The Barber Shop
A white rose,
the barber’s towel
around your face
shining like a beetle
clinging to the petals.
Clippings scattered on the floor
were the days when I loved you so much
while the garrulous
sculptor of heads cuts away
what time had made superfluous.
Ah! That unscrupulous hand made you
even more beautiful,
the curve of your eyebrows more clearly defined
and beneath the jade of your eyes,
your flowers, your lips half opened.
The shop impressed itself on my mind
in all its detail
and little by little the nothingness
which my life would soon become
without you
came crawling
into the scented room.
You smiled in the mirror
and I crumbled
because I had you and would lose you
like life classically cut short
by a pair of ancient scissors.
• Translated by the poet and Jackie Willcox
Over the summer, reader ID75577 ID75577 wrote that this column should look at a contemporary Greek poet. They suggested Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke, whose collection in English, The Scattered Papers of Penelope, “is a team work … a poetry collection filled with Katerina’s talent and made with a lot of meraki”.
The Scattered Papers of Penelope is a fascinating and well-organised “New and Selected”. As the title suggests, one of its strategies is to imagine the woman poet as a modern Penelope, liberating her from confinement to the original Homeric narrative but retaining some of its symbolic opportunities: “I wasn’t weaving, I wasn’t knitting / I was writing something / erasing and being erased / under the weight of the word.” (Penelope Says, translation by Karen Van Dyck). There are individual poems, prose poems and short sequences, translated by various hands, including the editor’s and the poet’s own. The poster didn’t specify a favourite poem so I have chosen one of mine, The Barber Shop, which I think fulfils the first commandment of a poem in translation: to open new horizons in the reader’s familiar language.
The poem begins with a startling image evoking a presumably male muse. The heterosexuality shouldn’t be allowed to disconnect Anghelaki-Rooke from Sappho and her tradition. Technical complexity is less amenable to translation, but the passion and observation of the earlier poet are qualities abundantly present in Anghelaki-Rooke. The Barber Shop exemplifies the immediacy of her love poems and their erotically driven stories.
Once we’ve put together the metaphorical pieces of the opening image, we find a startlingly new, masculine flower, almost exotic, but apt and beautiful. (The “white rose” represents the towel, the face of the man being barbered is like the shining beetle, “clinging to the petals” of the surrounding cloth). It will be developed and enriched in later lines, gradually inclining more towards realism. Meanwhile, metaphor-making continues, and the narrative enters time. Past and present tenses mix, perhaps to show how memory blurs perception of the temporal: “Clippings scattered on the floor / were the days when I loved you so much / while the garrulous / sculptor of heads cuts away / what time had made superfluous.”
The directness and simplicity of the diction, eg the intensifier in “loved you so much”, allows a “spoken” emotional authority to ground the classical allusions and inventive metaphor-making. The poem is of course retrospective, not a love letter but a voicing of unassuaged regret. The addressee is encountered, tragically, at the beginning of an inevitable loss, the visionary moment after which “nothingness … / came crawling/ into the scented room”. An impassioned personal voice is essential, and the translators capture it.
In the future predicted by the speaker, the “garrulous sculptor of heads” (a splendid image of the barber!) becomes a kind of male Atropos, severing the metaphorical thread of the speaker’s life. As the Wikipedia entry reminds us, in Plato’s Republic “the three Moirai sing in unison with the music of the Seirenes. Lachesis sings the things that were, Clotho the things that are, and Atropos the things that are to be”. It seems that the song of the Fates has been quietly chanted throughout this poem.
Anghelaki-Rooke was born in Athens in 1939, and is an internationally acclaimed poet and translator. Introducing her work in the current collection, the editor stresses that many of her more recent poems focus on “gender and language”, and concludes her selection with a poem from 2002, Translating Life’s End Into Love. It’s featured on this page, in a different English translation, but one that is vivid and compact. Some of the poet’s own thoughts on her art can be read here.
