Cyprus, Rimbaud and the British empire

Long ago, if my memory serves me, my life was a banquet where everyone’s heart was generous, and where all wines flowed.
One evening I pulled Beauty down on my knees. I found her embittered and I cursed her. (Rimbaud: A Season in Hell).

In return for the Ottoman empire ceding it Cyprus in 1878 under the provisions of the Treaty of Berlin which ended the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-1878, Britain agreed to continue its support to preserve Turkey against perceived Russian ambitions in the Balkans and the Caucuses.

Britain’s support for Turkey was hugely controversial domestically. Gladstone was appalled that Britain was backing Turkey in the Balkans, particularly after the atrocities committed by the Turks in suppressing the Bulgarian uprising in 1876.

‘Let the Turks’, Gladstone wrote, in his famous pamphlet The Bulgarian Horrors and the Eastern Question, ‘carry away their abuses, in the only possible manner, namely, by carrying off themselves. Their Zaptiehs and their Mudirs, their Blmhashis and Yuzbashis, their Kaimakams and their Pashas, one and all, bag and baggage, shall, I hope, clear out from the province that they have desolated and profaned.’

The Anglo–Turkish Convention, it seemed to Gladstone, was a tawdry deal – ‘an act of duplicity not surpassed and rarely equalled in the history of nations’ – another demonstration of Disraelian showmanship and vanity in which Britain committed itself to preserving the Ottoman empire, a murderous and base entity for Gladstone, in exchange for Cyprus, a pointless adornment to the British empire, which was accumulating colonies like a thief accumulating swag.

But Disraeli was convinced that Cyprus would be a vital asset for the British empire – an Eastern Mediterranean Malta or Gibraltar – a military and naval bastion to protect Turkey in Asia Minor and British imperial interests in the Suez Canal and the Middle East.

During the 300 years of Ottoman rule, Cyprus had lost its reputation for prosperity acquired under the Lusignans and Venetians and suffered neglect, depopulation and the arbitrary oppression associated with the worst excesses of the Ottoman empire.

Indeed, the British appear to have been taken by surprise by the extent of the destitution the Turks left behind on Cyprus and soon realised that if the island were to serve the interests of the British empire its infrastructure and sanitary conditions would have to be dramatically improved.

Thus the British occupation of Cyprus began with grand plans for roads, railroads, harbours, forts, hospitals and canals – hardly any of which materialised, but did initially encourage an influx of Europeans and European capital looking for employment and profit.

One of those to arrive on the island in 1878 was Arthur Rimbaud, the brilliant French poet/ex-poet/anti-poet, aged 24, who, helped by his knowledge of Greek, found work at a quarry in Larnaca and then – after catching typhoid and returning to France to recuperate – as a foreman on the project to build the new British governor’s summer residence in the Troodos mountains.

(Sir Garnet Wolseley, the first British governor of Cyprus, was so appalled at the state of Ottoman Nicosia – and was ‘very anxious to get out of [it]… it is one great cesspit into which the filth of centuries has been poured’ – that one of his first acts was to order the construction of a villa in the more salubrious surroundings of Troodos from which to rule the island).

Regarding Rimbaud’s Cypriot sojourn, we know through letters he wrote to his family in France of the arduous conditions of his work, that he complained about the heat of the plains and the cold of the mountains, that he requested arms to protect himself from the workers under his authority dissatisfied with irregular pay, and that he left the island suddenly – either because of illness, an argument with his employers or, according to Ottorino Rosa, who knew Rimbaud a few years later in Ethiopia – where Rimbaud was a merchant, gunrunner and, possibly, a slave trader – because Rimbaud had killed a subordinate in a fight.

But the details concerning Rimbaud’s year in Cyprus remain sketchy – Christopher Hitchens mischievously speculates that Rimbaud may have had a homosexual relationship with Captain Herbert – later Lord – Kitchener, who was on the island at the same time as Rimbaud, conducting the British Survey of Cyprus – and all that’s left of Rimbaud’s presence on the island is a plaque in the governor’s – now president’s – summer residence, which reads: ‘The French poet and genius Arthur Rimbaud, heedless of his renown, was not above helping to build this house with his own hands.’

