Poetry
Διονύσου πλους
Not translated into English
Alexandros Rizos Rangavis · 1864
Opening lines
Ἡ ἔκτασις τοῦ ἀχανοῦς
Αἰγαίου ἐκοιμᾶτο,
κ’ ἔβλεπες δύω οὐρανούς·
ὁ εἷς ἦν ἄνω κυανοῦς,
γλαυκὸς ὁ ἄλλος κάτω.
The expanse of the boundless
Aegean lay asleep,
and you saw two skies:
one was above, dark blue,
the other below, sea-green.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from openbook.gr
Synopsis
Tyrrhenian sailors seize on a shore a young man of singular beauty and take him aboard to sell him. The pilot recognises a god and begs them to release him; the captain mocks him and orders sail to be set. The ship races towards Naxos, the island where their captive was expected.
Context
The author attached to his poem a note that gives its key: he declares it an imperfect translation of the small frieze of the monument of Lysicrates, the choregus whose monument still stands in Athens. The same note admits a liberty: neither the frieze, nor the Homeric hymn, nor Philostratus features a woman, and he has put one in, Ariadne, who waits for the god on Naxos. A hundred stanzas in archaizing Greek, printed in Athens by Dionýsios Koromilás in 1864, mark the passage from the romanticism of his early work to the neoclassicism of his maturity.
Who it is for
One hundred stanzas in a learned language that present-day Greek can no longer read without difficulty, and which no French translation has rendered. It helps to have seen the frieze.
Prizes and reception
The poem still appears in Greek school anthologies, where it alone represents the neoclassical turn of the first school of Athens.