'Persephone'

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A/N: This is the complete poem by Giannis Ritsos that Nathan analyses in the last few chapters of the book.

Ritsos happens to be one of my favourite poets of all time and his work has always been a big inspiration - as I'm sure you can tell, if you've reached this far.

I really hope you enjoy it and hopefully, use it as an excuse to look into more of his poems but also the works of Greek writers, both ancient and modern, in general.

**

(She has returned, as every summer, from the strange dark region, to her large family home in the country--very pale, as if tired from the journey, as if sick from the great difference in climate, light, warmth. Something resembling a protective layer of protective shadow still concerns her face and hands. She lies stretched out on the old sofa, in a spacious, freshly whitewashed room, on the upper floor, with the shutters closed on the three windows and the balcony door. Even so, the glare of the Sun shines intensely on the walls in flickering strips of light. On the floor, a pile of baskets, full of wildflower, like those she didn't have time to take with her, then, on her first sudden journey. We may assume that, shortly before, her girlfriends had brought them to her as a welcoming gift. Now, only one young girl remains beside her, wearing a light blue dress, a blue ribbon in her hair--perhaps her most faithful, devoted friend, the water nymph Kyane. Next to the sofa, on a chair, a plate of cool water. Her friend, ever so often, moistens in it an embroidered batiste handkerchief, squeezes it, and places it gently on the traveler's forehead, covering her eyebrows. Now and then, a drop rolls slantwise down her cheek to wet the wide multicoloured pillow--almost as if she were crying with another's tears. And her hair is a little damp. Outside, one can barely hear the sea--calm, smooth--and sometimes a swimmer's voice. Then the Sunlight in the room intensifies. The traveler speaks):

It's true, I tell you--I was fine over there. I've grown used to it. It's here I can't bear it;
There's so much light--it makes me sick-- naked, harsh light; it reveals everything, conceals everything; it changes so often--you can't keep up; you change;
You sense time slipping away-- an endless, wearisome movement
Glasses shatter in the move, are left behind in the street, sparkle;
Some people jump ashore, others board the boats;--Just as when
our visitors came, went, and others came;

their big suitcases sat for a little while on the sidewalk--
a strange smell, strange places, strange names--the house was not our own;--
it too was a suitcase containing new underclothing,
unfamiliar to us--
Someone could pick it up from the leather handle and slip away.

We were glad then, certainly. A move then
seemed somehow to be a move upward;-- something was always happenin;
and for all that we feared that it would be lost, we did not yet know
the secret sally of the boat from the other side of the horizon
or from the swallow and the wild goose from the other side of the hill.

The glasses, plates, forks shown on the table,
golden and blue from the reflection of the sea. The tablecloth
white, well-ironed, was a shining plane; it had no creases at all in which other meanings, other conjectures could take refuge. Now
this light is unbearable--it distorts everything, it shows everything up
in its distortion; and the sound of the sea is wearisome, in its unstable boundlessness, its fleeting colours, it's changing moods. And these ridiculous boatmen
with their pants rolled up, soaking wet, getting angry at you;
and the swimmers,  like coal merchants,  daubed with sand,
laughing, apparently pleased, shouting only to be heard
as if their own voices were not enough.

Over there,
no one dives into the water, no one shouts. The tree rivers, ashen,disdainful, as they converge around the great rock make an altogether different noise--intense, uniform-- that fixed sound of eternal flux;--you get used to it; you almost don't hear it.

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