Nikos Gatsos: on the Greek character

Here we have the poet and lyricist Nikos Gatsos in a short documentary for Canadian TV shot in 1964 in which he talks about the elements he believes constitute the common Greek identity –  philotimo, ambition, materialism, grand gestures, egotism, volatility, extremism, gregariousness, love of solitude, sensuousness, sorrow, melancholy, defiance, sentimentality – though what he is really referring to is what informs his own art.

What Sikelianos said to Gatsos about Amorgos

If you know Greek, then someone has put together this youtube channel largely consisting of Greek TV documentaries on some of Greece’s best poets, including Cavafy, Sikelianos, Engonopoulos, Andreas Embirikos, Nikos Gatsos, Kiki Dimoula and so on, which are well worth watching.

Above are a couple of clips from the documentary on the poet and lyricist Nikos Gatsos. The clips are of nice anecdotes, which I’ve recapitulated in English below. See the entire documentary here. Gatsos’ masterpiece Amorgos is available in Greek with facing English translation.

1. The poet Nanos Valaoritis recalls in 1943, after Gatsos had just published Amorgos, that he and Gatsos were walking and talking in central Athens when they ran into an animated Angelos Sikelianos, who said to Gatsos: ‘I was reading your Amorgos on the boat on my way back from Aegina and I said to myself like Homer, like Homer.’

Valaoritis says he was surprised by Gatsos’ apparent indifference to receiving such praise from this most important and prestigious poet, and when asked about his reaction, Gatsos replied. ‘He hasn’t even read it. He’s just saying he has.’

 2. And then, Haris Vlavianos recalls an exchange he had with Gatsos regarding Gatsos’ great friend, Odysseas Elytis. Gatsos asked Vlavianos if he liked Elytis’ poetry. Yes, said Vlavianos. Which of his poems do you like, Gatsos went on rather insistently. The Light Tree and Six Plus One Remorses. Good, you’re on the right path; thank God, you didn’t say Axion Esti.

Vlavianos explains this unusual for Gatsos expression of malice, particularly aimed at his close friend Elytis, as reflecting Gatsos’ slight annoyance with Elytis and his tendency, as Gatsos saw it, to write certain poems that were consciously designed to establish him as the poet of the nation.

The Beatles sing Theodorakis

In 1958, Mikis Theodorakis recorded a song for Michael Powell’s Spanish/flamenco dance film Honeymoon – Theodorakis had worked with Powell on Ill Met By Moonlight in 1957. The song was sung by Gloria Lasso and set to the poetry of Rafael de Penagos and was called Luna de Miel. In 1963, the Beatles recorded the song as the Honeymoon Song. In the meantime, a Greek version was made with lyrics by Nikos Gatsos, Αν θυμηθείς τ' όνειρό μου (If you remember my dream), sung, first, by Giovanna and then by Mary Linda. Linda’s is the most famous version, though it has been sung and recorded by many, many Greek singers since – everyone from Marios Frangoulis to Anna Vissi. Above is the Beatles’ version, below is the Mary Linda version, followed by the Spanish version, a video with an excellent version by Photini Darra and Gatsos’ lyrics for the Greek song.





Αν θυμηθείς τ' όνειρό μου
Στην αγκαλιά μου κι απόψε σαν άστρο κοιμήσου
δεν απομένει στον κόσμο ελπίδα καμιά
τώρα που η νύχτα κεντά με φιλιά το κορμί σου
μέτρα τον πόνο κι άσε με μόνο στην ερημιά

Αν θυμηθείς τ' όνειρό μου
σε περιμένω να 'ρθεις
μ' ένα τραγούδι του δρόμου να ρθεις όνειρό μου
το καλοκαίρι που λάμπει τ' αστέρι με φως να ντυθείς

In my arms tonight once more sleep like a star
There’s no hope left in the world
Now that the night is knitting your body with kisses
Measure the pain and leave me alone in the wilderness.

If you my remember my dream
I’ll wait for your return
With a song from the street, come, my dream
In summer, as a shining star clothes you in light.

The Greek Revolution, 1821

‘Each person must imagine that they have to save their nation. Each person is born a potential saviour of their nation; even though few know they have been born as such, that they can be saviours, if they want. We must imagine that I alone am responsible for saving the nation, and that if I do not save it, no one else will. Nor must I look at what others do; instead I must imagine that only I have the great obligation to save the nation.’

