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The CHAR IOTEE R A Review of Modern Greek Culture NUMBER

IO

!968

THIRTEEN POETS OF SALONIKA An Anthology Selections and Translations by Kimon Friar

/[1

THE ART OF ]ANNIS SPYROPOULOS \ CA VAFY'S ARS POETICA •

Critical Essays Book Reviews

Published by Parnassos, Greek Cultural Society of New York $2.00

THE CHARIOTEER A REVIEW OF MODERN GREEK CULTURE

Published by Parnassos, Greek Cultural Society of New York NUMBER IO

EDITORIAL STAFF Executive Editors

Andonis Decavalles

Managing Editor

Katherine Hortis

Art Editor

Bebe Spanos

Nicholas Ikaris

Copy Editor

Belle Rothberg

Representative in Greece

Victorine Chappen

HONORARY BOARD C.

MAURICE

BowRA Warden of Wadham College, Oxford

LAWRENCE DURRELL

poet, author ofThe Alexandria Quartet

RicHMOND LATTIMORE

Professor of Classics, Bryn Mawr College

Retired Professor ofByzantine and Modern Greek, Exeter College, Oxford

JoHN MAVROGORDATO

THE CHARIOTEER is published by PARNASSOS, GREEK CULTURAL SOCIETY OF NEW YORK, a non-profit organization under the laws of the State of New York, Box 2928, Grand Central Station, New York 17, N.Y. 2-Number Subscription $3.75; 4-Number Subscription $7.25. Copyright © 1968, by Parnassos. All rights reserved. Printed at The Thistle Press, New York.

PARNASSOS EXECUTIVE COUNCIL Honorary President Andonis Decavalles Vice-President Constantine Brown Secretary Lula Hassakis Treasurer Mary Razelos Cultural Chairman Irene Christodoulou Social Chairmen Patricia Flynn Peate Marie Noussee Membership Chairman Mary Manousos Newsletter Olga Boondas Publications Katherine Hortis Public Relations Harvey Peate Board of Directors Lee Cakiades Takis Ganiaris Nike Kralides The staff of The Charioteer are members of Parnassos who donate their services. Support is earnestly requested from all who are interested in the aims of this publication. Your contribution is tax-deductible.

TABLE OF CONTENTS EDITORIAL

BEBE

SPANOS

AN INTRODUCTION TO THE SALONIKA POETS Essay GEORGE ODYSSEUS

6

10

THIRTEEN POETS OF SALONIKA Selections and Translations by Kimon Friar I

GEORGE THEMELIS

Athanasios Dhiakos Hymeneal II

ZOE KARELLI

Desires The Procession ofPoets Adolescent from Anticythera III

30

31 31 33

35 36

G. X. STOYIANNIDHIS

Memories Half and Half VI

26 27

NIKOS GABRIEL PENTZIKIS

Parallel Thoughts Scattered Leaves V

24

GEORGE T. VAFOPOULOS

Apartment House Taste ofDeath Dead Youth The Statues IV

19 22

38

39

TAKIS VARVITSIOTIS

A Small Monument to the West Wind Do Not Ever Say The Earth Is Not This World

40 42

43

VII

SARANDOS PAVLEAS

Tomorrow Echo VIII

KLITOS KIROU

I Speak With Broken Voice The Voice and the Poet Night Has Its Own Cries Filter IX

s6 s6 57

DINOS CHRISTIANOPOULOS

Your Love-Making Is Like The Sunset Ruined Quarry I Forsake Poetry Verses of St. Agnes for St. Sebastian Antigone: In Defense of Oedipus XIII

