Epigrammatic

  NOCTURNAL MARIA

On the very next day after my death, or rather my being put to death, I got all the newspapers to read, that I might learn every possible detail concerning my execution. It appears I was led to the scaffold under strict escort. I was wearing, it says, a yellow-coloured topcoat, a net necktie and an ancient helmet. My hair was like a brush, perhaps of a decorator, perhaps of a pine-bender. Afterwards, they cast my body far away, in a marsh once the haunt of the Frenchman Descartes and where, for years now, had lain, fodder for the vultures and a whore called Eu-terpe, the illustrious corpse of the never-to-be-forgotten Kara-manlakis. And though much was said on the quiet, that at that time I was in Maracaibo in South America, according to others in Passalimani in Piraeus, I was quite simply in Elbassan (in Albania). And the one thing of note that I happened to read during those days was a most lengthy letter from the Italian, Guillaume Tsitzes, my one close friend, whom actually I never met and whose existence I even doubt. In short, the entire con-tent of that letter of his was as follows: "You," he said, mean-ing Polyxeni of course, "are an old gramophone with a bronze horn beneath a black cloth."

Translated by David Connolly

the translation is taken from:
http://www.engonopoulos.gr/_homeEN/poem04.html