(Ion Dragoumis, My Hellenism and the Hellenes, [1903])

 The Sun had set (ah, men of Greece, a Sunset for you!)
And the Moon was no more to be seen,
No more to be seen the clear Morning Star,
Nor the Star of Eve that shines in its place,
For these four held council, and spoke in secret,
The Sun spins round and tells them, spins round and says
‘Last night when I set I hid myself behind a little rock,
And I heard the weeping of women, and the mourning of men
For those slain heroes lying in the field,
And all the earth soaked in their blood –
Poor souls all gone below in their country’s cause.’
(Composed by General Makriyiannis at the Siege of Athens, 1826)

Nikos Gatsos: The Knight and Death

This is a good translation by Diana Gilliland Wright of Nikos Gatsos’s The Knight and Death (Ο ιππότης κι ο θάνατος).

Death and Resurrection of Constantine Paleologos

I


As he stood there – erect before the Gate and impregnable in his sorrow

Far from the world – where his spirit sought
 to bring Paradise to his measure – And harder even than stone – for no one had ever looked
 on him tenderly – at times his crooked teeth 
whitened strangely

And as he passed by with his gaze a little
 beyond mankind – and from them all
 extracted One who smiled on him
 – the Real One 
– whom death could never seize

He took care to pronounce the word sea clearly that all the dolphins
 within it might shine – And the desolation so great it might 
contain all of God
 – and every water drop ascending steadfastly toward the sun

As a young man he had seen gold glittering
 and gleaming on the shoulders of the great – And one night – he remembers – during a great storm the neck of the sea roared so it turned murky – but he would not submit to it

The world's an oppressive place to live through 
– yet with a little pride it's worth it.

II


Dear God what now
 – Who had to battle with thousands 
– and not only his loneliness
 – Who?
 – He who knew with a single word 
how to slake the thirst of entire worlds
 – What?


From whom they had taken everything
 his – And his sandals with their criss-crossed straps and his pointed trident – and the wall he mounted every afternoon like an unruly and pitching boat 
– to hold the reigns against the weather

And a handful of vervain
 – which he had rubbed on a girl's cheek
 – at midnight – to kiss her – (how the waters of the moon gurled
 on the stone steps three cliff-lengths above the sea...)

Noon out of night 
– And not one person by his side
 – Only his faithful words that mingled
 all their colors to leave in his hand
 a lance of white light

And opposite – along the whole wall's length
 – a host of heads poured in plaster
 as far as his eyes could see

“Noon out of night – all life a radiance!"
– he shouted and rushed into the horde 
– dragging behind him an endless golden line

And at once he felt – the final pallor overmastering him – as it hastened from afar.

III


Now – as the sun's wheel turned more and more swiftly – the courtyards plunged into winter and once 
emerged red from the geraniums

And the small cool domes – like blue medusae
 – reached each time higher to the silverwork 
the wind so delicately worked as a painting 
– for other times more distant

Virgin maidens
 – their breasts glowing a summer dawn
 – brought him branches of fresh palm leaves – and those of the myrtle uprooted from the depths of the sea

Dripping iodine 
– While under his feet he heard
 – the prows of black ships 
sucked into the great whirlpool – the ancient and smoked seacraft
 from which still erect with riveted gaze
 – the Mothers of God stood rebuking

Horses overturned on dumpheaps 
– a rabble of buildings large and small
 – debris and dust flaming in the air

And there lying prone
 – always with an unbroken word
 between his teeth

Himself


the last of the Hellenes!

(Odysseas Elytis)

Seferis on Hellenism’s unfinished task; and more from The Free Besieged

'Greece lives, to the extent that she is able to give birth to great poets… I believe that if she has not managed to provide suitable soil for the tree that [once] burgeoned upon her land… in years to come she will be able not only to give birth, but also to suckle and to nurture the Poet, the Messiah, who will seize [back] from the hands of the barbarians the beauty, the gold-flaming torch, they have stolen from us.' (Giorgios Seferis)

Giorgios Seferis, along with Ion Dragoumis, is the greatest theorist of Hellenism in the 20th century and above is the conclusion of a lecture Seferis gave in Paris in March 1921, when he was just 21, on the Franco-Greek poet Jean Moreas (Ioannis Papadiamantopoulos). There's a lot to consider here; but just a couple of points: Seferis' optimism is surely based on the new Greek civilisation he hoped would emerge following the liberation of Asia Minor, an enterprise that failed and left Greece at the mercy of all sorts of barbarians, where, nearly 100 years later, it still remains. ‘Seizing back from the hands of the barbarians the beauty, the gold-flaming torch, they have stolen from us’ is Hellenism’s unfinished task.

