from Vol. #7, Issue 3: Autumn 2016

Three Poems of Translation
by George Kalogeris

MONTALE REREADING LEOPARDI

For the price of a poem that lasts: that Florentine coin
In the lava paperweight on your desk-or the lucent
Bleakness that flowers only on black Vesuvius.

For The Storm's Malebolgian ditch, no unrepentant
Sinner up to his neck in excrement
Ever spoke more pristine lyrics than A sé stesso.

For nothing so steep it walls off the Infinite,
Those bottles they break against it; for shattering, vacuous
Sky, the hunchback's low receding horizon.

For Clizia-cum-Irma-cum-Dora-cum-Donna me pregga
The treacherous transverse threads of Sylvia's loom.
For the Moon that chalks the houses: Mustache Bugger.

For the rainbow eel's recoiling epiphany: Sappho's
Last Song: everything's hidden except our torment.
The coastguard station swept clean. As if by a broom.

("Mustache Bugger": a phrase Montale took
from graffiti directed at Mussolini.)

PLOTINUS IN ENGLISH

Cadence that leads to clearness: that's how Stephen
McKenna described it, tractate by obscure tractate,
Reaped like wheat in the tiny dank village of Harrow;
Or rapture's sparks aglow in a low thatched cottage
Black with the coal-soot of Cornish Reskadinnick.

For thirty lean years, Plotinus, he kept to his Spartan
Diet of milk, brown bread and eggs, but gorged
On your abstractions, convinced the sublime had substance;
An isolate like you, translating you—
But not into bloodless, Neoplatonic ambrosia.

Please tell us, again, Plotinus, what ecstasy means,
And how it feels to be "lifted out of the body . . .
External to all things and self-encentered . . .
A marvelous beauty then, and more than ever
Assured of community with the loftiest order . . . "

And then the sudden, humiliating, let down.
And why the homeless soul must always go
Alone, when the body dies, back to the Alone.
And what little, in essence—even in Stephen McKenna's
English—carries over as sustenance.

TOUR-GUIDE FOR THE ROMANS

Two decades of foot-slog. One pack-mule for the peaks.
And you, like Aesop's tortoise, just plodding along,

Pausanias. Jack-rabbit heart with no spring in your step.
The whole of Hellas a mountainous shell of itself.

Inviolate ruins. And Greece in the smarmy palms
Of garrulous dealers posterity will treasure.

They'll leave no stone unturned. For what it's worth
You set it down in code: those broken inscriptions

Transcribed to keep the sanctuaries hidden
Within some inscrutable, inner recess of language.

Both the bizárerie and the brilliance met
With a blank expression: preserving for the vatic

Present the vacant look of proleptic loss.
Pax Romana. Pox Macedonia, pace

The sun beating down on the ridge of your pulsing skull.
The unremitting altars. Old blood on the dogmas.

Between the village of Strangled Artemis
And the grove of Hanged Helen, that shrine where Eros

Is older than his mother, though still a child.
He hovers above the foam as if it were slime.

His tomb's encrusted with coral and narwhal horns.
And later, all kinds of overgrown marginalia.

Further north, the coast of Thessaly. With snow
On its shoulder. Wild Thálassa's turn to bear the world.

George Kalogeris teaches humanities and classics at Boston's Suffolk University. His work as a poet and translator has appeared in venues including Slate, Harvard Review, Salamander, and Poetry. His most recent book is Dialogos: Paired Poems in Translation, published in 2012 by Antilever Press.

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