The new poetry book by poet, essayist, and translator Dionysis Kapsalis has been released. This edition is published simultaneously with the translation of Shakespeare's King Lear and is the thousand five hundred first book of Agra Publications. It represents a new celebratory collaboration of the trio of friends and close collaborators: Dionysis Kapsalis, painter Giorgos Chatzimichalis, and publisher Stavros Petsopoulos, just like with the 1st book of "Agra" in 1979 and the 1,001st in 2011.

EPITAPH

Arioso dolente

Moments, moments the silence gathers, a dense core, a thrombus like light, in the deepest darkness, ready to burst; and if you hear the night diminishing and bringing the music of the world from afar (as the sea will bring its morning dew to an insomniac chamber), think of those who were like you made of fragments of dreams and vanished before dawn.

Moments, moments the silence gathers, a cyan impression, a shimmer, where you said it wouldn’t shine; and this light that welcomes you so high above the darkness, if you see kindness mediating, and in its small cells if you bend down and drink from the dew of love, remember those who were like you made of ephemeral devotion and will not find the way to the day.

Moments, moments the silence gathers, a deep wave, a new oscillation of the world, an unexpected curve where light meets the lament of the flesh; and if a new pain comes and finds you, and the day begins to embroider the nocturnal on its tender skin, contemplate those who were like you fashioned from the foam of days and from the depths will never awaken.

BIOGRAPHICAL DETAILS

DIONYSIS KAPSALIS was born in Athens in 1952. He studied classical and English philology in the USA and modern Greek philology in London, where he also taught for two years. Since 1978, he has published twenty-three poetry books, ten volumes of essays, a selection from Shakespeare's Sonnets, poems by Emily Dickinson and Coleridge, haikus by Issa and Bashō, Wilhelm Müller's Winterreise, Heinrich Heine's The Poet's Love, among others.

He translated for the theater works by Shakespeare such as Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, Othello, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Pericles, Hamlet, The Comedy of Errors, as well as Samuel Beckett's Happy Days. He works at the Cultural Foundation of the National Bank, where, since November 1999, he has held the position of director. He has been an honorary doctor of the Philosophy School of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki since 2015 and was awarded the Grand Prize of Letters for 2017.

COVER ART: The cover was designed by GIORGOS CHATZIMICHALIS in August 2020.