■ Also, in my post for 25 March on Yiannis Markopoulos' musical interpretation of Dionysios Solomos' The Free Besieged; I omitted to make available the most beautiful and moving song on the album: Στα μάτια και στο πρόσωπο/In their eyes and on their face, sung by Nikos Xylouris. I've now put the song in Radio Akritas, and below are the lyrics.

Στα μάτια και στο πρόσωπο
Στα μάτια και στο πρόσωπο φαίνοντ' οι στοχασμοί τους.
Τους λέει μεγάλα και πολλά η τρίσβαθη ψυχή τους,
Αγάπη κι έρωτας καλού τα σπλάχνα τους τινάζουν.
Τα σπλάχνα τους κι η θάλασσα ποτέ δεν ησυχάζουν.
Γλυκιά κι ελεύθερ' η ψυχή σα να 'τανε βγαλμένη
κι υψώναν με χαμόγελο την όψη τη φθαρμένη.

In their eyes and on their face
In their eyes and on their face their thoughts are showing;
A host of major things they learn from the depths of their souls.
Their guts are violently stirred by love and desire for good;
Their guts and the sea alone are never still;
Sweet and free the soul as if it had broken loose,
And they raised with a smile their exhausted visage.

With swords to cut their path, and in freedom to stay

In Radio Akritas, I’ve made available three songs by Yiannis Markopoulos from The Free Besieged, taken from the poem by Dionysios Solomos. Irene Pappas, Nikos Xylouris, Lakis Halkias and Ilias Klonaridis perform the songs.


‘The events that formed the starting point of [Dionysios Solomos’] The Free Besieged were the protracted siege and capture of Missolonghi by a Turkish army, later joined by Egyptian reinforcements. Missolonghi had been a centre of the Greek insurrection from the beginning of the war of independence… and had already successfully withstood an earlier Turkish siege in 1822 – an event that Solomos had already celebrated in his Hymn to Liberty in 1823. The second siege lasted from April 1825 to April 1826. When all food supplies had run out and there was no hope of relief, the besieged Greeks decided that some of the menfolk of fighting age should burst out of the gates and attempt to lead the women and children to safety… while the rest would remain to defend the town to the death. Realising that freedom could not be attained in life, they opted for freedom in death; like Kazantzakis’ hero Kapetan Michalis in his novel Freedom and Death, the besieged of Missolonghi abandoned the watchword of the Greek War of Independence, namely Freedom or Death, opting instead for Freedom and Death.’ (Mackridge, Peter: Introduction to The Free Besieged and Other Poems).


Absolute silence of the tomb
Absolute silence of the tomb prevails on the plain;
Singing bird plucks a seed, and the mother envies it.
Hunger has darkened their eyes, on them the mother swears.
The brave Soulioti stands to one side and weeps:
‘Poor sombre rifle, why do I have you in my hand?
How burdensome you’ve become and the infidel knows it.’

Mother, magnanimous
Upon these ashes they conjure you…
The word, the work, the meaning…

Mother, magnanimous both in suffering and in glory,
Even if in the secret mystery your children ever live
In contemplation and in vision, how privileged my eyes,
These eyes of mine, to glimpse you in the deserted forest,
Which all of a sudden enveloped your immortal feet
(Look) with leaves of the Resurrection, with leaves of the Palm!
The divine footfall of yours I did not hear, I did not see,
Serene as the sky with all the fair attributes it has,
Of which so many sides are revealed and so many hidden;
But, Goddess, I cannot hear your voice,
And am I to offer it straight away to the Hellenic World?
Glory be to its black stone and to its dry grass too.

Exodus: with swords to cut their path
And I see in the distance the children and the brave women
About the flame they have lit and have painfully fuelled
With well-loved articles and modest marriage-beds,
Not moving, not lamenting, not even shedding a tear;
And a spark touches their hair and their worn-clothes;
Come quickly, ashes, so they can fill their hands.

They are ready in the relentless flood of weapons
With swords to cut their path, and in freedom to stay,
On that side with the comrades, on this with death.

