from 9/11 or Falling Man
Yiannis Efthymiades
all of you think I was scared shitless that's why I dove headfirst into the abyss
god what idiots for once I took my life into my own hands and let myself
drop provocative like in front of their eyes immense ghoulish I stick my tongue out
then in that last moment I see a girl with a sad look in the midst of the crowd
nothing special to remember about her just that she was a sad girl that's all
two summers ago or two years after we could've fallen in love yeah could've
though this chance in a lifetime didn't come to fruition how many ever do
and so in the end I won't be here but the girl sure will what simple logic yours
the kind of logic I repeated proudly ad nauseum for so many years
those nights when you fall when you're dreaming that's how you know I'm really falling I twist
and turn like a meteor in a dizzying spin sometimes right side up on deck
other times upside down see how I'm looking at your world upside down it's not bad
sometimes with my head between my legs, other times with hands like birdwings I twist and
turn in a dizzying spin and bingo I'm four years old eating an ice cream cone
then bingo thirty the kid comes out when I'm twenty eight at fourteen the day is
endless twenty one the world is new but then it's only a bend in the road
and I'm fifty then a hundred I'm all time and time eternal and that's enough
in one moment all time seizes up opens again at last the fourth dimension
my eyes hurt as I fall the air accosts me as if to tear them out uproot them
they hurt so does the hair on my arms it is mania this resistance of mine
this desire for matter to appear as if whole even as it disintegrates
my eyes hurt when confronted with the horror but I keep them wide open to see
the man who falls wants to see and wants to know knowledge is his justification
the man who falls must always know his own fall even as he is falling this is
his punishment knowledge instead of feeling experience not intuition
slowly addiction sets in and the horror becomes an image like the others
and this image becomes gigantic until it takes the shape of a complete world
translated from the Greek by Karen Van Dyck
Listen to the poems read in the original Greek by the author:
Yiannis Efthymiades's meditation on terrorism and suicide is comprised of twenty-seven poems of twenty-seven lines of twenty-seven syllables that chronicle a man hurtling down from the World Trade Center, turning contemporary Greek culture and society on its head both in terms of the themes it addresses and its attention to form. His collection interprets austerity measures as both the measures a society takes to deal with poverty and unemployment and the verses poets write in response. The flash-second experience of a man falling is spread across pages and pages, turning an American tragedy into something very Greek, but also global. Even the number twenty-seven on the cover is a formal experiment drawn so that it is the same whether it is upside down or rightside up.
In this project I grapple with my own complicity as an English-language translator creating these texts anew for an American audience. Can we even talk of separate source and target cultures in a global economy such as today's in which languages and goods pop up with no regard for national borders? In which tragedies reverberate in seconds around the world? I respond to the formal issue of limited resources by inscribing the actual date of the tragedy of 9/11 into a twenty-syllable line, using a mix of street slang and metaphysics to make the poems American, but with a (Greek) difference.
In this project I grapple with my own complicity as an English-language translator creating these texts anew for an American audience. Can we even talk of separate source and target cultures in a global economy such as today's in which languages and goods pop up with no regard for national borders? In which tragedies reverberate in seconds around the world? I respond to the formal issue of limited resources by inscribing the actual date of the tragedy of 9/11 into a twenty-syllable line, using a mix of street slang and metaphysics to make the poems American, but with a (Greek) difference.
Yiannis Efthymiades was born in 1969 in Piraeus. 9/11 or Falling Man is his fourth collection of poetry. His poems were included in Hellenika, a bilingual anthology of new poets (Gavriilidis, 2009). He also writes song lyrics. His translations of English and American poetry have appeared in literary journals. He hosts a radio show on sound and poetry, and makes his living teaching Ancient Greek and writing textbooks for high school students.
Karen Van Dyck teaches and directs Modern Greek studies in the Classics Department at Columbia University. Her translations of Greek poetry include her edited and co-edited collections: The Rehearsal of Misunderstanding: Three Collections by Contemporary Greek Women Poets (Wesleyan, 1998), A Century of Greek Poetry (Cosmos, 2004), The Scattered Papers of Penelope: New and Selected Poems by Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke (Graywolf, 2009), and The Greek Poets: Homer to the Present (Norton, 2010). Translations from her forthcoming anthology Austerity Measures: New Greek Poetry (Penguin) have appeared in the Brooklyn Rail (2014) and Mantis (2015).
