The night before 9/11, I was working on a translation of Gatsos' great poem, "The Knight and Death," a title he took from this Durer etching. The next morning as I stood in the crowds watching the astounding beauty of minute red flames flickering in the pillars of cloud, fragments kept buzzing in my head - - I saw your descendants like birds / rip open the sky of my country / and I saw the cypress trees of the Morea stop breathing on the plain of Nauplion . . . Gatsos speaks of April 1941 but the poem has become something of a talisman for me, and I have used its title for my book on the Morea. For this tenth anniversary of that terrible day, I am printing here my translation and Gatsos' original from my translations of his complete poetry.
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