Like the sun that suddenly cuts through dense and sombre clouds,
It strikes the mountains on its slopes and there! houses in the verdure.

And from where the sun rises
To where it goes down,

I did not set eyes on a place more glorious than this small threshing-floor.

The Return of the Exile

Below is Giorgios Seferis’ great poem, The Return of the Exile, about the perennial Greek theme of nostalgia and what awaits the nostos – Odysseus, Agamemnon, Orestes, the Greek refugee, immigrant, etc, etc – when he returns to his homeland after years in a foreign country. The poem has been set to music by Yiannis Markopoulos and I’ve made the song available in Radio Akritas. The singers are Ioanna Kiourtsoglou and Lakis Halkias.



The return of the exile
‘My old friend, what are you looking for?
After years abroad you’ve come back
with images you’ve nourished
under foreign skies
far from you own country.’

‘I’m looking for my old garden;
the trees come to my waist
and the hills resemble terraces
yet as a child
I used to play on the grass
under great shadows
and I would run for hours
breathless over the slopes.’

‘My old friend, rest,
you’ll get used to it little by little;
together we will climb
the paths you once knew,
we will sit together
under the plane trees’ dome.
They’ll come back to you little by little,
your garden and your slopes.’

‘I’m looking for my old house,
the tall windows
darkened by ivy;
I’m looking for the ancient column
known to sailors.
How can I get into this coop?
The roof comes to my shoulders
and however far I look
I see men on their knees
as though saying their prayers.’

‘My old friend, don’t you hear me?
You’ll get used to it little by little.
Your house is the one you see
and soon friends and relatives
will come knocking at the door
to welcome you back tenderly.’

‘Why is your voice so distant?
Raise your head a little
so that I understand you.
As you speak you grow
gradually smaller
as though you’re sinking into the ground.’

‘My old friend, stop a moment and think:
you’ll get used to it little by little.
Your nostalgia has created
a non-existent country, with laws
alien to earth and man.’

‘Now I can’t hear a sound.
My last friend has sunk.
Strange how from time to time
they level everything down.
Here a thousand scythe-bearing chariots go past
and mow everything down.’

Ο γυρισμός του ξενιτεμένου
‘Παλιέ μου φίλε τι γυρεύεις;
χρόνια ξενιτεμένος ήρθες 

με εικόνες που έχεις αναθρέψει

κάτω από ξένους ουρανούς 

μακριά απ' τον τόπο το δικό σου’.

‘Γυρεύω τον παλιό μου κήπο 

τα δέντρα μου έρχουνται ως τη μέση 

κι' οι λόφοι μοιάζουν με πεζούλια


κι όμως σαν είμουνα παιδί

έπαιζα πάνω στο χορτάρι 

κάτω από τους μεγάλους ίσκιους 

κι έτρεχα πάνω σε πλαγιές

ώρα πολλή λαχανιασμένος’.



‘Παλιέ μου φίλε ξεκουράσου 

σιγά σιγά θα συνηθίσεις 

θ' ανηφορίσουμε μαζί 

στα γνώριμά σου μονοπάτια 

θα ξαποστάσουμε μαζί

κάτω απ' το θόλο των πλατάνων

σιγά σιγά θα 'ρθούν κοντά σου 

το περιβόλι κι οι πλαγιές σου’.



‘Γυρεύω το παλιό μου σπίτι 

με τ' αψηλά τα παραθύρια

σκοτεινιασμένα απ' τον κισσό 

γυρεύω την αρχαία κολόνα 

που κοίταζε ο θαλασσινός.


Πως θες να μπώ σ' αυτή τη στάνη;

οι στέγες μου έρχουνται ως τους ώμους 

κι όσο μακριά και να κοιτάξω

βλέπω γονατιστούς ανθρώπους 

λες κάνουνε την προσευχή τους’.



‘Παλιέ μου φίλε δε μ' ακούς; 

σιγά σιγά θα συνηθίσεις 

το σπίτι σου είναι αυτό που βλέπεις

κι αυτή την πόρτα θα κτυπήσουν 

σε λίγο οι φίλοι κι οι δικοί σου

γλυκά να σε καλωσορίσουν’. 



