# λουρίδες απ' το πρόσωπο της Άννας



## OssianX

If it helps, the sentence is:  "Μες στον καθρέφτη / φαίνεται πελιδνό, τεθλασμένο το πρόσωπο εκείνου / που κοιτάει τον καθρέφτη, -- ένα πρόσωπο ρευστό μ' ενδιάμεσες / λουρίδες απ' το πρόσωπο της Άννας ..."  I confess that I find the whole sentence very difficult.  "In the mirror / appears, livid, crooked[,] the face of him / who looks in the mirror, -- a face liquid with interim / streaks from the face of Anna" -- I can't make much sense (for example) of the "απ'" near the end.  ("From"??) 

Anna, I know, is either the mother of Mary or a prophet mentioned (as very old) only by St. Luke.  But it doesn't seem to help much.  Does anyone know what's going on here?  The sentence is more obscure than anything else in this whole set of poems, I think.


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## makot

Hi!

First of all, yes απ' _is_ the abbreviated form of από (from or of).

Anna is a very common first name for girls (I don't think there's any need to search beyond that). So it might be that the person looking into the mirror is thinking of Anna so hard that he imagines seeing parts of her face reflected in the mirror. My feeling is that the mind's eye creates a blurred, distorting mirror where flashes of Anna's face appear.

I'm neither poet nor poetry translator - so you'll have to take it from there...


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## tasfos

I would rather say that "λουρίδες απ' το πρόσωπο της Άννας" is more likely to mean  : "slices of the face of Anna" that is to say when you look in the mirror you see somethink like a combined ikon of your face and the face of Anna.


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## OssianX

That'ss the image I get, too; it's good to have confirmation.  I'm still working how best to make it happen similarly in English.  "Slices" suggests somebody carving up the face, too gruesome for the context--too gruesome, that is, for a reader to want to assume, with little context to go on, that that is what's meant.  "Strips" may work best.

As so often, the real trick is the little words: deciding between "from" and "of" for από is probably crucial, in combination (of course) with the choice of noun for λουρίδες.  It's essential to figure out what kinetic sense a reader will get from a preposition, when there isn't a lot of other information to go on.  (It was "απ'" that threw me off in the first place.)

"With flashes of the face of Anna" would be clear to the English reader, but it moves too far away from the Greek.


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## tasfos

Poetic frases are always difficult to translate, as it not always clear what the writer would like to pass to the reader.


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## cougr

...ένα πρόσωπο ρευστό μ' ενδιάμεσες / λουρίδες απ' το πρόσωπο της Άννας

The following most likely lacks any kind of poetic aesthetic but my interpretation of the above is:  

...a face flowing with intermediary / strips of the face of Anna.


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## OssianX

What I've settled on -- for now -- is this:

     . . .  In the mirror 
appears, livid, crooked, the face of him
who looks in the mirror, -- a face flowing with intervening 
bands of the face of Anna . . .

Thanks to all -- thanks for "flowing," cougr, I hadn't thought of that.


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## cougr

OssianX said:


> What I've settled on -- for now -- is this:
> 
> -- a face flowing with intervening
> bands of the face of Anna . . .



That is the imagery I had in mind and had wanted to convey but got stuck with finding the requisite word to replace "intermediary" with. Now that you mention it "intervening" was the obvious choice. However, I still like the word "strips" (which you had come up with previously) better, only because- at least in this particular context- they evoke a sense of dangling down or hanging loosely whereas the word "bands" has a more rigid and fixed quality about it. Or maybe it's just because that in my case the term "intervening bands"  brings back memories of my cellular pathology classes which I used to abhor. 

Edit: Also, for "τεθλασμένο" you may want to consider the word "meandering".


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