Book Reviews 203 the beginning of the land question in early 1923, when Nicholas Plastiras started the ex­ propriation of the large estates without compensating the owners—in order to resettle as soon as possible the refugees from Asia Minor. Naturally, the interests of the Albanian citizens, who owned lands in were hurt. In the first chapter an account is given of the Albanian attempts to exclude the Moslems of Chamuria from the compulsory exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey. The second chapter examines the factors which contributed to a réévaluation of Greek policy towards Albania during the period that Greece was governed by Theodore Pangalos, who desiring to improve relations with Tirana agreed not to exchange the Moslems of Chamu­ ria. Moreover, Pangalos concluded with Albania four conventions, which were signed in June and October 1926. One of these conventions, which concerned the consular service, provided furthermore large reparations to the Albanian citizens whose lands had been ex­ propriated. As a result of it the convention was never ratified by Parliament, while the publi­ cation of the rest in the Official Government Gazette was delayed for a long time. In the third chapter the author very adequately presents an analysis of the policy of the Albanian government and of their attempts to achieve a favorable settlement to the land question. It is emphasized that Tirana used the Moslems of Chamuria as a means of putting pressure. Also, this chapter deals with the Italian attempts to mediate the Greek-Albanian dispute. In the fourth chapter the vindications of the Greek position by the Council of the League of Nations is examined. The author notes that Greece was fully satisfied by the fact that the Council had accepted the Greek views that the Albanian-speaking Moslems were not per­ secuted in Chamuria and Albanian landowners should receive the same reparations as the and not more as the Albanian government demanded. D. Michalopoulos’ excellent book, based on extensive archival research—unfortunately, access to Albanian documents has been limited by international politics—in Greece, Italy, Great Britain and the United States, is important not only for its analysis of the motivation of Greek and Albanian foreign policy but also for its new interpretation of the genesis of the questions concerning the two countries. All in all, the book is very objectively written, it reveals a deep understanding of the period and may be considered as a definitive treat­ ment on the subject.

University of Basil Kondis

Odysseus Elytis, Maria Nephele: A Poem in Two Voices, Translated from the Greek by Athan. Anagnostopoulos. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981. 76 pages. Yannis Ritsos, The Lady of the Vineyards, Translated by Apostolos N. Athanassakis. New York: Pella, 1981. 80 pages. Takis Sinopoulos, Selected Poems, Translated and with an Introduction by John Stathatos. San Francisco and London: Wire Press-Oxus Press, 1981. 96 pages. Manolis Anagnostakis, The Target: Selected Poems, Translated from the Modern Greek and with an Introduction by Kimon Friar. New York: Pella, 1980. 136 pages.

Four more elegant books with Greek poetry in fine English translations appeared in the United States in one year. This significant contribution is further emphasized by the 204 Book Reviews

