GEORGE SEFERIS ~

Selva Oscura

When I close my eyes, I find myself in an expansive darkness

the color of dawn; I sense it on your fingertips.

Forget the lie that helped you live.

Bare your feet, bare your eyes —

very few things remain when we've bared ourselves

but in the end we can see them exactly as they are.

When I close my eyes I always find myself on a path,

the yards ruined to the right and left and in the corner

the house with windowpanes beaten by the sun, empty

I thought of your fingertips beating against the panes.

I thought of your heart beating behind the panes

and the very few things that set a man apart from others

are never overcome.

You don't know anything because you looked at the sun.

Your blood dripped into the black leaves of the laurel bush.

I see the nightingale and the marbled moon of evenings past,

when I dragged your blood into the river, dyeing it red.

I ponder — when I ponder — I ponder

my veins and the mystery of your hands,

guiding carefully, descending step by step.

When I close my eyes, I find myself in an expansive garden.

                                                                                  May 1937

____________________________

George Seferis

Book of Exercises II

World Poetry 2024

Translated from the Greek by Jennifer R. Kellogg

GEORGE SEFERIS and HENRI MICHAUX MEET ~

H E N R I     M I C H A U X

This situation of not having a very large audience
has something good in it too. I mean that it educates
you in a certain way: not to consider that great audiences
are the most important reward on this earth.
I consider that even if I have three people who read
me. I mean really read me, it is enough. That reminds
me of a conversation I had once upon a time during
the only glimpse I ever had of Henri Michaux. It was
when he had a stop-over in Athens, coming from
Egypt, I think. He came ashore while his ship was in
Piraeus just in order to have a look at the Acropolis.
And he told me on that occasion:" You know, my dear,
a man who has only one reader is not a writer. A man
who has two readers is not a writer either. But a man
who has three readers (and he pronounced "three
readers" as though they were three million), that man
is really a writer.


 — G E O R G E     S E F E R I S

George Seferis, 1920

from Sweet Theft
a poet's commonplace book
J.D. McClatchy
Counterpoint 2016