‘Γιατί είναι απόμακρη η φωνή σου; 

σήκωσε λίγο το κεφάλι 

να καταλάβω τι μου λες 

όσο μιλάς τ' ανάστημά σου

ολοένα πάει και λιγοστεύει 

λες και βυθίζεσαι στο χώμα’.



‘Παλιέ μου φίλε συλλογίσου 

σιγά σιγά θα συνηθίσεις

η νοσταλγία σου έχει πλάσει

μια χώρα ανύπαρχτη με νόμους

έξω απ' τη γής κι απ' τους ανθρώπους’.



‘Πια δεν ακούω τσιμουδιά

βούλιαξε κι ο στερνός μου φίλος 

παράξενο πως χαμηλώνουν 

όλα τριγύρω κάθε τόσο 

εδώ διαβαίνουν και θερίζουν 

χιλιάδες άρματα δρεπανηφόρα’.

Nothing in excess

I should have written this post about excess before Christmas; but never mind.

When the Greeks said Μηδὲν ἄγαν (Nothing in excess), they meant in all aspects of life – in politics, ethics, aesthetics, culture, art, architecture, psychology and so on – defiance of which invited hubris, discord and catastrophe and amounted to the repudiation of what the Greeks aspired to more than anything – living with beauty and truth.

Nevertheless, it was Nietzsche who pointed out the essential deceit of the Nothing in excess maxim – carved into the temple of Phoebus Apollo at Delphi – and asserted the root of Greek art and life is not rationality and moderation but strife and pain, and that only a people – like the Greeks – who experienced an ‘excess of strength and courage to gaze into the horror of individual existence and not be turned into stone by the vision’, who were familiar with the ecstatic dream world of Dionysiac art, would have dared to unravel the mysteries of beauty and truth.

‘What suffering [the Greek] race must have endured to reach such beauty [in their culture],’ Nietzsche says at the end of The Birth of Tragedy.

Here’s another view of excess, from Odysseas Elytis, as expressed in his poem The Sovereign Sun, in which he prefers to extol the virtues of moderation, praise the man who has few needs in life and pity the tragic fate of those – like the Greeks – who create modest paradises and then find themselves at the mercy of the avaricious, the envious and resentful, of those whose needs are excessive and malicious.

There’s nothing much a man may want
but to be quiet and innocent

a little food a little wine
at Christmas and at Easter time

wherever he may build his nest
may no one there disturb his rest.

But everything has all gone wrong
they wake him up at break of dawn

then come and drag him to and fro
eat up what little he has and lo

from out his mouth from out of sight
and in a moment of great delight

they snatch his morsel in an evil hour.
Hip hip hurrah for those in Power!

Hip hip hurrah for those in Power
for them there is no ‘I’ or ‘our’.

Hip hip hurrah for those in Power
whatever they see they must devour.

Elytis on the heroic resistance of Greece

Above is a fascinating short from Finos Films capturing the liberation of Athens from German occupation in October 1944, while below is a repeat post with an extract from Odysseas Elytis’ poem From the Heroic and Elegiac Song for the Lost Second Lieutenant of the Albanian Campaign, followed by reflections from the poet on how his participation in repelling the Axis invasion shaped his poetry and view of Greece.  

From the Heroic and Elegiac Song for the Lost Second Lieutenant of the Albanian Campaign
Now the dream in the blood throbs more swiftly
The truest moment of the world rings out:
Liberty,
Greeks show the way in the darkness:
LIBERTY
For you the eyes of the sun shall fill with tears of joy.

Rainbow-beaten shores fall into the water
Ships with open-sails voyage on the meadows
The most innocent girls
Run naked in men’s eyes
And modesty shouts from behind the hedge
Boys! There is no other earth more beautiful

The truest moment of the world rings out!

With a morning stride on the growing grass
He is continually ascending;
Around him those passions glow that once
Were lost in the solitude of sin;
Passions flame up, the neighbours of his heart;
Birds greet him, they seem to him his companions
‘Birds, my dear birds, this is where death ends!’
‘Comrades, my dear comrades, this is where life begins!’
The dew of heavenly beauty glistens in his hair.

Bells of crystal are ringing far away
Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow: the Easter of God!

