Σονέτα
Λορέντζος Μαβίλης, 1915
A Greek patriot and translator of Heine, Mavilis wrote sonnets that praise the glorious and quarrelled with the chauvinists. Poems of beauty, of the dead, of love that slips away into the terrible falling dusk.
Λορέντζος Μαβίλης
1860–1912
Λορέντζος Μαβίλης was a Greek poet and soldier who translated Heine and wrote sonnets praising beauty, the dead, and love slipping into dusk, sometimes quarrelling with the patriots around him. Start with «Σονέτα», the 1915 collection where that voice is most clearly itself; the translations gathered in «Ανέκδοτα» share its tenderness and its feel for love, death, and myth, and read as strikingly modern for their time.
Feels like longing, death and wonder.
Start with Σονέτα.
Mavilis was a gifted man: a champion of the pistol, an admirer of the German Heine and a fierce critic of Nietzsche's cult of violence, before his lands and his life ended in a truce in Ioannina in 1912. And his verse, mostly written in the purist idiom, is what makes it strange and beautiful.
Lift the stone off the secret. Do not flinch at what bites.
Τοῦ μυστήριου ἀνασήκωσε τὴν πέτραΚαὶ μὴ σκιαχτῇς τὸ δάγκωμα τοῦ ἀστρίτα·Τὴν ἀλήθεια ἀκατάπαυστα ἀναζήταΚαὶ ἰδὲς ἂν εἶναι, ὡς λέν, ψυχοπονέτρα.Μία μία τὲς σαγιττιὲς τοῦ πόνου μέτραΚαὶ ἄγρυπνος τὲς πληγὲς ποῦ ἀνοίγουν κοίτα·Μηνύτρα φτάνει ἡ κάθε μιὰ σαγίτταἈπ’ τῆς ἄσπλαχνης Μοίρας τὴ φαρέτρα.Καὶ ἂ βρῇς ποῦ ὁ πόνος εἶναι ἡ μόνη ἀλήθεια,Τότες ἀπ’ τ’ ἀντριωμένα σου τὰ στήθιαΓδύσου τὴν ταπεινότη τῆς ὀρφάνιας·Στῆς Ὀμορφιᾶς, στῆς Δύναμης τὴ γλύκα,Μὲ ἀλαλητὸ χαρὰς καὶ περηφάνειαςΓίνε Θεός σου καὶ τὴ Μοῖρα νίκα. Books by Λορέντζος Μαβίλης
Ανέκδοτα
Λορέντζος Μαβίλης, 1915
A poet-soldier's translations of love, death, and myth, rendered in Greek verse with a tenderness that feels remarkably modern.
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