Mystic Passage (Swedish edition)

The Swedish translator of Elytis' poetry Ingemar Rhedin translated The Secret Passage into Swedish and wrote a preface as well. It was published by Stockholm's Bonniers Publishing House in 1996.

 

About the book

Preface of the poetic collection Mystic Passage for the Swedish edition of the book.
(In Swedish)

 

Mystic Passage

in english

 

Reviews

"You have to make life difficult", Bengt Holmqvist

 

SECOND PASSAGE
The Agony of Memory

One by one, I loose the bonds
The dream will be the last to be uprooted
The dream the dream torments me — joints
That groan lost azure in the deepest depths

My body
The odor of sky and of frigid star
Is lost in my millennia of a flowing
Pagan dream.

I have not yet loosed all the bonds
Moonlit nights oaths diaries and farewell
The earth rejects me, a foreign body
I will avenge myself, I say, with lucidity my weapon
I will pass beyond time like the flash of incubated crystal

I will pass like the silver of the desert
That outwits the darkness
Holding in my hands the mark:
Odor of birth-blood.

*

The dream will be uprooted last or I
I
Some hand will uproot me from the dream
Like a flower trodden by Time
What did I dream? What did I dream?
I will no longer remember

*

My house is uninhabited
Only memory remains among the crumbling walls
I hear its heavy footsteps — something
Like a cry in the dark
I wear it next to my skin with my first abyss
A flower whitened by my tears
And death laden with paradises
A window forgotten in the night
Illuminating the other life.

Death twisting
Climbing up my body
Displaces the boundaries

I am the burning memory that flows toward the Light
I no longer own the matter given me
I turn it into a poem
To pass through.

*

My soul ever more alien
Embraced by the abyss
I recognize it by the
Odor of night that riddled it like rust
A strip of azure

Pierced through by my sleep
I am left alone
With my soul erect
Bidding farewell to the old mooring

With tears I rinse time off the form of my Soul
With my blood I rinse the abyss off its fissures
To take it with me.