Andriana Mastor’s translations of Yiannis Ritsos, one of last century’s most accomplished and widely celebrated Greek poets, exhibit extraordinary sensitivity, daring, and finesse. Mastor has made some unexpected and spirited choices from the works of this modern master, having elected to steer clear of the usual anthology pieces in favor of poems less familiar to English readers. Perhaps most impressive is her translation of selected passages of Ritsos’s Helen, a long and challenging dramatic monologue in the person of Helen of Troy.
Fusing prolonged meditation with Ritsos’s impeccable lyricism, the poem imagines an encounter with Helen after “The season of rivalry is over,” a time when “desire has gone dry.” Once the object of passionate speculation, Helen declares that “now, perhaps, we all may gaze on the very point of futility,” asking us to look down with her from that vantage point (or is it up from those depths?) from which it appears that “objects have lost their meaning…the tables, the chairs, / the beds we lie on, the words.” Rich in characterization, psychological and philosophical insight as well as echoes of Ritsos’s lifelong commitment to Marxist ideals, Helen is a poem significant not only to its author’s body of work but to 20th-century poetry in general, and our jurors’ consultant from the Program in Hellenic Studies, Prof. Karen Van Dyck, admits to knowing of no comparably good version in English—in fact she can think no other worthwhile English version at all. For the difficulty of the task she set herself, for the brilliance with which she accomplished it, and for the significant contribution to Greek poetry in English that her work promises to make, the Drenka Willen Prize for Poetry in Translation is awarded to Andriana Mastor.
Selections from HELEN by Yiannis Ritsos
Translated from the Greek by Andriana Mastor
(The ravage already showed from a distance — unplastered, falling walls: bleached window-shutters: the balcony railings rusted. One curtain was stirring outside the window on the upper floor, yellowed, frayed at the edges. When he approached — still hesitating — the same abandon in the garden: rank weeds, fleshy leaves, untrimmed trees, the rare flower choked in the nettles: waterless fountains, mildewy: lichen on the beautiful statues. A lizard lay still between the breasts of a young Aphrodite, basking in the last rays of the setting sun. How many years ago! He was so young then — twenty-two, twenty-three? And her? You could never tell — the light she gave off was so dazzling — it blinded you: it soaked through you — you no longer knew what she was, if she was, if you were. He rang the doorbell. He heard it outside, the sound of the bell, so solitary, in a place he knew well, now so strange, with unknown forkings in gloomy colors. They were slow to answer. Someone leaned out the upper window. It wasn’t her. A housemaid — very young. Seemingly laughing. She left the window. Still no answer. Then, footsteps on the inner stairway. They unlocked the door. He entered. An odor of dust, rotten fruit, dried-up soap, urine. Over here. Bedroom. Wardrobe. Metal mirror. Two ramshackle, carved armchairs. A small, tinplate table with coffee cups and cigarette butts. And her? No, no — impossible. Old woman — old woman — a hundred, two hundred years old. Just five years ago — No, no. The sheet full of holes. There, not moving: sitting on the bed: hunched up. Only her eyes — larger than ever, autocratic, penetrating, empty.)
Yes, yes, — it’s me. Sit for a while. Nobody comes here anymore. I’m beginning
to forget words. And they aren’t needed, really. I think it’s almost summer:
the curtains are stirring strangely — they want to say something — nonsense! One of them
has already flown out the window, billowing, as if to break the curtain-rings,
to float over the trees. Maybe it also wants to drag
the whole house away — but the house resists in all its recesses
and I myself along with it, although lately I feel liberated
from my dead and from my very self: and this my resistance,
misunderstood, unwanted, a stranger, it’s all I own — my bond
with this bed, these curtains — it’s also my fear, as if I’m held up,
my whole body, by this ring with the black stone I wear on my forefinger.
I have been gazing at this stone now for endless hours in the night —
Black, without reflections — it grows, it grows, it fills
with black waters — the waters rise, overflow: I sink,
not to the bottom, to an upper depth: from up there
I can make out my room below, myself, the wardrobe, the servants
squabbling silently — I see one of them, high up
on a stool, polishing the glass over the photograph of Leda
harshly, vengefully: I see the dustcloth leave
a trail of dust, of thin bubbles that rise and break
with a silent purling around my ankles and my knees.
And I see you mystified, awkward, your face distorted
by the slow shifting of the black water — here widening, there elongating your face
with yellow streaks. Your hair floats upward
like an inverted jellyfish. But later I say, “It’s only a stone,
a tiny, precious stone.” Then all of its blackness contracts,
dries up and settles into a tiny nub — I feel it here,
a little below my throat. And here I am again
in my own room, on my bed, next to my familiar vials
that watch me, one by one winking at me — they are my only helpers
in the sleeplessness, the fear, the memory, the forgetting, the asthma.
