Vol 1 No 1 2007
Translator’s Note
I was attracted to Sachtoúris’ work after a conversation
that took place in Thessaloniki. My aunt had arranged for a young graduate
student to take me for a walk around the city shortly after I arrived there—it
might’ve been a date, I can’t be certain now. She was studying
philosophy and we stopped in at a bookstore and I looked into the poetry
section. She—I’ve forgotten her name; you can see how important
it was—stood beside me and judged the poets I called out at random
from the covers of their books. Her response, when I said Sachtoúris,
was “He’s macabre”. I remember that this happened in
June, just before I did some travelling. We made plans to meet again but
never did. I can’t remember her face, but her voice saying “macabre” resonates
and it was that French word that brought me back to the bookstore in early
August to buy the book. Sachtoúris’ poems were short and with
my limited Greek the exercise of translating him with a dictionary would
serve a double purpose—to engage in translation and to increase my
vocabulary. Short but severe I learned quickly, and never simple. His topos is
both local and unsuitable-for-human-living, utopia and nightmare, wish
and counter-wish, so that these things become confused and the poet continues
living by melding a Romantic longing with his strange and murderous surroundings.
My Greek has
since improved, but my translations develop from the same straight-forward
method—a one-two approach. First I make literal translations and
then I make them pretty [author’s note: by “make pretty” I
mean to oversimplify]. The finished product is a poem in itself that carries
the meaning and intent of Sachtoúris’ original in English,
but that can, of course, never do that.
—Evan Jones
Evan Jones