fact that the two volumes, published by PELLA Publishing Company in New York are bilin­ gual; publisher Leandros Papathanasiou must be commended for undertaking these two fairly expensive projects. Maria Nephele, which means “Maria Cloud”, is an astonishing modern composition worthy of its maker, the 1979 Nobel Laureate Odysseus Elytis (pen-name of Alepoudhelis), a poet, painter, critic, and essayist who started climbing Mount Parnassus step by step ever since he published his first book of verse in 1939. An avid student of Greek and foreign po­ etry—especially French—a dynamic verse translator and impressive collage artist Elytis began his career under the tutelage of surrealism and other modernist techniques and gradu­ ally developed a poetic sensibility and style with no match elsewhere in the wide world. His most sophisticated and meticulous workmanship underscores the fact that he matured fairly early and showed a unique understanding of the dynamics and potentials of form —something that many a Greek writer lacks. As its subtitle explains, the poem consists of a series of reciprocal, or rather antiphonal, utterances by Maria (Elytis’s alter ego) and the Poet on a number of topics, issues, and senti­ ments as they are experienced and articulated by a liberated young woman of today’s con­ fused world; and by an intelligent nature-understanding, and confident artist with Elytis’s inner and outer characteristics. Now conflicting, now then almost agreeing, and mostly moving along never-converging courses, as it were, their arguments and “discourses” are not forensic polemics meant to overwhelm each other. Despite their intensity or occasional emotional pitch they remain suave and civilized “lovers’ quarrels”, at least as impatient long-haired youths of today understand those terms. Their goal is the same—how to attain happiness and peace—though their means and methods differ. Maria Nephele is divided into three Parts. In each of them the Girl speaks seven times, the Poet responds seven times, and each poetic statement is followed by an epigrammatic coda of impressive beauty and wisdom. Four semi-independent lyrics—“The Presence”, “Maria Nephele’s Song”, “The Poet’s Song”, and “The Eternal Wager”—function as intro­ duction, two candid expressions of their credos, and conclusion, respectively. A master of the symbolic implications of mystical numbers, according to the Pythagoreans, Elytis uses 2, 3, 4, 7 (and their multiples), as well as other arithmetical combinations, to shape and control the overall structure of the poem, thus enhancing the proper articulation of its nume­ rous themes (love, sex, alienation, anxiety, aesthetics, local and global issues, philosophy, peace of mind, etc.) It must be emphasized that Elytis here utilizes a wide variety of metrics and stanzaic forms (couplets, quatrains, loose stanzas, free verse), at times seriously, at times in parody, manipulates tone, and changes diction from poem to poem as the occasion war­ rants in order to say the right thing in the right way according to his artistic idiosyncrasy. Irony, sarcasm, satire, comic parody reign supreme and co-exist along lyrical pieces of uni­ que beauty and power of conviction (Cf. “The Eternal Wager”). This seemingly confused and confusing variegated mosaic of traditional and avant garde artistic means suggests through its novel form the centi al theme: harmony in today’s chaos achieved thiough under­ standing, freedom, and love—the sacred duties of the artist. To translate, to “transport”, the astonishingly original literary feat in Maria Nephele, which is by no means less sophisticated than the celebrated Axion Esti (Worthy It Is), one would have to combine the poetic skills and ranges of Eliot, Pound, E. E. Cummings, and Ogden Nash, to mention just a few sensibilities and styles. The present translator had some experience in translating non-fiction prose; but, obviously, he was indequately equipped to do proper justice to this complex and demanding text. A passage in which he honestly Book Reviews 205 tries to approximate the overall melody and rhythm of the Greek is the last stanza of “Maria Nephele’s Song” (p. 26) which reads: Joy I have not known and I trample on grief; Like an angel I roam This renders the meaning with precision while it misses the conventional pattern of alterna­ ting rhymes (a, b, a, b) which, of course, has specific cultural implications in a poem of our days. A freer translation of the whole poem, with some anaplasis and necessary liberties done by Bertrand Mathieu and me, reads as follows—maintaining the exact metrics and form and thus securing the same tone:

“Pity for the girl” they say shaking their heads a bit Mourning me is their play they had better quit!

Through the clouds in my leisure I walk lightning-like and fair my give’n take for pleasure turns to tain in the air.

Come you guys and look here I cut like a double-edged knife; mornings I don’t talk or hear cursing Virgins and my life

and when I lay me down at night in each fellow’s green pasture I joust like a bold knight Va-room, va-room! Faster! Faster!

With joy I don’t bother sadness scornfully I miss Like an angel I hover over the abyss.

Though most of the composition has not been translated with the sensitivity and flexi­ bility that its complexity warrants, we must thank Dr. Anagnostopoulos for his good Intro­ duction (based on published scholarship), Notes, and daring. Anglophone readers and Elytis admirers thus have a chance to enjoy his striking Maria Nephele, even from a certain “dis­ tance”. Yannis Ritsos, the prolific and great folk bard of contemporary Greece, needs no intro­ duction to anglophone readers; some of his poems do, and The Lady of the Vineyards is one of them. The translator, a professor of classics and published bilingual poet, offers all necessary explanations for the understanding and appreciation of this idiosyncratically “Greek” long ode of two dozen uneven parts in mostly polysyllabic quasi-demotic free verse, in his succinct Introduction, Notes, and biographical entry on Ritsos. Written in 1945, revised a bit later, and included in a large volume first published in 206 Book Reviews

