Poetry

The Crane Dance

by Yannis Ritsos

The clew paying out through his fingers, a deftness

that would bring him back to her, its softness the softness

of skin, as if drawn from herself directly, the faint

labial smell, guiding him up and out, as some dampness

on the air might lead a stone-blind man to the light.

Asterios dead for sure, his crumpled horn, his muzzle

thick with blood, so at Delos they stopped,

Theseus and the young Athenians, and stepped

up to the "altar of horns" to dance a puzzle-

dance, its moves unreadable except to those who'd walked

the blank meanders of the labyrinth.

And this was midday: a fierce sun, the blaze

of their nakedness, the glitter of repetitions, a dazzle

rising off the sea, the scents of pine and hyacinth. . .

Well, things change: new passions, new threats, new fears.

New consequences, too. Nowadays, we don't think much

about Theseus, the Minotaur, Ariadne on the beach

at Naxos, staring out at the coming years.

But people still dance that dance: just common folk,

those criss-cross steps that no one had to teach,

at weddings and wakes, in bars or parks,

as if hope and heart could meet, as if they might

even now, somehow, dance themselves out of the dark.

Translated from the Greek by David Harsent

Translator Notes:
In making my versions of poems by Yannis Ritsos, I have brought significant changes to his work. There is, of course, nothing new about the business of making "a version‚" rather than offering what is sometimes called a strict translation; in fact, I suspect that this is the approach to translation now most often taken. One way of defining this method is to speak not of "translation," but of "re-imagining." It is, in short, a creative act in support of an earlier creative act.

I was well aware of the political resonances in the poem. Ritsos is an unreservedly political poet and was imprisoned, exiled, and ill-treated by both the Metaxas regime and the Colonels' junta. The Fourth Dimension, his long remake of The House of Atreus, was partly informed by the inability to speak openly of contemporary events. Ritsos called his poem "The New Dance," and it was clear that he was making use of the dance performed at Delos by Theseus and the young Athenians as an extended metaphor. Me too, though I've re-routed things to get what my version needed.

The sense of conflict in Ritsos's work is no less telling than the weight of sorrow or the sudden starts of surprise. And his work is indelibly Greek: in landscape, in weather, in the recurring statues and geraniums and balconies, the ever-present sea, the underpinning of myth. Most important for me is that he found a means to link mood to perception in a way that is economical, delicate, and indelible. In fact, economy is crucial. One of his tristichs, for example, goes: "The sun finally reaches the back room window./Someone shouts outside in the street./These things seem different to the loveless." Another: "You passed me a glass of water/Into which you had secretly/Dipped your finger." Still another: "A hallway of doors. A grandfather clock./A woman came out naked, her hair wrapped in a towel./She didn't look at the clock. It wasn't that."

The ability to compress an entire emotionally-rich episode into a few lines is typical of Ritsos's shorter pieces: the obliquity of compression, and the readability of the implied narrative, is a trademark, and it was this that first drew me to these haunting, mysterious, visceral, and (I suspect) pitch-perfect poems.—DH