Yiannis Bach Spyropoulos / Γιάννης Μπαχ Σπυρόπουλος

At the edge of eternity, a little moment of dreams
a drop that’s dripping, how it looks like you
fire and wind, and the world a fright
in the night that’s screaming, how it scares you…

The Moon looks so much like you
where to find some peace
i rise in Hades
how I want you…
How I want you..

Against the laws the desert’s prophesier…
Marks on the sand that you’ll erase tonight…

A future in black and white, a yielded settler
a radio station you must change
The Moon looks so much like you, where to find some peace
I rise in Hades, how I want you…

How I want you…
How I want you…
How I want you…

You shine like a star in my paintings
an orbit that gives rhythm to the vowels
I am like a figure exiled to the sand
I look at corals from the depths of my life

From the mirror your storm seizes me
and exiles me to your islands as a shipwrecked man
at another time your door encloses my road
I am naked and have a high fever

You gesture in notes that change my aspect
the sting of a violin, an electric signal
behind me run conclusions and it’s raining
from wherever it was I was leaving I still remain here

So here I am with a song that matches
only your voice is missing
Whisper in my ear the secret that scares me
It seeks you, from the radio to be heard

(translation: Eva Johanos)

In ’76, just before first daylight,
I went on a ship, it was white like a fridge
or like a hospital

In ’76, like a dirty joke,
the national beast in a cold surgical operation
packed me off to Chios.

A legendary walk-on with my profile shredded
soaking, sweaty, rotten summer,
shorn napes

Ethnic faction, parasites, harassment,
the same clientele from cine Omonoia
like a cheap cologne

In ’76 I closed my eyes
smoked a butt and got wiped off the map
Dante’s hell

Like a disarmed, fake revolutionist
I had my alibi, my cripple dog,
I had my mission

I stuttered “at your orders”, spent two months crawling
another ten to go, to spend in Chaidari**
in the burning fiery furnace***

I had been hiding it from everyone like a faker
hoping to get off lightly, being a “protector”****
What a gift, what a nightmare

Didymoteicho blues
Didymoteicho blues
Didymoteicho blues

Next to me lay Athens, like Odysseas’ siren *****
Showcase of the people, navel of the world,
behind and also before me

Years like a tavern, years like goblins,
The philhellenes reigning, adoring the void******
Poetic license

Anyway, back to my own business
to my unwashed army green, to my reveille
to my dumb sentry-box

to my transfer, to my crazed violin,*******
to my hoarse breakfast, to my this that and the other
on to Didymoteicho

Didymoteicho blues, on an out-of-tune guitar
Didymoteicho blues, my lost nickel
Didymoteicho blues, my greasy comb
my cigarettes soaked, the fruit rotting in the crates
Didymoteicho blues

Didymoteicho blues, your name is to blame
Didymoteicho blues, a hole in the fabric of the world
Didymoteicho blues, an empty photograph
serving for absurdity, wanking for anxiety,
Didymoteicho blues

(Translator’s notes:
*Didymoteicho is a small town on the eastern border of Greece with Turkey, named for its ancient double walls. This song is the plaint of the “fantaros,” the forced conscript to compulsory military duty which still exists in Greece for all men. Refusal means prison. And in 1976 it was as senseless, and even more disagreeable, than it still is.
**Chaidari is the name of an Athens neighbourhood which boasts a huge army camp; during the war the Gestapo had its headquarters there, a fact still remembered in a rembetico song by this name.
***”Paides en kamino” refers to a Bible story (Daniel 3:14-20) . It would translate as “young people in a furnace”
****The “protector” (Greek προστάτης) is the young man who is considered “head of the family,” standing in for a dead (or otherwise) incapacitated father; military service for a “protector” is shortened to one year.
*****Odysseas’ sirens: referring to Homer’s Odyssey~ beautiful but deadly mermaids whose enthralling songs caused sailors to wreck their ships on the coast
******The “philhellenes” refers to the foreign powers who acted as Greece’s patrons from the time it sought to free itself from the Turkish empire in the early nineteenth century to the present day: mostly they seem to be of the kind “with friends like that, who the hell needs enemies.”
*******to my crazed violin: a Greek expression for somebody’s psychological state, although it could be interpreted in many different ways)