1961 the poem is a fervent allegorical celebration of Greece’s resistance to, and liberation from, the Nazi miasma. Its features and symbols are squarely based on the folk culture of modern Hellenism and Byzantium where the sacred, the secular, and the supernatural go hand in hand to express the vigor and immensity of the soul of a tormented but enduring nation with ancient and uncuttable roots in its homeland. The Lady is Panayia (La Toussainte, in French), the Madonna of the Orthodox, a female protector deriving from the earth-mother Demeter, metamorphosed and enriched by the attribution to her of the dynamism of the individuated mother in a poor and tradi­ tional family which, however, survices the horror and ferocity of adversaries that stand for the newer masks of perennial evil and doom. To somehow understand some of Panayia’s symbolic implications one has to recall Henry James’s essay “The Dynamo and the Virgin”, and his view of cultural paragons in function. The poet alludes to such historical, folkloric, or even religious heroes and figures as Digenes, Kolokotronis, Bouboulina, Makriyannis, as well as saints traditionally associated with triumphs over evil forces or natural catastrophes (Cf. J. L. Weston, From Ritual to Romance; J. Campbell, ed., Myths, Dreams, and Religion; G. E. Daniel, ed., Myth or Legend). Simple in its demotic diction, rhetorical and liturgical in tone, uplifting in its humanistic message The Lady of the Vineyards celebrates Greece’s traditional endurance and eventual triumph over temporal and transitory adversaries. Perhaps the personal triumph of the poet over disease, poverty, and political persecution is implied in this more general national jubilation, one might venture to say. Unlike older or medieval compositions of a similar nature, Ritsos’s hymn does not resort to propaganda, didacticism, or undue polemic against the vanquished enemy. An idea of its poetic flavor may be formed from a reading of its concluding lines: Now, dawn and night mingle as the ten fingers clasp the knee in repose, and you. Lady of the Vineyards, at daybreak cleave with your great shadow the plain, like a ship, and your two hands are locked tightly above the olive trees, like a sacred dove that holds in its beak a wisp of light and balances the scales of the world. Though I would have used two or three different words in English to render the Greek smiyoun (join), galini (calm, srenity), and desmi (cluster, sheaf), there is no denying that Dr. Athanassakis’s rendition is adequately poetic and quite honest, especially in its overall impression. I There is no doubt that this slim volume is a substantial contribution to our awareness of Yannis Ritsos’s many and precious achievements in modern and original ethnic lyricism, since most other books of his verse in English do not feature The Lady of the Vineyards. * * *

Two years before his untimely death in April 1981 Dr. Panayotis Sinopoulos had the pleasure of seeing a rich and representative selection of his poems published by the Ohio State University Press in Kimon Friar’s excellent translation, accompanied by a long and scholarly introductory essay and a critical appendix. Undoubtedly one of the greatest post­ war poets of Greece—Ritsos, Elytis, and Seferis, all of them older than him, had started publishing in the 1930s—Sinopoulos published fifteen verse collections from 1951 through 1980. Stathatos’s slim book offers characteristic samples of eight of them in accurate and very readable translations. Book Reviews 207