52 52 54 54

GEORGE IOANNOU

The Lesson A Mouse This Abscess XII

so so

MANOLIS ANAGNOSTAKIS

Chess A Thief The DeadMan Love Is The Fear XI

47 47 48 49

PANOS THASITIS

High in the Heavens The Prince ofPutrefaction X

45 45

58 59 59 6o 6o

NIKOS-ALEXIS ASLANOGLOU

"Butterfly" 1951 The Ruins ofPalmyra Litohoron Station

NOTES

62 62 63 64

66

THE ART OF ]ANNIS SPYROPOULOS Critical Mosaic BY ALLAN S. WELLER, CHARLES S. SPENCER, J.-P. RODIN

adapted by Belle Rothberg THE PAINTINGS OF ]ANNIS SPYROPOULOS

facing page 68

CAVAFY'S ARS POETICA

72

REVIEW OF BOOKS

8r

CONTRIBUTORS

EDITORIAL

"THE POETS of Salonika? Splendid! But what about the poets of Vlahokerasia? When are you going to present them?" Thus from an old friend of The Charioteer when he learned that a Salonika issue was forthcoming. To someone who does not know him, his question would seem myopic, the outburst of a parochial mind, not worth an answer. He was speaking of the place where he was born. It is a village somewhere among the mountain fastnesses of Laconia. He is, however, not in the least parochial. He knows that in American terms he might as well have been asking about the poets of, say, Horseshoe Junction, Nebraska, in relation to the poets of Boston. His tone was rhetorically playful and yet implied expectations of a defmite, favorable reply. He did not wait for it. Swept along by an unlaconic eloquence, he went on to describe how vibrantly the poet's craft still thrives in the Peloponnesean jumping-offplace of his boyhood. On public occasions of drinking and dancing, the men of his village, young and old, take turns upon familiar themes and spin out stanza after stanza, recitatives all impromptu. Far from being dulled by their steepflavored wine or their strenuous etlmic dances, their wits are sharpened against each other's improvisations, and the competition to display their prowess in poetry is as ardent as in other manly arts. The scenes he evoked call up images of an archaic world. It seems the very sort that fathered The Iliad and The Odyssey and that depended above all on a prowess for life. In an American listener his words inflicted some wistful regrets that there is no such place for poetry, spontaneous or premeditated, not even for a jiggety-jog rhyming spirit, among those who drink and dance on American occasions. The instinct of putting words into a metric pattern has become so faint among Atlantic peoples that poetic skill for them is hardly akin to any sort of prowess. For them it tends to derive from much that is unmanly and is expressive not of an excess oflife but a non-life. It is not so much an art as it is a game to be played among mirrors. But then for what peoples has poetry ever been so sacred a sport as for the Greeks, to be enacted, in the supreme figurative sense, among the thigh-bones ofburnt offerings to the God. No matter what regrets about American times and customs the words of the Laconian gentlemen may arouse, they are, for the student of Greek

Bebe Spanos: Editorial

7

literature, very much to the point. For they keep pulling up sharply the fact that Greece is, as she has always been, a mother of poets. Small as she is, maybe because she is small, she has never neglected to foster in each generation the particular traits that identify her offspring. In the humblest as in the proudest ages of her history, the most dominant of these traits has been the urge toward poetry. Because of that very urge the Greeks are best known for their love ofliberty. It is a love that springs from what is deepest in every Greek heart-the need to be singular and to express that singularity. What else is poetry but that need made palpable? Hence, an issue of The Charioteer devoted to the poets of a small Laconian village would not be a digression into parochial trivia but would cast light upon the long, lustrous, unbroken tradition of Greek literature from Homer's day to our own. To embark upon such an issue would not be wise. It would provoke jealous outcries from almost every corner of Greece. For there is rarely a Greek village that does not have its cluster of poets who vie among themselves and the poets of neighboring regions in a display of poetic genius. If Greece does not lack poets, neither does she lack anthologists. In these difficult days when every circumstance seems to be conspiring in favor of the anonymous, she has been especially fortunate to have the service of distinguished scholars who are sensitive critics and skillful translators. Because of their indefatigable attention to detail, the varieties of poetic experience in Greece have not been blurred. The late Professor Moses Hadas of Columbia University, in his invaluable collection The Greek Poets (The Modern Library), reveals his selfless devotion to Greek poetry and his strong sense of duty as an anthologist to select the representative as well as the best works. "The anthologist of Greek poetry," he writes in his Preface, "must be haunted by the thought that his ancient colleagues were responsible for the loss of the bulk of classical Greek poetry. He may draw solace from the reflection that if what they failed to include fell into oblivion, perhaps what they did include would not otherwise have survived. Happily the power of the anthologist is no longer so absolute, for full printed texts are preserved in many libraries; nevertheless his responsibility both to the ancients and to posterity remains great. Whatever the anthologist's intentions, for a large number of readers the Greek poets he chooses, and the versions in which he chooses to present them, come to constitute a sort of canon. " Professor Hadas strikes the core of his matter in his Introduction. His opening statement that "for the ancient Greeks" poetry was a "natural and

8

THE CHARIOTEER

necessary commodity" more than for any other European people, needs only one word less to be timelessly true. Poetry has always been "natural and necessary" to the Greeks. The very meaning of the Greek word poetry or poesy which is to make refers to something concrete, not illusory or abstract, to an action, not to a thing. The word suggests how intrinsically viable is the poetic condition.Wherever we turn in The Greek Poets we see that what the Greek poets made was life and the life they made never ceases being alive. "When I am asked by some rich man to dine,/ I mark not if the walls and roof are fme,/ Nor if the vases such as Corinth prizes-/ But solely how the smoke from cooking rises./ If dense it runs up in a column straight,/ With fluttering heart the dinner-hour I wait./ If, thin and scant, the smoke-puffs sideway steal,/ Then I forebode a thin and scanty meal." This from Diphilus, companion to Menander. Throughout that little book we hear the many voices of Greece and the pages vibrate with countless, fleeting nuances of sound and meaning, from Samos and Cos and distant Rhodes, from every island, big and little, from her mountains and coasts, heartlands and hinterlands, the Attic shore, the Ionian, the Sicilian. It is never a faceless crowd, that pale procession who make way for our silent, breathless encounters. And here is Antipater ofThessaloniki, who lived at the end of the first century, B.C.: "Two sailors, when the vessel sank,/ Clung to one plank their lives to save./ Tom foully struck Jack off the plank,/ And doomed him to a watery grave./ Avenging Justice eyed the strife,/ And punished quick. The sequel mark./ Jack swam ashore and saved his life,/ Whilst Tom was swallowed by a shark." Though it resembles a jingle in a Victorian schoolbook, it tells us something about Antipater and makes us wonder how many more such anecdotes he had up his sleeve and whether they were all so proper. Greece now is again fortunate to have the discriminating force of Kimon Friar selecting, translating and editing the works of modern poets from all parts of Greece. As translator of the Odyssey ofKazantzakis and as the former editor of this magazine, he and his remarkable daemon need no introduction to our readers. The monumental work that he is now preparing will be as defmitive and invaluable for the literature of modern Greece as the work ofProfessor Hadas is for ages past. Like Professor Hadas, he is scrupulously aware that "the poets he chooses, and the versions in which he chooses to present them, (will) come to constitute a sort of canon." The baker's dozen from Salonika presented here delineate the private anguish of the poet even while they speak of agonies in the world at large.