Elytis on his war experiences
As a reserve officer, the poet Odysseas Elytis was called up immediately after the Italian invasion and served on the Albanian front with the rank of second lieutenant in the First Army Corps. The translator Kimon Friar says of Eltyis’ war experiences that the poet ‘saw in the heroic resistance of the Greek people against superior odds, throughout their long history, a recklessness of spirit, a divine madness. In the spontaneous reaction of the Greek people to Mussolini’s invasion, he saw the victory of a beautiful rashness over self-calculation, an instinct that could distinguish between good and evil in a time of danger’.

In a letter to Friar, Elytis describes the impact of the war on his life and poetry:

‘A kind of “metaphysical modesty” dominated me. The virtues I found embodied and living in my comrades formed in synthesis a brave young man of heroic stature, one whom I saw in every period of our history. They had killed him a thousand times, and a thousand times he had sprung up again, breathing and alive. His was no doubt the measure and worth of our civilisation, compounded of his love not of death but of life. It was with his love of Freedom that he recreated life out of the stuff of death.

‘Later, with an order in my pocket, I set out to meet my new army unit at the front somewhere between the Akrokeravnia Mountains and Tepeleni. One by one, I abandoned the implements of my material existence. My beard became more and more unkempt. The lice swarmed and multiplied. Mud and rain disfigured my uniform. Snow covered everything in sight. And when the time came for me to take the final leap, to understand what role I was to play in terms of the enemy, I was no longer anything but a creature of slight substance who – exactly because of this – carried within him all the values of material life stressed to their breaking point and conducted to their spiritual analogy. Was this a kind of “contemporary idealism?” That very night it was necessary for me to proceed on a narrow path where I met repeatedly with stretcher-bearers who with great difficulty tried to keep in balance the heavily wounded whom they were bearing to the rear. I shall never forget the groan of those wounded. They made me, in the general over-excitement of my mind, conjure up that “it is not possible,” that “it cannot otherwise be done,” which is the reversion of justice on this earth of ours. They made me swear an oath in the name of the Resurrection of that brave Hellenic Hero, who became now for me the Second Lieutenant of the Albanian Campaign, that I would advance into battle with this talisman of my lyrical idea… Nothing further remained for me but to fulfill my vow, to give form to the Second Lieutenant of the Albanian Campaign on multiple levels woven together with the traditions of Greek history, but also involved – in particular – within and beyond death, in the Resurrection, the Easter of God.’

Kostas Karyotakis: impressions of a drowning man

Thanks to Hermes for drawing my attention to the recent ERT series on the poet Kostas Karyotakis, one of the most troubling figures in modern Greek literature, who committed suicide in 1928, aged 32.

I watched the first episode of Karyotakis earlier and it was very good. Watch all six episodes (in Greek) here. Above is the opening sequence from episode one (with my English subtitles), in which Karyotakis tries to drown himself, fails, then succeeds in taking his life using a revolver. In between suicide attempts, Karyotakis wrote this suicide note:

It is time for me to reveal my tragedy. My greatest faults were unbridled curiosity, a diseased imagination, and my attempts to become acquainted with every emotion without being able to feel most of them. However, I despise the base act that is attributed to me. I experienced but the ideation of its atmosphere, the ultimate bitterness. Nor am I the suitable person for that profession. My entire past will show that much. Every reality to me was repulsive.

I felt the rush brought on by danger. And with glad heart I shall accept the coming danger.

P.S. And, to change the tone: I advise those who can swim never to try to commit suicide in the sea. All night and for ten hours I was battered by the waves. I drank much water but, by and again and without me knowing how, my mouth would surface. Perhaps some time, given the opportunity, I shall write down the impressions of a drowning man.

Karyotakis' last poem, written a month before his death, was Preveza.

Preveza
Death is the crows clattering

on dark walls and roof-tiles;

death – those women who make love

as if they were peeling onions.



Death these grimy, insignificant streets

with their great, illustrious names,

the olive grove, in all directions the sea,
and even the sun – death amid deaths.



Death – that cop who wraps up

an 'Insufficient' serving and weighs it;

death – these hyacinths on the balcony

and that teacher with the newspaper.



Base, Garrison, Platoon of Preveza.

On Sunday we'll hear the band.

I got a savings book from the bank,
first deposit – thirty drachmas.



Walking slowly on the wharf you say,

'Do I exist' and then, 'You do not exist!'

The ship arrives, Raised flag.

Perhaps His Honor the Governor is coming.

If, among these people, just

one would die from disgust…
Silent, sad, decorous,

we'd all have fun at the funeral.