Going back to Ithaca
was such a pleasant journey,
but at the sacred moment of arrival
no smoke rose from the chimney,
and to his poor eyes
the old palaces seemed
like castles built on sand.
Nothing was as he’d left it—
Penelope unfaithful,
those he trusted gone,
and everywhere a deadness and a silence.
Before him a chasm, behind him a flood—
which was true, which illusion?
The return or the departure?
Going back to Ithaca
was such a pleasant journey,
as lovely as a fairy tale,
thinks the nostalgic traveller.
But suddenly in his thoughts
Troy rises up before him
and the journey begins again.
Nikos Ninolakis
Translated by Pavlos Andronikos
Published in Antipodes nos. 25/26 (1989) p. 11.