garden guardians

They want to live in nature but they'd kill anything that would attack their gardens.

no blinders

Let me never be the kind of horse that doesn’t rear up against the blinders of faith.

slowly along

Meander me slowly, along the river of my mindscape.

beat about the head

The binaries were boxing my ears again.

sturdy enough

Find a few facts you can stack and then stand upon without fear of collapse.

city planning

For so many cities, was it urban renewal or was it the urban ruined?

vain and vital

Vanity is a vital force. You know you’re getting old when you feel your vanity begin to fade.

ancient ache

All the pain of history hurts us still.

all in

All in on the here and now, he’d spit out the spiritual long ago.

a fire too far

Always chasing after what was hot, and ending up with ashes in her eyelashes.

where the reward

The reward is in life itself: to live by kindness and with goodwill among other human beings inhabiting the planet.

no wall to write on

The handwriting of the galaxy was trying to find the wall of the cosmos.

charitable caricature

One sees oneself in the most charitable of caricatures possible

never unpacked

His suitcase was his bureau.

Monochords by Yannis Ritsos

Monochords by Yannis Ritsos
Translated by Paul Merchant, Tavern Books, 2017.

Monochords by Yannis Ritsos (1909-1990) is not a traditional collection of aphorisms. There are many statements conveying wisdom and insight, but this book is primarily a diverse collection of quick observations and fragmentary vignettes.

The short entries, some not even complete sentences, make more austere the thinking which tilts toward the stoic. Statues appear in several of the numbered entries—and they make me think of the ‘archaic smile’. Ritsos hardened by life and Greek politics, but not dulled or unfeeling. In these brief entries he remains rather amused and still hopeful. I can almost see the smile rising at the corners of the lips of a closed mouth, as he prepares to speak. He’s ready to be fanciful and light in face of a world that both worries and wearies us:
   -1-
   With a bird for a pillow, I lie awake night after night.

A number of the fragments operate as though collapsed poems, leaving only a few nouns for imagery:
   -2-
   The lamppost, the statue, the flagpole.

   -175-
   Mountain, bell tower, cypresses, travelers.

Recalling “The Ninth Elegy” by Rilke,
‘Perhaps we are only here in order to say: house,
bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit-tree, window—
at most: column, tower…But to say them, you must understand,
oh to say them more intensely than the Things themselves
ever dreamed of existing.’*

Then there are some glimpses of Greek daily life:
   -45-
   When I have forgotten you, the garden will remind me.

   -270-
   Mounted on hazardous scaffolding, we are cleaning our temples’ pediments.

Here the image stands as an arrested moment in time:
   -13-
   Just when the swimmer jumped in. I missed it.

Or as Ritsos says in a later entry:
   -286
   How gently time collapses into poetry.

Twice in his life, Ritsos was a political prisoner of his country. He refers at times to his resistance:
   -78-
   Later comes the strip search of the corpses.

   -334-
   Now they’ve taken off his muzzle how can he speak?

There are some traditionally rendered aphorisms, that are both wry and knowing:
   -24-
   He shouted loudly so we’d forget how for years he’d said nothing.

   -37-
   From a long way down he assesses the height.

Being foremost a poet, Ritsos shares some elemental aspects of his ars poetica:
   -74-
   Hard for the word to travel from blood to poem.

   -320-
   The old woman came from Myli with a basket of tomatoes so she could enter my poem.

And in this one that recalls Mallarmé’s admonishment to Degas, that ‘poems are made not of ideas but of words’:
   -107-
   You capture a nightingale not idea by idea, but word by word.

The Greek is printed en face and those who know Greek may contradict me, but I feel that Paul Merchant’s translations wonderfully capture the mind and spirit of the man, and the poet, from what I know of Ritsos’ biography.

*Ahead of All Parting, Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Stephen Mitchell, Modern Library, 1995.

too late

Latecomers cast no shadows, they are the shadows.

is is

Existing is the only ‘is’.

degree of disk

You’ve seen old stooped workers; they prove one’s back can be broken by degrees, disk by disk.

one must be tested

You can’t be taught by a teacher who doesn’t test you.

huffing and puffing along

Her sighs acted as the propulsive force in her life.

no tongue left

He had bitten his tongue so many times, it was as if they’d cut out his tongue.

what don't you know

It’s truly grand what I don’t know, and equally grand is what I’m capable of understanding.

made beerable

I’ve found that drinking beer makes accordion music bearable.

bad rhyme

It scares me that soul rhymes with hole.