Bebe Spanos: Editorial

9

The twentieth-century preoccupations with violence and death are here, and shades ofT. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound sometimes flit between the lines. That the total effect is Greek cannot be questioned. There are innumerable, fleeting nuances that invite and at the same time defy analysis. We never forget, though, that we are walking not only in the path where Antipater walked but also in the footsteps ofSappho and of Anyte ofTegea and of any number of other long-dead poets who extended the time of their lives by transfixing a moment of their awareness into words and who thereby added another dimension of time to moments in our own life. BEBE SPANOS

for Parnassos and the Staff of The Charioteer

AN INTRODUCTION TO THE SALONIKA POETS BY GEORGE ODYSSEUS

I JUST AS EVERY individual has his own particular poetry, so has every city. The city ofThessaloniki, or Salonika (in its shortened form) is no exception. From the very beginning, its geographical position has determined the course of its destiny in the Hellenic world. Stretched along the North Aegean Sea, amid Mt. Olympos (that mythical abode of the gods) and Mt. Athos (that hermitage of orthodox mysticism) it once dominated the entire stretch of the Mediterranean. A brief glance at the city's historical past will reveal the subterranean sources of its poetic creativity. It was founded in 315 B.C. by the Macedanian king Kassander, who gave it the name ofhis wife, Thessaloniki, the sister of Alexander the Great. Macedonian in origin, Roman by circumstance of war, Byzantine in its spiritual renaissance, then yoked under Frankish and Turkish rule for many centuries, the city has always remained -like the rest of Greece-stubbornly Hellenic. Having passed through so many adventures and misadventures, Salonika, with its present 500,000 inhabitants and its throbbing business and industrial activity, strives now to survive in the modern mechanized world. It is not surprising that an authentic and provocative school of poetry has been born in a place of such historical significance. The school of poetry in Salonika differs from the various schools in Athens and has its own color and identity. Its first Promethean characteristic in its difference from Athens lies in its natural environment: the harsh Macedonian landscape coupled with the softness of atmosphere, in sharp contrast to the mild contour ofhills and the brilliant transparency oflight in Attica. The light in Salonika does not have that dazzling clarity for which Greece is world renowned; the light in Salonika is subdued and refined. Consciousness, therefore, goes underground, goes esoteric, whereas the Athenians live in the clear and extroverted light of day. And yet, as though to confute these geographical distinctions, it was the mystical and idealistic Plato who was born in the clear Attic light, and the scientific and logical Aristotle who was born in Macedonia. Salonika is more deeply impregnated with Byzantine tradition than Athens, as is evident in such poets

George Odysseus: An Introduction to the Salonika Poets

II

as Vafopoulos, Karelli, or Pentzikis. On the contrary, such Athenian poets as Seferis and Elytis carry with them in their souls all of ancient classical Greece, the southern Aegean Sea with its myriad islands. Thus, the Salonika school of poets has a particular esoteric quality or climate of spirit, an introversion of exquisite sensitivity which has already influenced the entire range of modern Greek poetry. The publication of a volume of poetry in Salonika becomes a literary event, and the percentage of bad poetry is therefore comparatively smaller in proportion to the many fabricated publications in Athens, where poets from many regions have gathered. The poets of Salonika though introverted are dedicated to a clarity of form and expression which significantly distinguishes them from the Athenians who have followed more closely the obscurity of European, primarily French, surrealist and symbolist schools. The irrational, with a few inevitable exceptions, is not congenial to the Macedonian temperament. The modern school of Salonika has already claimed three separate generations of poets, and a fourth is in the process ofbeing born. Along the entire genealogical tree of poetic creation, the tradition of Solomos and Kalvos has played a dominant role, and, more recently, the aesthetic and stylistic mannerism, the new orthodoxy of Cavafy. But in the last analysis, the school of Salonika has not remained completely isolated in a Macedanian provinciality but has extended its roots into French symbolism (though not surrealism), into the philosophy of existentialism, and has even partaken of the bitter taste of Eliot's The Waste Land. II

The first generation of poets made its appearance in the thirties, and includes Vafopoulos, Themelis, Pentzikis, Karelli, and Varvitsiotis. With the publication ofthe magazine Kokhlias (Snail) in 1945, this group stamped its seal on what had hitherto been scattered and individualistic orientations. Later, the poets Pavleas and Stoyanidhis attached themselves to this group, which became increasingly concerned with the subjective problems of existentialism and the dialectics oflyrical sensibility. George Vafopoulos was born in 1906 in Gevgeli, a town near the Yugoslavian border. He completed his high-school studies in Salonika and for a while majored in mathematics at the University of Athens. From 1939 to 1965 he was Director of the Municipal Library of Salonika and in this capacity was invited by the British Council to visit Great Britain in 1951, and by the United States Department of State to visit America in I957·

