Who is the author, is it you? I can’t read modern Greek at all, but was very curious so I asked an LLM to translate this poem with the care of Robert Fagles and Stephen Mitchell. It seems well done to me insofar as it touched me, and the LLM annotated its choices which seem reasonable. I’ll note the translation below. Does it capture well the original?
…
You’re searching for your last cigarette
in the green leaves of the chestnut tree.
The stars nod to you from the sky—
nightingales singing, and a Greece gone feral.
A tin of balm
you turn into graves with feta.
A car passes,
somewhere, beside a cross.
A child’s memory lingers
in the dusty shed that still barely stands
in the corners of my childhood mind.
A pomegranate tree that sprang from the earth
at birth—
and a glance in your eyes
that I am still waiting for.
I cry and remember.
We hold onto your words.
I write so I won’t forget your memory, Father—
the day on the balcony you etched into mine.
And later, you sit again in the haze of the dice,
at the edge of the sea,
bewitched by the nightingale’s song.
I’m no songwriter—
I’m a Nobody.
In my eye you’ll see the birth
of some kind of death.
And a brother’s head resting on the father,
a dog’s whimpering sigh
in the lie of the village.
The nightingale—still there.
And a stone, a diamond,
brought from Smyrna,
from Grandma Maria.
A grandfather in my mother’s haunted gaze,
and a life worthy of
one great lie.
The lie is our delusion
that hides the truth.
And a pedestrian prose lurks
between the ribs,
an arbitrary stale bread
in the truth of law and order.
An old teacher
on the edge of ugliness,
and seven siblings in a row—
you were cut into two.
Still you refuse sleep.
You light your second-to-last cigarette.
Our thoughts rush fast
along the moon’s path.
A heavy shadow on your wall,
and a silver-gold mountain beckons
each of us
to hand over the child’s enchanted lie.
Time for sleep.
I woke inside my father’s dream—
in the child’s airplane,
dust in the air—
and a kind of honor
pulsing in the lie of lenses.
Time for sleep—
I’m late,
inside the madness of ash.