Tassos Leivaditis | Juggler with Oranges

 

Joan Miró, 'The Escape Ladder' (1940)

 

He was the kind of poet you thought was not touching the ground. Tasos Leivaditis's poems accompnied my youthful dreamy days and solitary nights in much the same way that W.B. Yeats would years later. I find politicised poetry rather forced and wooden, writing motivated by some ideology, which willfully forces the text to unforld in a certain preconceived direction. But Leivaditis's poetry - especially of his middle and later period - largely transcends the poet's own political ideology and opens up new paths of expression, not only emotional but also philosophical, if not metaphysical and mystical. The retreat to the inner life often gives rise to unanswered - and perhaps unanswerable - questions about the meaning and value of life but, as in 'Juggler with Oranges', the existential angst generated by the absurdity of existence is intertwined with moments of unexpected joy and wonderment.

 

Juggler with Oranges

 

It’s as if you’re not touching the ground, but stepping

on a big ladder, which also rests upon

another ladder, and that on another; innumerable ladders,

which, if you want to name, you can call:

ambition, pity, arrogance,

you can call them fear of death, and a still greater fear,

that of life, you can call them:

visions, desires, your own memories, and the memories

of those who shed their blood and whom you never got to know,

you can name them: days, name them nights and even name them God

and Nothing and time and justice.

 

Every name, each word is a dangerous, big ladder

all forming an enormous, shuddering structure of ladders

which are on the verge of falling and which are held together only

by the unyielding balance of your paltry existence.

 

 

(My translation ~ August 2017, December 2023)

 

 

 

Note

 

You can read the Greek text, under the title «Ο ζογκλέρ με τα πορτοκάλια», here.