I2

THE CHARIOTEER

He is the author of six books of poetry and of a poetic drama. At first he concerned himself with the traditional forms of poetry which had dominated Greek poetry in the interval between the two world wars, but he passed quickly from a post-symbolistic modern sensibility to an individualistic style of his own, a curious and successful mixture of classical and Byzantine techniques. He was the first significant modern poet ofSalonika. The central theme of V afopoulos' s poetry is the existentialist agony of death, rising out ofthe anguish he endured on the death ofhis first wife, herself a poet of note. He has since spent his entire life coming to terms with death on a plane of multiple transformations. In "Apartment House" the dead "have the privilege of rising, ofloving, and of dying once more." To paraphrase one ofhis last verses: his God is death, because Death is the only god. Nevertheless, he has also been entirely successful as a poet ofirony, wit, and satire in a triumph of elliptical visions. He is capable of poems that are rich in symbolic structure and intensity of atmosphere, as in "The Statues," where, caught in their frozen expression and immobility, the statues "feel time's crucifixion." Zoe Karelli was born in I90I in Salonika, received the tutorial education of a girl of good family according to her class and period, married at the age of seventeen, and then attended courses in philosophy at the University of Salonika. She is the author of eleven books of poetry, of two poetic dramas, of many literary essays, and has translated the poetry of William Carlos Williams, Eliot's Family Reunion, and Kimon Friar's "Introduction" and "Synopsis" to Kazantzakis's The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel. In I955 she won the First National Award in Poetry and has been presented with the Palmes academiques by France. Karelli has transformed her feminine nature into a poetry of intellectual depth and width, into a kind of masculine femininity. Though her poetry nourishes a profound spiritual inquiry, she has also cultivated unworldly gardens of existential anguish where the four horses of the apocalypse run unbridled, emiting ideas that flash like flame. Either deliberately or subconsciously, she has managed to combine the balanced beauty of classical Greece with the mysticism of Byzantium in the contemporary climate of our anguish, and in a style uniquely her own. By projecting her sensibility into historical symbols and events, as in "The Adolescent from Anticythera," she comments on contemporary events, metaphysics, and death. George Themelis was born in r900 on the island of Samos, studied literature at the University of Athens and has been teaching in the high schools ofSalonika since I939· He is the author of eleven books of poetry,

George Odysseus: An Introduction to the Salonika Poets

13

ofseveral books ofessays on poetic themes, and is the translator into modern Greek of Prometheus Bound and Oedipus the King. In 1955 he was awarded the Second, and in 1961 the First National Award in Poetry. Themelis appeared late on the literary scene, in 1945, but immediately won the general approval and deeply influenced the younger generation with his intense gaze into infmite expanses of personal and universal states of the soul. Hurrying to make up for lost time, he published book after book in a flood of esoteric elevations, organizing the form of his verses on the models of ancient Greek lyrical choruses. In his last books he probes deeply into the human existential condition where love and death still remain his primary themes. In an intermezzo of ancestral nostalgia, he recalled the heroes of contemporary Hellenism and sang of their gallantry in a series oflyrics that are epicalin theme, such as "Athanasios Dhiakos," idealizing the beauty of modern Greek folk tales. Nikos Gabriel Pentzikis, the brother of Zoe Karelli, was born in 1908 in Salonika. He studied chemistry in France and later opened a pharmacy of his own in Salonika. This he has now abandoned to become the representative for Northern Greece of a pharmaceutical firm in Switzerland. A man of many talents, he is not only the author of two books of poetry and of five novels but has also taken his place among the painters of modern Greece. His position in Greek literature and art is highly idiosyncratic. Somewhat daemon-driven, he is the only consciously religious poet of Salonika, though of a pagan cast. His main contribution, perhaps, may lie in his prose writings where, when the interior dialogue does not dominate, we are astonished by an almost virginal purity of contemplation, coupled with rhapsodic style. As a poet, he is difficult because he moves in a space of condensed universality, bestowing, like James Joyce in Ulysses (parts of which he has translated) heroism to insignificant details. In "Scattered Leaves," written in a harsh rhetoric with an almost demagogic obsession for seemingly unrelated events, he wanders in Daedalian corridors, possessed by a mysticism which has affmities to William Blake's. When Pentzikis is not writing prose or poetry, he paints in a certain impressionistic and pointillistic style modified by Byzantine mosaic techniques, presenting a more concrete and optical vision ofhis poetic world. Takis Varvitsiotis was born in 1916 in Salonika where he studied law at the University and is now a practicing lawyer. The author of seven books ofpoetry, he was awarded the poetry prize in 1960 by the Group ofTwelve in Athens, and the First Prize in poetry by the Municipality of Salonika. Among his many translations from French and Spanish poetry is St. John.

THE CHARIOTEER

14

Perse's And You, Seas. Varvitsiotis is par excellence the representative of French symbolism in Salonika. His poetry is permeated with a childlike innocence and tenderness which rises out of a happy and congenial disposition of soul, and which floods all his physical and metaphysical world. Entirely detached from the whirlpool of social events, he sings, in a melody of "pure poetry," ofleaves, flowers, wellsprings, the wind, the birds and the stars, though oflate his verse has deepened with the lamentation of passing things and persons. A symbolic radiance shines through his poetry, imparting to words vibrations not normally associated with them. He creates a lyrical world of his own and transforms it into dreams. Sarandos Pavleas was born in 1917 in the town ofPlatsa, in Mani, in the Peloponnesos, but moved to Salonika at an early age. He is now professor at the Experimental College of the University of Salonika and is the author of nineteen books of poetry. In his torrential offerings, he has orchestrated his world into a synthesis of humanistic optimism. Essentially simple and earthy, his poetry vibrates with a spontaneous sincerity, though often he dilutes his emotions by overextending them in an untamed enthusiasm of verbal virtuosity. His best poems, however, seem to spring out of a well of fresh mountain water, gushing and pellucid. George Stoyiannidhis was born in 1912inXanthi, nearKavala. Though he lived in Salonika since early youth, he now runs a confectionary store in Kavala and is the author of six books of poetry. Writing at first out of a transparent lyrical disposition, he began to harvest his solitude in a scenery of dreamlike music. He sought the origins of beauty as though in an azure sea, recalling and repeating his memories until, laden with the guilt that many men of innocence feel in our contemporary world, he attempted to deal more and more with the concrete world about him. In the poem "Half and Half" he expresses deeper human emotions in a curious combination of arithmetic and despair. Finally, in his poem "Memories," he cries out to the world: "Only poetry can save you." III The second generation of Salonika poets, who appeared in, the first years after the Second World War, included Anagnostakis, Kirou, and Thasitis. All these poets were deeply influenced by the torment they underwent during the harsh German-Italian Occupation of Greece, and all became involved in the consequent Resistance Movement. They rallied around the magazine Xekinima (Starting Point), founded in 1944, and with unyielding resolution and youthful enthusiasm all espoused the freedom

