Nanos Valaoritis
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The CHARIOTEER AN ANNUAL REVIEW OF MODERN GREEK CULTURE . ' NUMBER# 2006 SPECIAL ISSUE Nanos Valaoritis INTERVIEW WITH NANOS VALAORITIS BY APOSTOLOS ATHANASSAKIS THE GREAT HOMELESS ONE _. I'" PAN DAIMONIUM (EXCERPTS) ,- FJ.,GONTAS (FROM 0 Sl<YLOS TOU THEOU) AN ALPHABET FOR THE DEAF AND DUMB THE DESCENT OF THE M CORRESPONDENCE SELECt BIBLIOGRAPHY DAY TRIPPERS BY PENELOPE 'KARAGEORGE BOOK REVIEW $20.00 The CHARIOTEER AN ANNUAL REVIEW OF MODERN GREEK CULTURE Formerly published by PARNASSOS Greek Cultural Society of New York NUMBER44 2006 SPECIAL ISSUE Nanos Valaoritis Publisher: LEANDROS PAPATHANASIOU Editor: APOSTOLOS N. ATHANASSAKIS Associate Editor: THEONY CONDOS Managing Editor: SUSAN ANASTASAKOS The CHARIOTEER is published by PELLA PUBLISHING COMPANY, IN C. Editorial and subscription address: Pella Publishing Company, 337 West 36th Street, New York, NY 10018-6401. Tel.: 212-279-9586, Fax: 212-594-3602. One-year subscription $20. Copy right 2006 by Pella Publishing Company, Inc. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America by Athens Printing Company, 337 West 36th Street, New York, NY 10018-6401. The CHARIOTEER solicits essays on and English translations from works of modern Greek writers. Translations should be accompanied by a copy of the original Greek text. Manuscripts will not be returned unless accompanied by a stamped self addressed envelope. No responsibility can be assumed for theft, loss or damage. ISSN 0577-5574 TABLE OF CONTENTS EDITOR'S NOTE . 5 AVI SHARON, Introduction . 7 APOSTOLOS ATHANASSAKIS, Interview with Nanos Valaoritis . 27 NANOS VALAORITIS The Great Homeless One . 57 Pan Daimonium (excerpts) .......................... 133 "Fevgontas" (from 0 Skylos tau Theou) . 139 "An Alphabet for the Deaf and Dumb" ................. 161 "The Descent of theM" ............................. 165 Correspondence .................................. 167 SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY . 182 PENELOPE KARAGEORGE, "Day Trippers" 183 BOOK REVIEW . 207 ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS . 208 EDITOR'S NOTE Nanos Valaoritis was a professor at San Francisco State University for twenty-five years. Back then, in the sixties and the seventies, California was a center of intellectual activity as well as of various political move ments, which sought to put an end to the Vietnam War and to bring about catalytic social changes in the United States. When Nanos moved from Greece to San Francisco State University-first as a guest profes sor, then as a regular member of the faculty-he found himself sur rounded by academics who were very supportive of the humanities. He taught Comparative Literature and Creative Writing. Especially notable at this time of his career is his contribution to creative writing in the field of drama. Much as he had done before he moved to San Francisco, he continued to write both poetry and prose in Greek as well as in Eng lish. He himself makes no distinction between his poetry and prose; he refers to both as his poetic work. His devotion to literature and his pro ductivity during these years was greatly nurtured by his friendships with American authors and poets. At that time many Greeks distin guished themselves in the sciences, but very few pursued a career in the humanities. Living abroad and being open to new ideas and ideologies was nothing new to Nanos. He had lived in England and in France, keeping company with some of the most creative and daring minds of the great era that followed World War II. Names such as Durrell, Spencer, Spender, Eliot, MacNeice, Breton, Peret leap to mind immedi ately. It should be of great interest to many Europeans and Americans that Nanos knew these great men ofletters. Contemporary Greek poets might wish to study in depth the cross-fertilization of ideas that has pro duced Nanos' enormous work. The poet to whom the present volume of the Charioteer is devoted was very fortunate to be the very young con temporary of such stellar Greek poets as Seferis, Elytis, Gatsos, Embirikos, and Engonopoulos. He came to know French Surrealism before he graduated from the Gymnasium. Not too long after that he gained intimate knowledge of the English reaction to this novel and unconventional literary movement. Perhaps more than twenty years went by between the time I met Nanos at San Francisco State and the time I met him again at Starbucks 5 6 THE CHARIOTEER in Kolonaki in the Summer of 2005. I must admit that I never thought there would be a connection between Starbucks and literature. In a sur realist way, Nanos proved me wrong. Not only did I meet him at Star bucks, but I met him surrounded by affectionate friends and pupils. I knew that we had to talk about poetry-more specifically his own poetry. We agreed to meet in his house. It was a few months later, at the end of December 2005, that we met in Kolonaki on four successive evenings to talk about his profound