The sun shines and grows in an instant.
Free play in the short youth when flowers are in full bloom,
It doesn't matter whether it's a curse or a blessing.
Two gloomy fates always stand on one side,
A man with the bitter fruit of "old age" in his hand,
The other holds "death". The flowering period of youth is very short,
At most, the sun shines on the ground for so long.
Once this time is gone from you,
It is better to die instantly than to live.
Because there will be a lot of troubles in my heart. By then,
Poverty is a painful thing when family wealth is exhausted.
Plus no children, unwilling,
It is better to fall to the ground and walk into the ghost land.
Plus the disease. Who is there in the world?
Zeus won't give him too much disaster.
(translated by Shui Jianwei)
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Minamos is a musician who is good at playing the flute. He used flute songs to praise the joy of youth and lament the shortness of life. We are all green leaves and an elegy. "Elegy" does not refer to its content sadness, but to its form. Early Greek lyric poems were generally used for singing, often accompanied by orchestral instruments, which were divided into flute songs and piano music. Around the 7th century BC, a lyric style called Allegro appeared, which was generally called elegy by later generations. But it is quite possible that Allegro means "flute song". This is a kind of two-line body, which consists of six-step lines and five-step lines, and there are cases of rising and falling, with a flute.
The theme of this poem by Mimnamos is born out of a poem by Homer, which depicts the metabolism of the world with fallen leaves. Homer wrote in the sixth volume of the Iliad: "Heroic Diomedes, why do you ask me about my family background?" /Just like leaves wither, so do generations of human beings. The autumn wind scatters dead leaves all over the floor. When spring comes, many new green leaves will sprout in the forest. /Humans, too, will wither from generation to generation. "Homer's epic, especially the Iliad, often contains such lyrics or paragraphs. Starting from Homer's poems, many later poets imitated and developed this theme, and Mimnnairmos's We Are All Green Leaves is one of them.
In this parody, we hear the poet lament that life is short, sentimental and quite helpless. Poets compare youth to green leaves, and carefree but fleeting youth to the season when flowers bloom. Although the flower season is beautiful, it is like a flash in the pan; Youth is beautiful, but it can't get rid of the control of two destiny goddesses who represent aging and death respectively. As soon as a person is born, the footsteps of the goddess of fate are approaching step by step, which is an irresistible and helpless fact. The flowering period of youth is "as long as the sun shines on the ground at most". However, is a day's rest as simple as sleeping after sunset?
Then the poet's description is quite different from the above expectations. In the poet's pen, once youth disappears, people can say that life is worse than death. It is accompanied by poverty, loneliness without children, and the torture of old diseases. The contrast between the beauty of the flowering period of youth and the suffering after the flowering period shows more and more the preciousness and brevity of youth and the long suffering when youth is no longer there. Although the poet didn't write much, the message conveyed between the lines is undoubtedly youthful but fleeting. People, seize youth, eat, drink and be merry. Don't wait for youth to leave regrets in time and space and sigh in space.
(Yang Li)