George Odysseus: An Introduction to the Salonika Poets

I5

of an enslaved people. Their social attitude may remind us of Auden, Spender, Lewis, and MacNeice during the Spanish Civil War. Even to this day, this group carries with it the scars ofits martyrdom, though it has long since attempted to heal its wounds and to lull to sleep the nightmares of a scorching experience. In a crisis of conscience, these poets saw that the unique aim of poetry is man himself, the human creature in his social struggle. Manolis Anagnostakis was born in Salonika in 192 5 from a family originating in Crete. He took his degree in medicine at the University of Salonika, then went for further study to Vienna and Stockholm. Today he is a radiologist and the author ofsix books ofpoetry, ofmany critical articles and a book ofcriticism. He took an active part in the Resistance Movement and in the Civil War that followed. Condemned to death by a military court, he spent three years in jail but was fmally released. Some ofhis dearest friends were lost on the battlefield or before firing squads, and his nightmare experience has become the basis of some of his best poetry, as in "Love Is The Fear." His claims for introspection in his later poetry ring true because they spring out of his intensified agony, his personal involvement. In his poem "The Dead Man," for instance, he mocks at conventionality, and in the refrain of the poem expresses with irony the decadence ofa middle-class posture. Between 1953 and 1961 he edited the magazine Kritiki (Criticism), which has exerted a strong influence on critical thinking in postwar Greece. Klitos Kirou was born in Salonika in 1921, studied in the GreekAmerican preparatory school, Anatolia College, and took his degree in law at the University of Salonika, but never practiced law. For the past twenty years or so he has worked for the Commercial Credit Bank of Greece and is now the director of its branch in Salonika. The author of five books of poetry and many books of translations from French, Spanish, and English poetry, he has beautifully transposed into modern Greek MacLeish's The Pot ofBasil and Eliot's Ash Wednesday. A close friend of Anagnostakis, he underwent the same searing experiences during the Occupation and Resistance. "The people of my generation did not die in hospitals," he writes in one ofhis poems, "they shouted frantically to firing squads." His poems are testaments of a brilliant and persuasive sincerity. In his latest collection, however, he has become more introspective, his remorses have become more imagistic, his probings less social and more individualistic, as his translation of Ash Wednesday testifies. Panos Thasitis was born in 1925 in Molivos, a town ofLesbos, where his parents had settled in 1922 as refugees from Asia Minor. They moved to

THE CHARIOTEER

16

Salonika in 1928 where Thasitis took his degree in law at the University and is now a practicing lawyer. Like Anagnostakis and Kirou, he played an active role in the Resistance Movement. He is the author of three books of poetry and one of poetry criticism. He began writing in a lyrical vein but gradually reached a density ofimagery that has made him one of the purest intellectual poets of Salonika. In their architecture, his poems attempt to reach an equilibrium between the antagonisms ofheart and mind, of theory and routine. His Prince ofPutrefaction is a symbol of decadence in an environment of political and economic might which forces poets to come to terms with the modem world as it really is. Concerned more with phenomena than with hypotheses, his humanism springs out of his isolation and his introspection to explore a world of unknown spaces.

IV The third generation of poets in Salonika appeared after 1950 and includes Christianopoulos, Aslanoglou, and Ioannou. Though freed from any involved experience with the War and the Resistance, this group has nonetheless been tormented by the barbarity of the postwar period, by its disparity and solitude, its shattering of any social cohesion. These poets turned away into an exploitation of their own inner hinterlands, from which they send messages of private despair and confession to an industrial and mechanized world bent on devouring innocence and dreams. In this group Christianopoulos has consciously played a leading role, particularly with his magazine Dhiagonios (Diagonal), founded in 1958. He was born in 193 I in Salonika, took his degree in ancient Greek literature at the University there, and for many years worked in the Municipal Library of the city. Now he has set up his own office as professional copyreader and is the author of six books of poetry, one of short stories, one of poetic criticism, and one of translations primarily from ancient Greek and Latin. Christianopoulos began with a poetry set in historical times, influenced by similar uses ofhistorical personages and places in Cavafy, as in his poems on St. Agnes and Oedipus which, though set in historical periods, succeed in depicting the current feeling of his times, not without deliberate use of anachronisms. He has long since abandoned such devices to write a poetry of direct confessional simplicity, anti-heroic, anti-idealistic, and antilyrical, as in "Ruined Quarry" or "I Forsake Poetry," where he has probed into himself with a relentless honesty. Poetry, for Christianopoulos, has become a catharsis of almost narcissistic incision. In this he has deeply influenced the poets ofhis generation.

