Lord, the love that conquers the heart,
Those forest nymphs with deep blue eyes,
The goddess of beauty with rosy complexion
When you travel through these high mountains,
I will accompany you to play together,
I kneel down and beg you, please
< p> Have mercy on me and listen to mePrayer for your mercy:
Please advise Clebros
Love,
Bacchus, accept it.
(Translated by Shui Jianfu)
Comments:
Lord: This is the call to the god of wine.
In mythology, the god of wine likes to travel around the world. Wherever he goes, groups of believers follow him. Here, the poet had a hallucination after drinking, and regarded "love", the forest goddess, and the beauty goddess Aphrodite as his followers and wanderers.
People in love have always sought help from the God of Love, but not from the God of Dionysus. This is an expression of the poet's boldness and uninhibitedness after drinking.
Appreciation
The poem "Prayer to the Bacchus" is a solo harp song written by the ancient Greek poet Anacreon in the Ionian dialect. According to legend, on a bright spring day, when wild flowers were in full bloom and trees were luxuriant in the mountains, Anacreon was drinking happily in the mountains. He missed his beloved young boy Clebros intoxicatedly, so he played and sang this song. A love song. This poem is not only the representative work of Anacreon, but also one of the representative works of solo harp songs in ancient Greece.
In ancient Greece, people always prayed for love to Aphrodite, the goddess of love. But when the poet Anacreon was drunk, he hallucinated and prayed to Dionysus, the god of wine. At the beginning of the poem, the poet calls out to "the Lord", and the "Lord" here is also the god of wine. In his opinion, Dionysus has always been associated with "love that conquers the heart", "the goddess of the forest with dark blue eyes" and "the goddess of beauty with ruddy complexion". According to Greek mythology, Dionysus, the god of wine, likes to travel around the world and has many followers, especially women who often follow him in groups. In the poem, Bacchus is beautified by the poet and becomes an image of a fertile land that can endlessly provide "love" and "beauty". Therefore, the poet immediately knelt down and prayed devoutly to the God of Wine, asking him to be kind and grant him love. He hoped that this love would come from the beautiful boy Clebros.
Clebros was a Rhodesian who lived between the 7th and 6th centuries BC. He was selected as one of the seven sages of ancient Greece. Little about his life and poetry has been handed down, but his name was mentioned in the poems of many poets of the same time or later. Anacreon admired him even more. He wrote in another poem: "I love Clebros, I am crazy for Clebros, I am speechless before Clebros." This. Same-sex love was very popular in ancient Greece. The Greeks believed that women were just tools for reproduction, and men were nearly perfect creations. Immature and handsome young men like Clebros are more ideal love objects. They are shy like girls, energetic and full of vigor, and can ignite the blazing fire of love better than heterosexual couples.
Maximus recorded the origin of Anacreon and Clebros in "Collected Essays": At the Pan-Ionian Festival, a nurse held a baby in his arms. The child was passing by the meeting place and happened to meet Anacreon, who was wearing a wreath on his head and was very drunk. Anacreon stumbled along the way, bumped into the nurse holding the child, and cursed. The nanny was so angry that she secretly prayed to the gods, hoping that the bad guy who scolded the child would praise the child twice as much during his lifetime. That child was Klebros. Later, Anacreon fell in love with the child and wrote countless poems about him.
The poem "Prayer to the Bacchus" expresses Anacreon's love and yearning for love. The Dionysian, love, drunkenness, poetry, etc. involved in the poem are all reflections of the spirit of Greek carnival culture. Anacreon, like all Greeks, was always interested in enjoying the little joys of daily life. This is also characteristic of Anacreon's poetry. He always sings for the happy time of mankind and all the beautiful enjoyments, pursuing a kind of joy and freedom of simple enjoyment of body and soul, and has a bold and heroic interest.
(Ling Zhe)