The Introduction (pp. 9-15), despite its brevity, covers most of the main details in the life and career of that physician and army doctor who experienced first hand the wounds and traumas of a hellish period in the turbulent history of his country before allowing their impact and reverberations upon his psyche to record them in poetic form as an agonized, dynamic, and honest testimony of war, civil strife, unnecessary destruction and death in an old country scorched by an ever young and relentless sun. Eloquent, insightful, and sound are the short critical and historical analyses and characterizations of the represented collec tionş: No Man's Land, B (1957), The Sons of Joanna and Constantine (1951), The Poetry of Poetry (1964), Deathfeast (1972), Stones (1972), The Chronicle (1975), The Chart (1977), and The Grey Light (1980). Almost one-thitd out of the forty-odd individual poems and sequences that make up Selected Poems were included in Friar’s more encompassing edition; and a comparison of his to Stathatos’s version proves him the more careful, skilled, and talented translator, though young Stathatos’s work is by no means that of a novice. For instance, his version of “Inventory” (Apologismos, p. 57) reads as follows in its beginning; What’s left of the scenery? This chair and that other chair, the sudden veering of the wind. Or, let us say, the late lamented sun with its windows and birds. Friar uses more colloquial, more natural expressions in his translation which is closer to the conversational tone of Sinopoulos: What was left us of the stage set? The chair and the other chair, the sudden twist of the wind. Or, let’s say, the late departed sun with its windowpanes and its birds. We may observe here that the imagery of furniture (chairs, windows) suggests the words “stage set” that Friar used for the Greek skeniko that Stathatos rendered as “scenery”. Also, “windowpanes” is more accurate for tzamia than just “windows”. Finally Friar’s “the chair and the other chair” is more faithful than Stathatos’s “this chair”, with its rather ar­ bitrary use of a demonstrative adjective instead of an article. One of the main assets of Sta­ thatos’s book, however, is the presence in it of many good excerpts from The Chart and all of The Grey Light. The first lyrical prose piece from The Chart reads as follows : “The great morning full of wind, passages and windy turnings, the earth farther down, the dark soil, a few grasses and flowers, their black eye of coolness, thought quickened by the wind, and the brain’s water, a savage light flooding hidden sensations in the body and beyond, absence, raving, memory, dream” (p. 83). That passage may explain why the reviewer of the Times Literary Supplement had aptly written that “Takis Sinopoulos can now be seen as one of the major Greek, and indeed Euro­ pean poets”. John Stathatos’s handsome little book will serve well the needs of those who cannot afford Friar’s expensive, bilingual edition, and is one more tribute to that fine man’s lasting memory.

* * *

A Thessalonikiot physician, Anagnostakis has published some ten books of poetry and essays since 1945. A life-long advocate of a Marxist ideology free of dogma and slogans, he showed his social commitment by offering himself as a candidate of the Left on two occa­ sions. Most of his poems are political in a broad humanitarian rather than sectarian sense. 208 Book Reviews

As the knowledgeable translator explains in his long, diachronic, analytical, and detailed Introduction (pp. vii-xxx), Anagnostakis’s collections Epochs (1941-44), Epochs 2 (1946- 48), Parentheses (1949-50), The Continuation (1953-54), The Continuation 2 (1955), The Con­ tinuation 3 (1950-62), and The Target (1969-70) constitute a kind of personal and informal record of the poet’s reactions to unwelcome events and situations in his life and in that of Greece as it came under the influence of global developments and foreign interventions in various forms that have had sad, if not tragic, repercussions. As their suggestive titles imply Anagnostakis’s earlier books of verse were inspired by the various phases of the struggle and defeat of the Greek Left, articulating his anguish and feeling of guilt and suffering at the loss of dear friends and their common cause. The Conti­ nuation poems derive from a recognition of past mistakes and new forms of agony and pain that later facts added to the fading, but still hurting, traumas of his youth. The Target focuses mostly on registering his controlled bitterness at the complacent ways of today’s Philistines and their euphoric behaviour in the recent years of material affluence and spiritual void. The last man to blame others, Dr. Anagnostakis does not name public figures or events of topical significance; thus, instead of bemoaning ephemeral vicissitudes, he takes stock of himself and broods over the stance that he, as a sophisticated and committed intellectual, must take in view of a permanent chaos created and orchestrated by vested interests that no honest person can share. Although the conditions and times that “made” him a poet are the same, or almost so, with those that inspired the great socially-minded poets of Greece—Ritsos, Vrettakos, Elytis, Sinopoulos, Seferis et al.—Anagnostakis’s style, technique, forms, and degree of emo­ tional outburst are different and bear his personal and distinguished mark. The succession of his eight collections shows an evolution from longer and descriptive or argumentative lyrics to shorter and more “crystallized” poems which, however, retain the same sober tone and unembellished diction. “Epilogue”, the last piece in this beautifully-printed bilingual volume, epigrammatically concludes in Friar’s sensitive version:

And above all, no self-deceptions. At the very most construe them as two dim searchlights in the fog As a postcard to absent friends with two words only: I live. “Because”, as my friend Titos too once rightly said “No verse today can mobilize the masses No verse today can overthrow the established order”. So be it. Disabled, show your hands. Judge that you may be judged.

In addition to Kimon Friar’s excellent prefatory essay, Notes, and a Bibliography complete this fine translation of Dr. Manolis Anagnostakis’s subtly political poetry.

The University of M. Byron Raizis