George Odysseus: An Introduction to the Salonika Poets

17

Nikos-Alexis Aslanoglou was born in Salonika in 1931, studied in the Greek-American preparatory school, Anatolia College, and then for many years traveled widely throughout the world. He is now in France studying the literature of that country and is the author of three books of poetry and one of poetic drama. At first influenced by Themelis, then later by Seferis and Elytis, he has condensed his experience as a victim of modern barbarism into allusions of dramatic passion. His wide travels, however, have given his more recent poetry a less local and a more universal quality. The driving immediacy ofhis vision is apparent in such poems as "Litohoron Station." George Ioannou was born in Salonika in 1927 of refugee parents from Thrace. After taking his degree in literature at the University of Salonika, he taught in many high schools throughout Greece, and during two years founded the Greek high school in Libya. He has published two books of poetry, one of prose sketches, four collections of Greek folk songs and ballads, and has translated into modern Greek Euripides's Iphigenia in Tauris. Beginning as a poet of a refmed yet controlled adolescent passion, he gained increasingly in intensity, particularly influenced by the slum district in which he was raised and by the sufferings ofhis Jewish neighbors during the German-Italian Occupation. Like the other two poets ofhis generation, he also developed a style which epigrammatically depicts the nakedness and loneliness of his particular microscopic world. Economical and compact, his poems often end with a line which brings his message to startling conclusion. The naked, almost masochistic truth is, for Ioannou, the essence of modern poetic expression.

v The three generations of Salonika poets represented here have, each of them, their own defmed experiences and aesthetics, clearly evident, I believe, in the poems with which K.imon Friar has chosen to represent them in this small anthology. The first generation sprang out of the traditional forms of poetry and literature which reigned during the periods between the two world wars. Though considerably influenced by the European symbolist and existentialist climate, it succeeded in forming its own Greek, almost Byzantine, expression, and unconsciously created the basis of a new school. The second generation sprang out of the agonies and despairs of the Second World War, the Civil War, and the Resistance Movement, all of which brought to Greece calamities of tragic proportions. The hesitant voice of social protest began to be heard individually, though it has had

I8

THE CHARIOTEER

historical resonance in the folk poems and ballads created during the Ottoman Occupation and the Greek War oflndependence. The third generation in its maturity rejected any conformation to intellectual or social poetry and explored, instead, a confessional expression ofalmost narcissistic obsession. Oppressed by the brutality of the modem mechanized world, this generation offered, in its sincerity, a new apocalypse, nnique in modem Greek poetry. And although the attitude and aesthetics of these various generations may fmd their counterparts in several Athenian schools, they have all written with a flavor, technique, and color which clearly belong to Salonika. The Macedonians have always had a deep reverence for poetry. When Alexander the Great razed the entire town of Thebes, he left only one house standing: that ofPindar.

THIRTEEN POETS OF SALONIKA Selections and Translations by KIMON FRIAR

I

GEORGE THEMELIS ATHANASIOS DHIAKOS

Your wings, 0 Angels, fly everywhere, and are unwithering. -DIONYSIOS SOLOMOS

They bewail the shape of the cross. They weep for that intrepid sword which shattered in seven pieces, For the rosemary and silver fir of mountain peaks that rise in black smoke That days may not fmd the cross, Nor fountainheads nor girls who come to pour out their tears; That mother earth may not hide it Who has delicate trees, cracked houses, Fishes that talk, stones that have an air about them, Visionaries, And the dead who converse in their wide graves And have nightingales in cages and eyes that watch from afar. Who knows how many swallows have launched out toward the seas To scatter flaming sparks on islands and lost ships, How many secret heartbeats became prayers and begged the Angels To leave the sleep of the heavens and come down on earth To see how well some of Their kindred creatures still maintain Their blood, How preciously they hold Them, written down in their destiny; They become flames, they become flaring candles to light Their way. "He was simple," They replied, baptizing Their wings in the smoke, "Like isolated rocks to which the sea gives birth. He had the clean heart of new waters that try out their voices, The waist of cypress trees that lean over graves,

20

THE CHARIOTEER

The nobility which the patience of rain chisels on colunms, The eyes of small children when they kiss under the trees, The beauty of enfleshed Incorporeals "He lifted the stake on his blood-stained wing And his knife slid into his heart's edge. He turned and saw that the boughs had blossomed around him, That hands now hung down dead like withered leaves. And not a sound was heard, not a twig stirred. "He greeted Death and gazed on the white flowers And the smoke that rose to take him. "The lances of ancient times bent low as their shadows huddled close, The scimitars cracked which had once been warm and steaming, The steeds whinnied bitterly and the mountains brimmed with tears. And the tormented crosses lowered their haloes When they saw the skylarks touching the earth And digging, shedding their feathers to hear the brothers below Who lie in their graves now turned to stone, who haunt bridges; When they saw the sun turning its face away, The sea beating itself with three hollow stones, And the pale roses dripping with bitter blood. "Let bells resound Let statues rise and rivers stop. "Rise, 0 pigeons, Call the swallows from their Spring and the eagles from their azure spaces, Call the brothers, all the children of the aerial generation, And come that we may take the dead man away, Come that we may bury him by scattering the ashes he left, That light may increase and the wind be disburdened ... " On the three stairs, in the three heavens, they have lit all the lights, They have opened and are counting petal by petal all the rounds of the Eternal Rose.

