Hours of the Stars

De: Manolis Aligizakis (translator), Dimitris Liantinis (poet)

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

What Dimitris and I lived together, 26 years of marriage, was the oak tree craft of Odysseus, the marked Fate, a demonic (with the ancient Greek meaning of the word demon) fable. Our years were sometimes smiling, other times sorrowful. We studied happiness by painting for days and nights, the great return. It was the story of the sea, like the sea of Kechrees-Korinth that floods the seashore, the rock of Bourtsi, the opposite forest, the girl who sleeps under the moonlight on the opposite hill, the wrath of rain, the storm of sexual arousal. We fought to transcend the anger of destruction into the breath of creativity and all this with the calmness and certainty of the same death which, whenever it would come it would be nothing but a game, simply a different sound in the endlessness of the sea.
He wrote all his poems between 1971 and 1985. To my question why he wouldn’t publish them, he would answer, “I write and publish poetry through my scientific prose. These poems will be left to you. He believed that true poetry has its own spring life as it is an exquisite form of expression; its purpose, irreplaceable, has in it its final completeness: the creator turns into an immortal.
Liantinis learned that the true poet experiences truth and reveals the truth; he knew that the poet dies and reveals the truth after his death; that the tragic poet is completed by the re-risen poet. He wrote two poetry collections: Hours of the Stars and The Eight Day, which are included in this publication.
However, his most important poem in content and substance is the one he wrote on March 31st 1998, the night before he left; this poem speaks of his final course of action. I reveal this poem for the first time today, and I let it speak to the discerning reader of the final completeness, of Dimitris Liantinis’ last course of action.

Nikolitsa Liantinis, Professor, wife of the poet