How are you? Are you still in the army? Be careful. Don’t be so caught up
with heroism, with rank and glory. What will you do with them? Do you still have
that shield with my image engraved on it? You were amusing
with your high helmet and its long crest — so young,
so timid, as if you had hidden your beautiful face
in the hind legs of a horse and its tail draped down
your naked back. Don’t be angry again. Stay a little longer.
The season of rivalry is over: desire has gone dry:
now, perhaps, we all may gaze on the very point of futility
where it seems the only true meetings are fulfilled — though indifferent,
yet soothing always — our new community, wasted, still, vacant,
without shifts or clashes — we’re only raking ash in the fireplace,
forming, now and then, with spindly ashes, lovely urns
or, sitting on the ground, we’re thrashing the dirt with soundless palms.
Little by little objects lost their meaning, drained away:
or perhaps they never had any meaning — loosened, hollow:
we fill them with straw and chaff, so they take shape,
thicken, firm up, solidify — the tables, the chairs,
the beds we lie on, the words — always hollow
as the canvas sacks, as the bags of the merchants —
already from the outside you can make out the produce they hold,
potatoes or onions, wheat, corn, almonds or flour.
Sometimes a sack catches on a nail on a flight of stairs
or on the hook of an anchor down at the harbor, a hole forms,
the flour streams out — a senseless river. The sack empties.
The poor gather the flour with their hands, to make
some pies or porridge. The sack collapses. Someone
lifts it up from its two corners: he shakes it in the air:
a cloud of white dust wreathes around him: his hair whitens:
his eyebrows whiten most of all. The others look at him.
They don’t understand anything: They wait for him to open his mouth, to speak.
He doesn’t speak. He folds the sack in half: he leaves
white like that, inexplicable, speechless, as if disguised
as a leering nudist covered with a sheet,
or as a cunning corpse, come alive inside his shroud.
No meaning at all, then, in events or objects — the same for words, although
we name, more or less, those things that we lack or those
that we have never seen — the airy, as we say, eternal things —
innocent words, deceitful, consoling, evasive always
in the pose of their accuracy — what a depressing affair,
to give a name to a shadow, calling it at night in bed
with the sheet drawn to our necks, and hearing it we, fools, believe
that we hold our body, it holds us, that we have a hold on the world.
Now I forget the names I knew best, or confuse one with the other —
Paris, Menelaos, Achilleas, Proteas, Theoklymenos, Teukros,
Kastor and Polydeukes — my brothers, the moralists: they, I think,
became stars — so they say — a beacon for ships — Theseas, Peirithous,
Andromache, Kassandra, Agamemnon — sounds, only sounds
without forms, without their image inscribed on a windowpane,
in a metal mirror or in shallow seas, as on
a tranquil, sunny day, riddled with masts, when the battle
had subsided, and the creaking of the wet ropes against the pulleys
held the world up high, as if the world were a stifled sob
in a crystal throat — and you saw the world spark, shudder
without becoming a scream, and suddenly the whole seascape, with the boats,
the sailors and the chariots, was sinking into light and anonymity.
Another sinking now, deeper, darker — from within it
some sounds rose, off and on — when the mallets chimed on wood,
as they nailed a new trireme in the tiny shipyard: when a huge, four-horse chariot
passed by in the cobbled road, the chiming continued
from the cathedral clock for another interval, as if
there were many more hours than twelve and as if the horses
were revolving inside the clock until they were weary: or, one evening,
when two handsome young men were singing, below my windows,
a song for me, without words — one was one-eyed: the other
had a large clasp on his belt — it gleamed under the moon.
*** Here my translation skips from page 14 to page 27 of the original text ***
It’s a wonder how many useless things were gathered, with such greed —
they were blocking the space — we couldn’t move: our knees
knocked against wooden, stone, metal knees. Oh, certainly, we must
grow older, much older, to become just, to reach that
peaceful impartiality, the sweet disinterest of comparison, of judgment,
when our own share no longer lives except within this peace.
Ah, yes, how many foolish battles, heroisms, pretensions, pride,
sacrifices and defeat upon defeat, and more battles, over matters
decided by others, when we were not there. And the people, innocent,
thrust hairpins into their eyes, knock their heads
against towering walls, knowing surely that the wall does not fall
or even crack, to see at least within a crevice
a bit of blue unshadowed by time and their shadows. All the same — who knows —
perhaps when someone resists without hope, perhaps then human history,
as we speak of it, begins, and the beauty of humanity
in rusty fetters and the bones of bulls and horses,
in ancient tripods where a bit of laurel still smolders
and the smoke rises unravelling into the sunset like the goldenhaired fleece.
