Lucas Thanos / Λουκάς Θάνος

Even if my dream faded away like a shadow,
even if I lost happiness forever,
even if I’m crawling through the filth of the street,
Little bird with broken wings

Even if the flower in my heart’s garden
has been withered before blooming,
the free song I came up with
even if I know it will never be sung

Even if I buried my own life
deep inside the pain I have dear
how my soul’s clearly agitated
when I look at the big sky

The sea as it comes huge,
and wets the sand in the morning,
tells me about a familiar seashore,
tells me about a life I once led!

“In the depths of the good times
our loves bitterly wave in our direction. . .”

You don’t love and you don’t remember, you say.
And if the breasts swelled and if you shed tears
that you can’t cry as you did at first,
you don’t love and you don’t remember, you may well cry.

Suddenly you’ll see two blue eyes
-how long ago!- you caressed them for a night;
and it’s as if you hear inside you, moving
an old disaster, waking up.

They will hold a macabre dance
the memories in the past all around;
and on your eyelash will bloom, as then
and fall, your bitter tear.

The eyes that hang –pale suns-
the light on the snow of the heart and it melts,
the loves that move, dead,
the first once again that set sorrows alight.

They do not bend, dead sticks of wood, and being ruined hurts
limping one and limping two, in the wreckage of life
Dayworker, foreign worker, they all give beatings, bosses, workers
all the workers, boss, and they left me with an empty stomach
and they left me with an empty stomach

Upper village and lower village, uphill downhill
and with dagger and rain until my soul left
Twenty years old, built strong, I lifted all the quarry
and I built, in the entrance of the village, the church
of the village, the church

Come on, you victim; come on, you peacock**, come on, centuries-old symbol
if you wake up all of a sudden the world will be turned upside down
the world will be turned upside down

And yoked with the ox, a different height and a different foot,
I ploughed in the gullies, in the boss’s land
And in the war, going for broke, I carried a machine-gun
so the people could kill each other for the boss’s meal
for the boss’s meal

Come on, you victim; come on, you peacock,… (etc)

Look, the others have made a movement, creation has become red
another sun has come out, in another sea, on another earth

Come on, you victim; come on, you peacock,… (etc)

(translation: Eva Johanos
*κυρ-Μέντιος ~ Mr. Mentios (from Mendaios or Mendios) is a name for a donkey going back to ancient times, from a city, Mendes, which became prosperous through trade in donkeys and created coins of 4 drachmas with a donkey on one side carrying the god Dionysus! Therefore, in Varnalis’s poem, the speaker is a donkey.
**ψώνιο ~ a difficult word to translate with just one word; it can mean an arrogant, stuck-up person, a poseur, swellhead; I am translating this idea as “peacock”)

Άιντε θύμα άιντε ψώνιο…

Where should I hide you my son
so that the evil ones won’t reach you
on what island of the ocean
on what deserted mountain peak?

I will not teach you to speak
but you will speak out loudly about injustice
I know that you will have a heart
so good so sweet
that in the rain of corruption
quickly, quickly you will be in distress.

You will have blue eyes
you will have a tender body
I will keep you from the evil eye
and from bad times

From the first sudden surprise
of awakened youth
you are not for the warriors
you are not for the cross
you who have been brought up well
not a slave, not a slave nor a traitor

And if sometime your brains
what is just, light which is flashing
and if they ask you the truth
my child do not say it

Harvests the people cannot
lift up the light
the truth is not more golden
than the silence of truth
a thousand times if you will be born
so many, so many times will they crucify you

(translation: Eva Johanos)

Θεριά οι ανθρώποι δεν μπορούν
το φως να το σηκώσουν
δεν είναι η αλήθεια πιο χρυσή
απ’ την αλήθεια της σιωπής
χίλιες φορές να γεννηθείς
τόσες, τόσες θα σε σταυρώσουν