BookFeed Ελληνικά These poems keep returning to the same few things: a home you can't quite reach, a defeat you turn over in your mind, a freedom worth staying for. Cavafy's «Ποιήματα» gives you a civil servant in Alexandria making Greek history speak to anyone who has failed at something, while Solomos in «Οι Ελεύθεροι Πολιορκημένοι, σχεδίασμα Β΄» sets hunger and danger against spring's beauty at the siege of Missolonghi. You come to them for the plain, immediate way they hold a moment and let it stay.
A page that shows it
On a wild beach, a man who has lost everything hides in dead leaves like a fire that won't go out.
Και τούτο συμφερώτερο του εφάνη• προς το δάσοςεκίνησε, και τωύρηκεν εις το νερό πλησίον,’ς ανοικτόν τόπον• έσκυψε κάτω από δυό δενδρούλιαομόρριζα, και το ’να εληά, και τ’ άλλο ήταν αγρίλι•κει μέσα ούτ’ άνεμοι φυσούν με την υγρή πνοή τους,ούτε του ηλιού πότ’ έφθασαν η φωτειναίς ακτίνες,ούτε η βροχή τα έσπασε• τόσο πυκνά πλεγμέναήσαν μαζή• κ’ εσύρθηκε ’ς εκείν’ ο Οδυσσέας,κ’ ευθύς στρώσιν εστοίβασε πλατειά με τα δυο χέρια•ότ’ ήσαν φύλλα περισσά χυμέν’ αυτού, ’π’ αρκούσαννα φυλαχθούν άνθρωποι δυο και τρεις ’ς ώρα χειμώνος,και αν ψύχος έπνεε δριμύ• τα είδε κ’ εχάρη ο θείοςο άνδρας ο πολύπαθος, και του σωρού ’ς την μέσηεπλάγιασε κ’ επάνω του έχυσε φύλλα πλήθος. Όμηρος, -700
A prince discovers he is not the master of his house, a soldier turns down immortality, and a naked man falls asleep in a pile of leaves on a beach. The Odyssey, translated with a rough, sweet, immediate Greekness by the Ionian poet who gave it its modern Greek voice.
Κωνσταντίνος Καβάφης, 1937
A civil servant in Alexandria turns Greek history into a mirror for every reader who has failed at something or is tempted to give up. Read one poem a night, and it stays with you.
Κωνσταντίνος Καβάφης, 1968
Cavafy's secret drawer: poems he never published, from chess-game allegories and lost youth to homoerotic confession and the last Greek emperor.
Όμηρος, -750
A war ten years old and still not won: the quarrel, the losses, and the two impossible choices that keep people fighting.
Διονύσιος Σολωμός, 1830
Ο εθνικός ποιητής γράφει σάτιρα: ένας ζυγιαστής ζυγίζει ανθρώπους, πουλιά και πολιτικούς, κι ένα ποίημα βγαίνει από ένα όνειρο και μια τρίχα.
Διονύσιος Σολωμός, 1859
In these fragmentary poems, lost characters search their own memories, unsure which words are theirs and which belong to the dead.
Διονύσιος Σολωμός, 1825
Solomos turns Byron's death into a lament for Greece: the poet as freedom's herald, sung in the ragged, luxurious Greek that literature forgot.
Διονύσιος Σολωμός, 1859
The poems Solomos wrote while inventing a Greek poetry that could carry a nation — fragments of longing, grief and resurrection, some never finished.
Διονύσιος Σολωμός, 1859
At the siege of Missolonghi, hunger and danger contend with spring’s beauty, remembered love and the will to remain free.
Διονύσιος Σολωμός, 1859
Songs, fragments and unfinished poems in which private grief, natural beauty and the struggle for freedom meet in startling images.
Homer, -800
The first great story about a journey home — and every stop along the way is a good reason to give up.
Κωστής Παλαμάς, 1886
The great popular poet of modern Greece: ballads, island legends and small elegies, in the language people actually spoke. Look for the human gesture inside the folk song. At his best there is no one warmer and more exact about the things he loved. Still, some verse is more pastiche than lived experience, but the ambition is real. But the book has real ballads and real feeling, and a warm, generous voice, and Palamaς is a key figure in Greek letters. Read him as a poet who came from the folk tradition. Read him for the ballads and the small elegies. In the end, you get a sense of the poet's world and a few lines to underline. That is the honest case for this book,
Homer, -750
A war stalled outside a city, a commander's wounded pride, and the best fighter in the army refusing to fight. Seven weeks of rage, grief and armour.
Κώστας Καρυωτάκης, 1928
The poet of Greek disillusionment: ironic, musical verses about failed hopes, dull offices, and the strange comfort of knowing nothing lasts.
Dante Alighieri, 1321
A guided tour of the afterlife in which every punishment is a portrait of the sin, and every heaven a lesson in desire.
Homer, -750
A homecoming story where the hero keeps losing ships, men and years, told through monsters, goddesses and one patient wife. Butler's plain prose reads like a travel narrative.
