Copyright © 2001-2002 Panayotis Skordos
contact: pskordos (at) alum (dot) mit (dot) edu

my Greek-to-English translation of
Nikos Kazantzakis' "The Life and Adventures of Alexi Zorba" 

PROLOGUE

Many times I longed to write the life and adventures of Alexi Zorba,
an old worker whom I loved very much.

In my life, the greatest benefactors turned out to be the travels and
the dreams; among people, live and dead, very few helped my struggle.
However, if I wanted to select which people left the deepest
footprints on my soul, perhaps I would select three or four: Homer,
Bergson, Nietzsche and Zorba.

The first one remained for me the calm brilliant eye --- like the disk
of the sun --- that illuminates everything with liberating brightness;
Bergson unburdened my mind from insoluble philosophical agonies that
were torturing my early youth; Nietzsche enriched me with new agonies
and taught me to transubstantiate the suffering, the bitterness, the
uncertainty into pride; and Zorba taught me to love life and to not
fear death.

If I were to choose today from the whole world one spiritual leader,
"Guru" as the Indians call him, "Geronta" as the monks of Aghio Oros
call him, most certainly I would choose Zorba.

Because he had what a pencil pusher needs to save himself: the
primitive gaze that grabs from afar like an arrow its meal; the
creative, renewed every morning, ingenuousness to see everything
unceasingly for the first time, and to give virginity to the eternal
everyday elements --- wind, sea, fire, woman, bread; the firmness of
the hand, the freshness of the heart, the boldness to mock his own
soul as if he had inside him a power superior to the soul, and finally
the wild gargling laughter from a deep fountain, deeper than the
bowels of man, which would jump out liberating on critical moments
from the old chest of Zorba; it would jump out and could destroy, and
did destroy all the fences --- ethics, religion, country --- that have
been put up by the miserable, the fearful human being in order to limp
along his life in safety.

When I contemplate with what food they fed me all these years, the
books and the teachers, in order to satiate a starving soul, and with
what food, the mind of a lion, Zorba fed me in a few months, it is
hard to hold back my wrath and my sadness.  Because of a coincidence
my life went in vain; it was too late when I acquainted with this
"Geronta" and what could still be saved inside me was
insignificant. The great turn, the complete change of the face, the
"firing" and the "renewal" did not happen.  It was then too late. And
thus Zorba, instead of becoming for me a high imperative model for
life, degenerated and became a literary, alas, topic for me to dirty
with ink a few pages of paper.

This sad privilege, to turn life into art, becomes disastrous for many
carnivorous souls. Because this way, the extreme passion finds an
escape, leaves the chest, and the soul lightens, does not vex any
more, does not feel the need to fight bodily, interfering directly in
life and in action --- instead it rejoices watching proudly its
extreme passion flare into ring shapes in the air and fade.

And not only does it rejoice but it is also arrogant; it thinks it is
accomplishing a great feat by transforming the transient irreplaceable
moment --- the only thing in the infinite time that has flesh and
blood --- into something apparently eternal. And thus Zorba, the one
full of flesh and bones, degenerated in my hands into ink and
paper. Without me wanting it, and actually wanting the opposite, it
started long ago to crystallize inside me, the myth of Zorba. It began
in my bowels, the secret process; first a musical disturbance,
feverish pleasure and discomfort, as if a foreign body entered my
blood and my organism was fighting to tame it and to extinguish it by
assimilating it.  And around this nucleus, the words started to flow,
to encircle it and to feed it like a fetus. The fogged memories were
solidifying, the sunken joyful and bitter moments were rising, life
was moving to lighter air, Zorba was becoming a story.

I didn't know yet what form to give to this story of Zorba: a romance,
a song, an intricate fictitious narrative of Halima, or dryly, plainly
to lift the sentences he had told me on a beach in Crete, where we
lived, digging seemingly to find lignite. We both knew very well that
this practical goal was ash for the eyes of the world; we couldn't
wait for when the sun would set, the workers would finish their
shifts, we would lie on the sand, to eat our rustic tasty meal, to
drink our brut Cretan wine and to start conversation.

I myself, most of the time, didn't talk; what would an "intellectual"
say to a dragon? I listened to him talking about his village on
Olympos, about the snow, the wolves, the komitadzi liberating army,
the Aghia Sophia, the lignite, the white rock of carbonic magnesium,
about women, God, country and death --- and all of a sudden, when he
was vexed and words were not enough for him, he would jump up on the
thick pebbles of the beach, and begin to dance.

Aged, straight-torso, bony, with head slightly leaning back, with
small perfectly round eyes like a bird, he danced and yelled and hit
his thick-built soles on the seashore and splashed seawater on my
face.

If I had listened to his voice --- not his voice, his loud cry --- my
life would have become worthwhile; I would live with blood and flesh
and bones what I now ponder in a hashish-like stupor and act with
paper and pen.

But I didn't dare. I would watch Zorba dance neighing in the middle of
the night and shouting to me to toss myself out of the convenient
carapace of prudence and habit, and to embark on great voyages with
him --- and I remained unmoved, shivering.

Many times I have been ashamed in my life, because I caught my soul
not daring to do what the supreme madness --- the essence of life ---
was calling me to do; but I never felt as much shame for my soul as in
front of Zorba.