Thirteen Poets of Salonika

21

ΥΜΕΝΑΙΟΣ Τέλεια, πυκνή, άναπόδραστη μοϊρα τοΟ ερωτα Και τοΟ θανάτου· κατάκτηση πρ&τα, ϋστερα παραίτηση,

Άνά~αση πρ&τα, ϋστερα κατά~αση, Πτώση τοΟ σώματος και θλίψη τfjς ψυχfjς Καθως άνοίγει ή μοναξιό: και καταπίνει Ταπεινωμένα κόκκαλα και σωριασμένα. »Ερχεται δ ερωτας και μας έμπαίζει,

'Ένας θεός ~ ενας δαίμονας.

Μας γδύνει χωρις ντροπη και φό~ο. Μας άψήνει γυμνοuς γιό: νό: κρυώνουμε, Νηστικοuς γιό: νό: πεινοΟμε, Καθως στην εσχατη κρίση. ΠεινοΟμε την πείνα του, κρυώνουμε τη γύμνια του.

* 'Έρχεται δ ερωτας και μας άλλάζει. Σκιό: μές στη σκιό:

Σιωπη μέσα στην aλλην σιωπή. Τό: χείλη μας μυρίζουν άνοιξη

Και χωματίλα, τό: στήθη μας ωριμο μfjλο. Μές άπ' τοuς κήπους των νεκρων ερχεται δ ερωτας.

Τό: μέλη μας τρέμουν και τό: σπλάχνα 'Έχουν τόν πυρετό μιας πυρκα"ίας, Τρομαγμένα πετάγματα, ζ&α ποu τρέχουν

Και τόν άναπαλμό μιας ύψωμένης θάλασσας, 'Υπόκωφα κύματα καμπυλωτά, Και τό ~αθu νυχτοκολύμπι τοΟ ψαριοΟ.

THE CHARIOTEER

22

Aa[J.TIOKonoOvE -rO: !J.aA.A.tO: Enavc.u o-ra npocrK£cpaA.a, £yyouv -ra XEpta [lEe; OLo na9oc:; -rflc:; O:yanT]c:;, Llax-ruA.a tjJCxxVOV-rac:; -rucpA.a [J.EO"a 0"1:~ crapKa.

* •A no OLfl9oc:; crE crlfl9oc:; -rCxvEt cr-rlc:; tjJUXEc:; ·o £pc.u-rac:;, Ka9wc:; navc.u crE KAl[laKa.

ot tjJUXEc:; 5Ev [J.TIOpoOv va !J.lA~crouv. LlEv £xouv yA.wcrcra, £xouv crtc.un~, "EKTIAT]E:T] O:n6ppT]1:T] Kal 9A.[tjJT], •AVCx[J.VT]O"T] Kal -rp6!J.O -roO KEVOU. N• O:v-rtcpEyy(crouv [J.6Vo !J.TIOpoOv, NO: KtV~crouv -rO: 5aK-ruA.a N. O:votyoKA.Elcrouv -rO: [J.Cx-rta Kal -rO: XELATJ.

HYMENEAL Perfect, dense, inescapable destiny oflove And of death; conquest first, and then resignation. Ascent first, then descent, Fall of the body and sorrow of the soul, Like solitude when it opens and swallows Bones heaped high, humiliated. Love comes and mocks us, A god or a demon, Strips us without shame or fear, Leaves us naked to shiver in the cold, Leaves us fasting that we may hunger, As in the Last Judgement. We hunger his hunger, we shiver in the cold ofhis nakedness.

Thirteen Poets of Salonika

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* Love comes and changes us: Shadow within a shadow, Silence within the other silence. Our lips smell of springtime And of earth, our breasts of ripe apples. From within the gardens of the dead, love comes. Our limbs and our entrails tremble. They are as fevered as a conflagration, Frightened flights of birds, animals that run, And the throbbing of the swollen sea, Hollow and curving waves And the deep swimming of the fish at night. Heads glitter on the pillow, Hands glow in the passion oflove Groping on flesh blindly for fmgers.

* From breast to breast love reaches Souls, as on a ladder. Souls cannot speak. They have no tongue, they have silence, Speechless astonishment and sorrow, Remembrance and dread of the void. They can only reflect light, Make fmgers move, Open and close eyes and lips. Look into each other's eyes, as in a mirror.

24

THE CHARIOTEER

II ZOE KARELLI

DESIRES Youthful desires, like very beautiful youthful lovers, with the irreproachable innocence of the impetuous, with incomparable pride and nobility. They have vanished. As it is said of certain young men that the gods loved them and they died young. Perhaps they disappeared without any possibility of returning on a lovely evening with the full-flooded, honey-colored light of the moon. Let us thrust aside the common conception, the loathsome thought, that profane hands stifled them on lawless beds in rooms rented for cheap pleasures. These restless ghosts of desire which reappear, tragic and very beautiful faces, confess to some kind of crime, nonetheless.

Yhirteen Poets of Salonika

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Η ΣΥΝΟΔΕΙΑ ΤΩΝ ΠΟΙΗΤΩΝ Νά, τοότ' είναι ή συνοδεία &π' τούς ίερείς τοσ λόγου, πού παν τραγουδώντας γιατι μόνο νά τραγουδοΟν, νά λέν λόγια ξέρουν αύτοι κι' d:πό κεϊ πέρα τίποτ' άλλο μην περιμένης

&π' τό χέρι τους. Οϋτε καμιά τελετη Ιέπι~λητική, οϋτε λειτουργία ξέρουν άλλη, παρά μόνο ν' άπαγγέλουν,

v'

ά-yγέλουν λόγια, πού λέν πως τά ~λέπουν.

