İKOSTAS
E. TSIROPOULOS
EXERCISE
BOOK
FOR
HALLUCINATIONS
Duster of the Greek summer, this discourse
Will blossom in the bronze-colored night of passion,
And sprinkling the entrails with fire
Will invite darkness not to forget.
From
İKostas. E. Tsiropoulos, Exercise Book of Hallucinations
Athens 1979
Original title: TETRADIO PARAISQHSAIWN
Transl. from Greek
by İMauro Giachetti
FIRST HALLUCINATION
SUDDENLY
Succession of outlandish figures,
events he ignores, he expects - compact, stifling oppression of the memory that
will weave life again searching blindly for the sense of it. There, in the vain
weft of the instant, a thread of immortality, an unexpected golden thread: suddenly.
A word-abyss in the nausea of every day, a word-key of mystery. A hope-scratch
on the obscure world, a word in which palpitates the event, light in darkness,
darkness in light, life sunflower, death-sinking, everything suddenly: an encounter,
a start, love, amalgamation, fullness, ennui, betrayal, empoisonment, redemption,
exclusion from memory. Suddenly, blinded in the house, a sinuous mystic perception
startles his senses. Doors and windoes open up as if raped suddenly, elusive powers,
the ankles of the angels shine suddenly. He opens, searches but finds nothing.
Then slumber arrives with tender hands, nails, fragments of glass: Suddenly a
dreamy supersubstantial garment attracts him towards another life. Suddenly refreshed
figures he had summoned in the woodlands of slumber, faces made of warm ashes
he had rejected, the world in an astonished chaos.
Suddenly he thrusts away slumber with a knife at the throat - it is life! - the
nocturnal world breaks down. Shreds of dreams keep trembling awhile on his eyelids.
Reconciliation, nourishment for wounds. Then, suddenly, breezes from peerfect
bodies shock life, the intolerable world catches fire, May's fine weather is brief,
expectations become potent wine, suddenly, and exitence turns itself into a cellar.