and spectacular journey from pre WWII Greece to present time. Surrounded by mountains of books and memorabilia, we allowed ourselves to drift into a spontaneous discus sion of the persons, events, and political circumstances that constituted the fabric of Nanos' poetic work. Nanos was very happy to be inter viewed and very eager to talk about not only significant times of his career but also about colorful details, such as the resemblance of his nose to that of T.S. Eliot. As we worked together long hours, the flow of life and literature in his apartment was constant. His wife and daughter were receiving guests. Young Greek poets would call him and invite him to poetic gatherings. A few of them would simply come to his apartment to discuss books. A publisher or two came while I was there. Nanos' apartment in Kolonaki gave me the impression of a never-ending poetry workshop which was also much like a literary salon. The text of our discussions is published in this volume. I feel very privileged to have had the benefit of such an immediate connection with one of Greece's most creative and most open minds in the modern era. INTRODUCTION* "We are terribly alone in Greece," wrote Nobel Prize winner George Seferis in 1963, lamenting the isolation of Greece and of those who write in Modem Greek. The language, dissociated from its glorious past by the tag "Modem," isolated in the vague zone between Europe and Asia, remains proverbially incomprehensible for the West. Even up to the Second World War the civilization and literature of modem Greece were rarely subjects of interest to Europeans, especially to the English. The first encounter of the two traditions, Greek and English, took place in the second decade of the twentieth century. At that time, E.M. Forster traveled to Alexandria, where he met Cavafy, and after returning to Eng land, made Cavafy's poetry known in translations and essays, projecting the image of a Greek gentleman "with a straw hat standing absolutely motionless/at a slight angle to the universe." Otherwise, there prevailed in English literary culture a somewhat misunderstood image of Greece. Yeats' Byzantine poems and T.S. Eliot's verse "Mr. Evgenides, the Smyrna merchant/Unshaven, his pocket full of currants" comprised almost all that England knew about Greece at that time. Nevertheless, seven years later, toward the end of the 1940s, the well-known English writers Spender and WH. Auden wrote poetry reminiscent of Cavafy and Seferis, while Henry Miller and Lawrence Durrell spoke glowingly about the Modem Greek poets and about the Greek landscape in their works. And before the end of that decade, the two most important publishers in London, john Lehmann and Cyril Connolly, poets such as Bernard Spencer and Louis MacNeice, writers and well-known philologists, such as Steven Runciman, Maurice Bowra, Rex Warner and Patrick Lee Fermor, could be characterized, according to Lehmann himself, as "Greek-struck". And furthermore, they would all have agreed with what john Waller wrote in his poem "Spring in Athens" (1945): *This essay, written in Greek by Avi Sharon, is the Introduction to the volume of Valaoritis' Correspondence. 7 8 THE CHARIOTEER Athens for me was Katsimbalis, Seferis, Antoniou, new friends in new places. The speed, extent and markedly personal character of the discovery of Greece by English writers, through their acquaintance with the work and person of Seferis or the "Colossus" Katsimbalis, appear curious. When the "idyll" was crowned in 1948 with the great success of the first volume of Seferis' poetry, Nanos Valaoritis, then a young man, who had translated a large number of those poems, announced from London: 'The wall is crumbling, George, falling. The seed has been sown beyond our borders." That complete reversal of the position of the English toward Greece was a surprising phenomenon, and Valaoritis had played a leading role in that reversal. Valaoritis recalls that in his first meeting with Stephen Spender in London, when he was twenty-three, Spender considered Greece as "a land inhabited by fishermen, farmers, merchants, and wait ers. (Also many thieves, and terrible diseases)." Yet seven years later, in 1952, Spender would dedicate a poem of his to Seferis and would say the fact that he had not gone to Greece was "disappointing to an extent that can only be understood by people who feel that Greece is the only place to which they could belong." The radical change in the views of Spender, which were characteris tic of that period, could be considered a consequence of the Second World War: many English writers and philologists found themselves in the Aegean islands and contributed to kindling the interest of the Eng lish in the people and landscape of Greece. But to obtain a fuller picture of this sudden "weakness" of the English for Greek letters during the 1940s, we must take into account the role of those "new friends" in Athens and in London, and especially, the role of Seferis and Katsim balis.