITOS PATRIKIOS
The Lions' Gate: Selected Poems
Translated by Christopher Bakken and Roula Konsolaki
Truman State University Press, 2006.
Photo by Christopher Bakken
Brief Biography of Titos Patrikios:
Titos Patrikios was born in Athens in 1928. He studied Law in the University of Athens and later sociology and philosophy in Paris, at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes and at the Sorbonne. He was active in the resistance movement against the German Occupation, but during the years of military dictatorship following the Greek Civil War he was "displaced" within the borders of his own country (to detention camps on the islands of Makronissos and Ai-Stratis), and later exiled outright to Paris and Rome, once from 1959-1964 and again from 1967-1975. After he received Greece's National Prize for Literature, Patrikios' numerous books were assembled by Kedros Publishers into a three-volume Collected Poems, and several new volumes have followed.
Ashes
It
was not the living that held me back
--I dealt with them
in spite of the
debts they heaved on me.
It was the dead who held me in chains.
I kept
burying them: two times, a third,
but they still wanted me for themselves.
Even after they were burnt I couldn't escape,
their ashes kept riding back
down the wind
falling and clinging to me.
Only when I put down their memory
in words that flew like birds,
then little by little I freed myself.
Winner of 2005 Wills Barnstone Translation Prize
Latest News
Dead chimneys, smokeless
mouths emptied of laughter,
hearts that won and
died-
we must bridge the lips of the abyss.
Humans, above
all humans,
persistent, restless, shameless,
without doubt,
hiding
nothing,
let's spill out in the streets again
to build life once again,
to build life first.
A sky full of voices
and overturned
clouds
that were executed this noon-
the newspapers got this bit of news
just as they went to print.
Not one of them wrote of the fountains
that
opened upon their tortured bodies.
1948
From SENECA REVIEW, Fall 2005
Drafts on Makronissos
I
With your wind that picks up at night,
with your night
that swells the silence
and with barbed wire around your heart.
Island,
no earthquake
will swallow you,
stretched like a compass-needle of stone
indicating both north and south
of our course
of history
of time.
And
the sea flows and goes,
flows and goes,
cannot stand these rocks,
flows and goes.
II
BETO, AETO, CETO, SFA,
the Gamma Center,
stone from head to toe,
the pup-tents like muddy clods,
and the men pieces of mud,
the soul flickered, became dirt,
ghostly lamps
clipped the faces,
lighting the eyes of madmen,
mouths pouring our insects
and the wind with a torturer's heavy boots
whips the jagged mountain with
its army belt.
III
Thick worms from the
barrack latrines,
giant rats from the cesspools
dig all night into loaves,
backpacks,
creep over faces,
the half-eaten face of a cat.
Like a
crow, day perches on the mountain
and night falls where the privates masturbate,
night with patrols, with loaded guns.
Behind the latrines
two in lewd
acts, in moonlight,
one had a wife and kids.
And a certain Skarvellas
poking his rotten mug into my sleep
to see if I am singing.
IV
Drunks walled on muddy paths
and the old partisan sang,
with sobs and spit,
Embros ELAS yia teen Ellada
until he was busted by
the MPs.
Sophianos was crawling next to me,
stinking of ouzo, crying in
the empty barracks:
I am a snitch, I became a snitch
for a forty-eight
hour leave,
shove me away, shove me…
And I was holding his head up
so he could puke.
V
That's how I learned
how heavy sand bags are,
how unbreakable stone can be,
how to uproot shrubs
and brambles.
The sand remained in my mouth forever,
stone forever in
my heart,
the thorns forever stuck under my nails.
March, 1953 - December, 1954
Note: "BETO, AETO, CETO, SFA, the Gamma Center": these are the names of detention centers on the island of Markronissos, listed as they were located north to south.
From MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW Winter,
2006:
"The Documentary Imagination, Part 2"
While They Speak
While
they speak in cafes
of love and freedom and that kind of thing,
how could
you say love was abandoned,
how it eluded even solitude,
or how justice
is shaped by the chaos
of a thousand insults and errors;
how could you
say that freedom
could only be attained in the bottom of crowded cells
where all the hours of our lives are held captive…
from GULF COAST, Issue 17.2 (2005)
Night in the Tent
The bread and the knife lie down like brothers…
--Costas Koulafakos
From
the upper window the moon's marble dust falls slowly,
whitens the grime of
the kerosene stove,
gives to a cardboard box its original shine,
as when
it first arrived as a parcel,
erases wrinkles from the faces of the comrades,
makes them smooth again as when they first joined the movement…
These
people and things lie down like brothers,
only the crackle of the canvas is
heard
as it rots, as the tent, death and sleep constantly rot
--it's time
to rain at last, for everything to become mud,
with no illusions, to be reborn
through the mud
if they can, in the light.
Forthcoming
in LITERARY IMAGINATION
Read "Earth and Sea," "Elements of Identity," and "Syllables" at
Passport: The Arkansas Review of Literary Translation (Summer, 2005)
Titos Patrikios and Christopher Bakken
Roula Konsolaki