Διονύσιος Σολωμός, 1859
The good poet of modern Greece whose greatest works survive as fragments. Read what he finished, what he abandoned, and what his friends remembered.
John Milton, 1667
A blind poet turns the fall of Adam and Eve into an epic of free will, ambition, and married love, and gives the devil its most persuasive voice.
James Joyce, 1907
The poems Joyce wrote before Ulysses: love lyrics built like songs, and later, darker pieces from Trieste and Paris, short enough to read standing up.
Geoffrey Chaucer, 1476
A raucous medieval road trip: pilgrims, a wife with five husbands, a pardoner selling fake relics, and tales that argue about marriage, fortune and who gets to speak.
Άγγελος Σικελιανός, 1916
A poet walks among the dead as if among family, and finds a language for grief that is closer to feasting than to mourning. One unbroken hymn, in the rhythms of folk song, to a mother larger than any church.
Άγγελος Σικελιανός, 1918
A poet walks up a mountain at Easter and finds the old gods still breathing in the light, the bread and the sea.
Άγγελος Σικελιανός, 1907
A young poet on Lefkada hears a voice on the mountain calling him to carry a promise into word and deed. Greek lyricism at full lung. Emblematic title: αλαφροΐσκιωτος = «ελαφρά σκιασμένος» — touched, shadow-lit. The text is scan-prone (verse, breathless voice). For Greek readers, a card by a poet who believed poetry could found a religion. It opens with a question about beauty and ends with a vision of Odysseus and Ajax. Some of the 40 samples are compelling, a few are very weak and uneditable. Tags: purely the book as a whole and Greek/English variants allowed but only if they truly reflect the content. Any modern English renderings have to be clearly translations, because the book is in Greek; but the actual feed will show the Greek passage. A good mix of cards should feel like this collection: the opening ecstatic question, a sea-bath, a thirst, the olive grove, the people, the descent into a folk mourning, a wedding dance, the spring charm, the mountain ascent, the 'other gods' closing line. I'll return all cards with Greek field text and english objects.
Άγγελος Σικελιανός, 1946
Ancient rites, sunburnt fields and a Greece that feels older than myth — poetry that makes the landscape a state of the soul.
At night, things without names walk through your room.
Την νύκτα, Δέσποτα Χριστέ μου,
τον νου και την ψυχή μου φύλαττέ μου
σαν γύρω μου αρχινούν και περπατούνε
Όντα και Πράγματα που όνομα δεν έχουν
και τ’ άσαρκα ποδάρια των στην κάμαρή μου τρέχουν
και κάμνουν στο κρεβάτι μου κύκλο για να με διούνε —
και με κοιτάζουν σαν να με γνωρίζουν
σαν να καγχάζουν άφωνα που τώρα με φοβίζουν.Ανέκδοτα · Κωνσταντίνος Καβάφης
Two men meet between the armies, and one answers a question with leaves.
«Τὴν γενεάν μου τί ἐρωτᾶς, ἀτρόμητε Τυδείδη;
Καὶ τῶν θνητῶν ἡ γενεὰ τῶν φύλλων ὁμοιάζει·
τῶν φύλλων ἄλλα ὁ ἄνεμος χαμαὶ σκορπᾶ καὶ ἄλλα
φυτρώνουν, ὡς ἡ ἄνοιξη τὰ δένδρ’ ἀναχλωραίνει·
καὶ τῶν θνητῶν μιὰ γενεὰ φυτρώνει καὶ ἄλλη παύει.Ιλιάδα · Όμηρος
You wake up sure it was only a dream. Then you open your hands.
Ι
Στὴ ζέστη ὁ φλάρης τοῦ χοροῦ μία ματιὰ μοῦ ρίχνει
κι’ ἔπειτα εἰς τὸ πάτωμα κάτι τάχα μοῦ δείχνει
κι’ ἐγὼ ποὺ λέω πὼς μὲ καλεῖ στὸ ζύγιασμα μὲ βάλῃ
μέσα ἡ ψυχή μου ἐθύμωσε, σέρνω φωνὴ μεγάλη
καὶ βρίσκομ’ ἔξυπνος γυμνός, ἔξω ἀπὸ τὸ κλινάρι
καὶ μὲ τὰ χέρια ποὺ ἔτρεμαν στὸ λάρυγγα τοῦ φλάρη.
Ἀκίνητος, ἀμίλητος, στὸν τόπο του στημένος
δὲν εἶν’ τὰ ζύγη πλέον ἐκεῖ, δὲν εἶν’ ὁ ζυγιασμένος.
Ἔμεινα, ἐστέναξα βαριά, τὸ πᾶν ἐσιωποῦσε·
μέσ’ στὴν αὐλή μου ὁ κόκορας βραχνόφωνα λαλοῦσε.
χτυπῶ τὸ μέτωπο, ἐδῶ μοῦ ’πρεπε μὲ τσ’ ἀμάδες
ξανοίγω κάτου τὰ μαλλιά! τὲς τρίχες τὲς γραφάδες.Ἡ Τρίχα · Διονύσιος Σολωμός
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