Γιά κοίταξε τό ~λέμμα τους. Λένε πως ~λέπουν ά-yγέλους

οί άνθρωποι αύτοί,

πως οί άγγελοι τούς δίνουν λόγια ν' d:γγίξουν στά διψασμένα στόματα. πράγματι νηστεύουν και φαίνονται στερημένοι. Κοίταξε τά πρόσωπά τους,

εtν' d:λλόκοτα, ετσι άλλοιωμένα πού μιλοϋν, ετσι πού θέλουν νά μας πείσουν πως μας χαρίζουν των &γγέλων τά δωρα, άγγελίες δπέροχες. Τά ζητοuν

μέ προσευχές και μέ μεγάλους καϋμούς, παρακαλοuν μέ cΧ-yωνα, τά δέχονται μέ συντρι~ή.

Είναι πράγματι άλλη των ματιων τους ή εκφραση κι' d:λλοιώτικα γίνονται τά μιλήματα πού αύτοι τραγωδοuν, οί ποιητές, γιά νά αtσθανθοuμ' έμείς τις διαφορές τους.

Βέ~αια νά τυραννιστοΟν αύτοι πρέπει, γιά νά πιστέψουμε έμείς, γιά νά μας πείσουν. 'Έχουμε άλλες

d:πασχολήσεις έμείς, αύτοι

&πασχολοΟνται μέ τά μάταια λόγια. Θέλουν νά τά συγκρατήσουν,

νά μας τά χαρίσουν λέν,

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THE CHARIOTEER

yta va TOU~ 5EXTOU~E o~v TEAET~ T~~ /;;Q~~- ToOTot Twv MyQv

OL CXv9pQTIOl yta Va ~a~ KEp5LOOUV, A.Ev, TI@~ Sa ~a~ ovo~6:oouv t~a~

Kal T~ OTJ~ao(a T~~ /;;Q~~ ~a~.

THE PROCESSION OF POETS Look, this procession of poets is made up of priests of the Word who go singing, because these know only how to sing, to speak words, but from there on expect nothing more from their hands. Nor do they know some imposing ceremony or any function or ritual, but only how to recite, how to proclaim words, which they insist they can see. Look at their eyes. These men declare they see angels, that angels give them words with which to touch their parched mouths. In truth, they fast and seem deprived. Look at their faces, which are odd because of the very awkward way they speak, because they want to persuade us they are giving us a gift of angels, and miraculous angelic messages. They seek them with prayers and great anguish, they implore with much striving, they accept them with contrition of spirit.

Thirteen Poets of Salonika In truth, the expression of their eyes is another thing, and the words these poets tragically sing become altered that we may understand their difference. Of course they must be tormented that we may believe, that they may persuade us. We have other concerns, and they concern themselves with vain words only. They want to preserve them, they say, to present them to us, that we may accept poets in the ceremony oflife. These men of words, in order to win us over, say they will give us names and the meaning of our lives.

ADOLESCENT FROM ANTICYTHERA I have come again for your sake. As I walked on, I observed the Corinthian vessels well; they impressed me, of course, with the grace of their shapes and their paintings. I thought of the throbbing life of that notorious city. Afterwards, almost on purpose, I lingered in the halls where the light seems somewhat watery. I don't know whether this is due to the color-tone of the walls, the immobility of the exhibits, or the glass of the showcases. I lingered, therefore, holding my anticipation of your presence like a joy.

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THE CHARIOTEER

For a while Kroisos held my attention, "Pause here and pity him ... destroyed by belligerent Ares." In the movement, in the placement of the hands, a particular tum betrayed the spirit which remained there still and indicated the controlled desire of the body as it leaned forward. Imagined rustling of the lives of statues when the sculptor has been able to catch the vital moment...• Wondrous youth, unique moment, you are not only the adolescent of perfect beauty, of radiant youth, that harmony in the form of the limbs' music ofhim who keeps his posture and holds it in natural strength and power, like the stone or the plant which exist both simple and perfect together; hands spread out in ideal balance, divine curvature, indestructible innocence of caught time, smiling face of incorruption, heightening of our perishable position. Reality and magic, smooth surface oflife, convex and concave curves from the impetuosity hidden within you, guided and controlled. Offering and acceptance of existence, in movement and immobility both, like the balancing of a regal bird. You were born before we were taught the meaning of sin. You are the concession of the spirit

Thirteen Poets of Salonika that quenches insatiable privation and annihilates cupidity. Though filled with longing, you remain ready to deprive yoursel£ Every foreign disposition to your shape glides away from you. You seek the spirit's value, yet it is you who proffer it, alive and serene body. Frugal meeting with the absolute, naked mystery, form snatched from necessity, you rise as the music of one sound, divine sufficiency, created in human terms. You were not tormented by that love which is an uncertainty, anguish and painful submission, even though in your glance is held the wondrous human melancholy, for you are the work of a man who loved his life in a glory both arrogant and modest.

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THE CHARIOTEER

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III GEORGE T. VAFOPOULOS nOAYKATOIKIA ~-r~v noA.uKa-roLKla fla
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