Journal of an Unseen April

”Come now my right hand,

depict what demoniacally torments you,

but over it place

The Virgin’s silver sheen

that at night masks the waters of the

marshy waste”.

The Journal of an Unseen April contains 49 poems in the form of journal entries, beginning on 1 April and ending on 7 May, and covers the whole period’of an unspecified Greek Easter (though some critics specify the year as being 1981 when Easter fell, as in the Journal, on 26 April). The prevailing atmosphere throughout the work is that of death, but death expressed as a transcendent, unseen life. The setting is the border area between the earthly and transcendent life; between the ”now” and the ”forever” of The Axion Esti. Its themes of departing and experience of what Elytis elsewhere has called the ”after-death” acquired a new relevance in the month of April 1996, which came in the wake of his own departing and during which the translation was made. It was the first April without Elytis or, perhaps more correctly, the first April with an unseen Elytis. I dedicate the trans-lation to his unseen presence. (David Connolly, from the Translator’s Afterword)