Translated by Lili Bita and Robert Zaller
Travelling to the Light, handsomely designed in a seductive green color,is the twenty-sixth book by the distinguished Greek poet, essayist, and translator Phaedra Pagoulatou-Zambatha, and her eighteenth book of verse. As in previous volumes, her work is concerned with the most universal themes of our individual and collective experience: love and justice. Her verse is gentle, wise, and healing, yet also powerful and at times impassioned. In “Myrtis,” she evokes the voice of a girl from the fifth century B.C. of whom nothing is known, linking her to an embattled present:
Welcome to my century,
Young and innocent Myrtis
With the wounded look
And the white death-shroud
About you.
You suffered greatly in that famine
Twenty-four centuries ago.
You come timidly now
To my world.
I thank you.
Do you announce
Another famine
In the Greece
That breaks my heart?
Myrtis
Do you like the name
They gave you Anno Domini 2010?
When I met you
My breath caught
For the life and death
I read in your hurt eyes,
Your brow.
The whole history of our people
Was there.
Good night Myrtis
Rest quietly
Into our uncertain future.
Phaedra Pagoulatou-Zambatha was born in Athens to the distinguished writer Koulis Zambathas. She studied French and Italian literature, and made her literary debut in 1962 with Drops of Light. In 1964 she became a member of the Hellenic Authors Society, and later served as its general secretary. The recipient of many honors and awards, she has lectured frequently in Greece and abroad, and her work has been translated into English, French, Italian, Spanish, and Russian. Her deep lyricism aligns her with a tradition that goes back to Sappho, as in “And You Are Always Missing”:
I open the windows every morning,
Smiling at the sun, and the little pigeons
To whom I feed grains of wheat
Come to wish me a good day.
Nothing has changed; you’re always missing
And I am always waiting, smiling, speaking,
Wondering if you’re listening somewhere.
You know that everyone is gone,
And you, the ghost I find every night
On my pillow,
A shadow, a murmur, a breath
The same-old, same-old mocking me
That vanishes with daybreak
And travels to the light.
Here is a poet who command attention, and leads the heart
