Weekly Poem: ‘Molyvos’

By Titos Patrikios

For Yiannis and Rallou Constandellis

The same landscape for ages:
the stone houses,
the castle, cobbled streets,
the olive trees, beach.
The same landscape,
with a few changes
that would be noted by Alkaios, Sappho,
Orion, Loggos.
The same landscape where
I myself arrived
on the boats of Athenians
from the other bank.
Opposite: Troy,
Assos, Asia,
the world, as I see it,
broad, terrific, beautiful.

Translation copyright by Christopher Bakken and Roula Konsolaki.

Titos Patrikios is one of the leading poets of Greece. Born in 1928 to parents who were actors, he spent his first years in the United States as they toured with a Greek theater company. He returned to Greece, where he eventually studied law at the University of Athens and then philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris.

Click here to watch our profile of Patrikios and here for another poem.