Tag: Delphi

Almost a hundred years old. You are in the asylum for the incurable. From the next room you hear the death rattles. Your mind is clouded. You drift into relentless memories. You have bent over your dark desk for whole years. In the damp and poorly lit room you write for hours and hours for a mere crust of bread. You translate the ancients: Latins and Greeks. Your employers place one volume after another on the dark mahogany. A tower of manuscripts rises and envelops you. The sunlight barely passes into your cold cell. Your long, sparse white hair falls untidily over your patched coat.

You go out only at night, to get a little air. You walk alongside the grey Seine, and your mind goes to your homeland. To the house where you grew up. Greece belongs now to the haze of dream. Your homeland is now noisy and muddy Paris. Eighteenth century.

Suddenly, from memory bursts Light. That day shines like a meteor in orbit through your mind. The manuscripts of Boustronios, brought from Venice, reach you. You rolled into the very skin of the language and were stirred. The rough crust of dialect bewitched you. A fiery flame ignites in your studious head. You weep with happiness. You feel your body spreading roots, deep roots that reach across the Mediterranean. From Nicosia and the Salt Lakes to the depths of Genoa, you see the fusion of cultures unfold. Cyprus becomes for you the crucible and the seal of your life. Frank and Greek become one. The apostoles warm your heart, and the commomoutaina^¹ cries on your damp shoulders. The smile has not left you since then, poor friend, blood of my blood.

Old man, it is you I remember, you whom all have forgotten. You, who gave the light so that Europeans could be educated, and were thrown like a dog into the asylum. Years and years of arduous work. Over faded manuscripts, blinding your eyes day by day for a piece of bread. Scholars always consulted you for some difficult passage. Philosophers, rhetors, and poets—all stored within your head. Now they march before you in formation. Cicero, Aristotle, Plato, Parmenides, and Aeschylus greet you in line. They call you to follow them. Ahead, an intense, warm light. They all wear white robes. So do you. You ascend with them into the heavens at the very moment two orderlies lift your lifeless body like a sack of potatoes for the gravedigger licking his lips.

 
Note: Sypsomos (perhaps an ancestor of Lambros Porphyra?) lived in Paris during the 18th and early 19th century and was a translator of ancient and medieval Greek and Latin texts in the service of French scholars. The inspiration for this short piece comes from some moving details recorded by G. Kechagioglou in the edition of Georgios Boustronios.

^¹commomoutaina – in Cypriot Greek, literally “she who has a cut nose.” This refers to Maria of Patras, mother of James II (Ιάκωβος Β’), whose nose was cut by Helen Palaiologina, wife of King John II of Cyprus, because Maria bore James, the king’s illegitimate son.