One morning, early dawn, we split; I left again for foreign lands,
incurably hit by the Faustian illness of learning; he went northwards
and settled down in Serbia, on a mountain near Scopia, where he
unearthed, they say, a rich vein of white rock of carbonic magnesium,
induced a few rich folks, bought tools, enlisted workers, and started
again to open tunnels in the earth.  He blasted boulders, constructed
roads, brought water, built a house, got married, old and thriving, a
beautiful mirthful widow, Lyuba, and had one child with her.

One day, in Berlin, I received a telegram: "Found green stone, the
most beautiful, come immediately. Zorbas."

It was the epoch of the great famine in Germany. So much had the mark
slipped, that to make a small payment, you carried millions in a sack;
and when you went to a restaurant to eat, you opened your
over-inflated with bills wallet and emptied it on the table to pay;
and there came days when you needed ten billion marks for one stamp.

Hunger, cold, worn-out jackets, overused shoes, the red German cheeks
had become yellow. An autumnal wind, and like leaves, the people were
falling on the streets. Babies were given a piece of rubber to chew,
to be beguiled, so they would not cry. The police was patrolling the
bridges of the river, so that the mothers would not jump with their
babies to drown and be saved.

Winter, it was snowing. In the room next to mine, a German professor
of Chinese literature, in order to warm himself, would take a long
brush and following the uncomfortable way of the Far East would try to
copy some old Chinese song or some saying of Confucius.  The tip of
the brush, the elbow lifted in the air, and the heart of the sage
should be forming a triangle.

--- After a few minutes, he would say satisfied to me, the sweat is
running from my armpits and thus I warm myself.

In such venomous days I received the telegram of Zorba. At first I was
enraged. Millions of people are degraded and are on their knees,
because they don't have a piece of bread to prop their souls and their
bones; and here is now a telegram, to set out to travel a thousand
miles in order to see a beautiful green stone!  To hell, I said, to
beauty, because she is heartless and does not care for the suffering
of human beings.

But, all of a sudden, I was frightened; the anger had already subsided
and I could feel with horror that this inhuman shout of Zorba was
answering another inhuman call inside me.  A wild predatory bird
inside me flung its wings open to leave.

But I didn't leave; I didn't dare once more. I didn't get on the
train, I didn't follow the divine beastly call inside me, I didn't do
a brave senseless act. I followed the measured, cold, human voice of
logic. And I took the pen and wrote to Zorba to explain...

And he answered me:

"You are, and forgive me, boss, a pencil pusher. You could, even you,
poor soul, see once in your life a beautiful green stone and you
didn't see it. For God's sake, I was sitting once, when I didn't have
work, and I was saying to myself: "Is there, or is there not Hell?"
But yesterday when I received your letter, I said: "Surely, there must
be Hell for a few pencil pushers!""


The memories have commenced and are pushing each other and are
hurrying. It's time that we put some order. That we take the life and
adventures of Zorba from the beginning. Even the most insignificant
events that were linked with him are shining at this very moment in my
mind, clear, swift-moving and precious, like colorful fish in a
transparent summerly sea. Nothing of his has died inside me, whatever
touched Zorba is as if it has become immortal, and yet these days a
sudden restlessness is disturbing me: I have not received a letter
from him for two years, he must be over seventy years old by now, he
could even be in danger. Surely he must be in danger, otherwise I can
not explain the sudden urgency that has taken over me to reorganize
everything of his, to recollect everything he told me and all he did,
and to immobilize them on paper, so they won't go away. As if I want
to exorcise death; his death.  This is not, I am afraid, a book I'm
writing; it is a requiem.

It has, I can see it now, all the characteristics of a requiem.
Decorated is the tray of boiled wheat, with thick powdered sugar, and
written on it is the name: ALEXIS ZORBAS with cinnamon and almonds. I
look at the name, and instantly, jumps out the sea, the indigo of
Crete and inundates my brain. Words, laughs, dances, drinking sprees,
worries, soft conversations at sunset, eyes perfectly round which were
gazing at me with tenderness and contempt, as if they were welcoming
me each moment, as if they were bidding me farewell each moment,
forever.

And just as when we look at the full adorned funeral tray, other
memories suspend themselves in bunches like bats in the cave of our
heart, likewise, without me wanting it, another cherished shadow was
entangled from the very beginning with the shadow of Zorba, and behind
this, unexpectedly, yet another one, the shadow of a degraded,
innumerably painted and kissed, woman whom we had met with Zorba on a
sandy beach in Crete, in the Libyan sea...

Undoubtedly the heart of a human being is a closed pit of blood, and
when it opens, they run to drink and to be revived, all the thirsty
inconsolable shadows, who keep on thickening around us and darken the
air.  They are running to drink the blood of our heart, because they
know that another resurrection does not exist.  And among all, Zorba
is running farther ahead today, with his large strides, and he is
pushing aside the other shadows, because he knows that for him is
taking place, today, the requiem.

 Let us give him, thus, our blood to revive him. Let us do 
  all we can for him to live a little more, this wonderful
     glutton, drinker, worker, womanizer and vagabond.  
         The widest soul, the most confident body, 
             the freest shout that I knew 
                      in my life.