Beauty and the Illiterate by Odysseus Alepoudelis Elytis : The Poetry F...

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Beauty and the Illiterate

BY ODYSSEUS ALEPOUDELIS ELYT IS T RANSLATED BY OLGA BROUMAS

Often, in the Repose of Evening her soul took a lightness from the mountains across, although the day was harsh and tomorrow foreign. But, when it darkened well and out came the priest's hand over the little garden of the dead, She Alone, Standing, with the few domestics of the nightthe blowing rosemary and the murmur of smoke from the kilns at sea's entry, wakeful Otherly beauty! Only the waves' words half-guessed or in a rustle, and others resembling the dead's that startle in the cypress, strange zodiacs that lit up her magnetic moon-turned head. And one Unbelievable cleanliness allowed, to great depth in her, the real landscape to be seen, Where, near the river, the dark ones fought against the Angel, exactly showing how she's born, Beauty Or what we otherwise call tear. And long as her thinking lasted, you could feel it overflow the glowing sight bitterly in the eyes and the huge, like an ancient prostitute's, cheekbones Stretched to the extreme points of the Large Dog and of the Virgin. "Far from the pestilential city I dreamed of her deserted place where a tear may have no meaning and the only light be from the flame that ravishes all that for me exists.

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21/8/2011 5:47

Beauty and the Illiterate by Odysseus Alepoudelis Elytis : The Poetry F...

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/180426

"Shoulder-to-shoulder under what will be, sworn to extreme silence and the co-ruling of the stars, "As if I didn't know yet, the illiterate, that there exactly, in extreme silence are the most repellent thuds "And that, since it became unbearable inside a man's chest, solitude dispersed and seeded stars!"

Odysseus Elytis, "Beauty and the Illiterate" from Eros, Eros, Eros: Selected and Last Poems. Copyright 1998 by Odysseus Elytis. Reprinted with the permission of Copper Canyon Press, P.O. Box 271, Port Townshend, WA 98368-0271, coppercanyonpress.org.

Source: Eros Eros Eros: Selected and Last Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 1998)

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PO ET

Odysseus Alepoudelis Elytis 19111996

PO ET S R EGIO N

Greece
SUBJEC TS

Nature, Stars, Planets, Heavens, Landscapes & Pastorals

BIOGRAPHY
Odysseus Elytis was relatively unknown outside his native Greece when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1979. Although the Swedish Academy of Letters had in recent years bestowed the honor upon other previously little-known writersamong them Eugenio Montale, Vicente Aleixandre, and Harry Martisontheir choice of Elytis came as a surprise nonetheless. The academy declared in its presentation that his . . .

POEMS BY ODYSSEUS ALEPOUDELIS ELYT IS For Efessos The Little Mariner The Presence

POEM CAT EGORIZAT ION

SUBJEC T

Nature, Stars, Planets, Heavens, Landscapes & Pastorals

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21/8/2011 5:47

Beauty and the Illiterate by Odysseus Alepoudelis Elytis : The Poetry F...

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/180426

PO ET S R EGIO N

Greece
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