Greek Poet Manolis Anagnostakis

Greek Poet Manolis Anagnostakis

Manolis Anagnostakis (b. Thessaloniki, 1925), poet and essayist, has also been politically active with the New Left. While studying medicine, he served as editor in chief of the student magazine "The Start" (1944). He took part in the Resistance and during the Greek Civil War was condemned to death for unlawful political activity by a military tribunal.

Birth: Mar. 10, 1925
Thessaloniki, GreeceDeath: Jun. 23, 2005
Athens, Greece
Greek Poet Manolis Anagnostakis Dies in Hospital

Athens.- Greek poet Manolis Anagnostakis, held to be one of most important poets to emerge from Greece in the post-war era, died on Thursday in Amalia Fleming hospital at the age of 80, after a long bout of illness.

He was politically aligned to the Left, taking part in the Greek Resistance movement during WWII and the civil war that followed, while his poetry was marked by the terse, grim realism characteristic of left-wing poetry at that time.

Anagnostakis, also a writer of prose and essays, was born in Thessaloniki in 1925. He studied medicine and practiced radiology. During the troubled post-war era, he was condemned to death by a military court and spent many years in prison and exile.

He had won many awards for his poetry, which has been translated into several European languages.

President, party leaders express sorrow over death of poet Manolis Anagnostakis. President Karolos Papoulias and party leaders on Thursday expressed their sorrow over thedeath of renowned poet Manolis Anagnostakis earlier in the day.

President Papoulias said in a statement "we will miss the voice of Manolis Anagnostakis as much as his silence in past years."

Prime Minister and Culture Minister Kostas Karamanlis expressed his condolences and said "Greek literature and Greek culture lost a splendid poet and humble fighter today."

Communist Party of Greece (KKE) Secretary General Aleka Papariga said in a message of condolences to the family of Anagnostakis "warm condolences for the death of Manolis Anagnostakis, one of the most important poets of his generation."

Coalition of the Left, Movements and Ecology (SYN) party leader Alekos Alavanos also extended his condolences to the family of the deceased, and expressed his deep gratitude for Anagnostakis' work and the example he set in life.

PASOK party leader, Athens mayor express sorrow over death of poet Manolis Anagnostakis: Main opposition PASOK party leader George Papandreou and Athens Mayor Dora Bakoyianni on Thursday expressed their sorrow over the death of renowned poet Manolis Anagnostakis.

"Having an open mind and always an uneasy thought, he did not hesitate to open new paths, seek new ideas and set his own bright paths, remaining steadfast on his principles and values. Even his silence was a great cry of freedom," Papandreou said in his statement.

"Manolis Anagnostakis, with his character, humility, fighting spirit and his priceless work was a model human being, ideologist and intellectual," Bakoyianni said in her statement.
 

 Burial:
First Cemetery
Athens
Regional unit of Athens
Attica, Greece

His first collection of poems, "Seasons", was published in 1945. In 1948, while he was in prison, his collection "Seasons 2" was published and in 1951, immediately after his release, "Seasons 3". These volumes were followed by "Sequel" (1954), "Poems, 1941-1956" (1956), his collected works to date, and the cycle "Sequel 2" and "Sequel 3" (1962). In another collection, "Eighteen Texts" (1970), his poems appeared under the general title "The Target", written during the early years of the Colonels' dictatorship (1967-73).

From 1959 to 1961 he was the editor of the bimonthly journal "Criticism", which focused on the literary, ideological and aesthetic questions of his generation. He worked on many other magazines and newspapers and published additional collections of poetry -- "Poems, 1941-1971" (1971) -- studies, articles and book reviews. His poetry demonstrates the conviction that human life is marked by the historic events that form its context.

MANOLIS ANAGNOSTAKIS
STOCHOS
The subject is now what do you think
We ate well we drank well
we lived our live well so far
Minor troubles balanced by minor gains
The subject is now what do you think.

Some other Poems by Manolis Anagnostakis

Selections from THE TARGET (1970) by Manolis Anagnostakis (1925- )

translated by David Conolly

POETICS

- You're betraying Poetry again, you'll tell me,

Man?s most sacred expression

You're using it again as a means, a pack-mule

For your sinister objectives

In full knowledge of the damage you're doing

To the young through your example.

- Tell me what you have not betrayed

You and your kind, for years and years,

Bartering your possessions one by one

In international markets and common bazaars

So you're left without eyes to see, without ears

To hear, with lips sealed and you say nothing.

For which of man?s sacred rights are you arraigning us?

I know: preaching and rhetoric again, you'll say.

Well, yes! Preaching and rhetoric.

Words have to be hammered like nails.

If they're not to be lost in the win

THESSALONIKI, DAYS OF 1969 A.D.

In Egyptou Street -first turning rightThere now stands the Transaction Bank Building

Tourist agencies and emigration bureaus

And kids can no longer play with all the traffic

passing

In any case the kids have grown, the times you knew have

passed

They now no longer laugh, whisper secrets, share trust,

Those that survived, that is, as grave illnesses have

appeared since then

Floods, deluges, earthquakes, armoured soldiers;

They remember their fathers? words: you'll experience

better days

It's of no importance in the end if they didn't experience

them, they repeat the lesson to their own children

Always hoping that the chain will one day break

Perhaps with their children?s children or the children of their

children's children.

For the time being, in the old street as was said, there stands

the Transactions Bank

-I transact, you transact, he transactsTourist agencies and emigration bureaus

-we emigrate, you emigrate, they emigrateWherever I travel Greece wounds me, as the Poet said

Greece with its lovely islands, lovely offices, lovely

churches

Greece of the Greeks.

YOUNG MEN OF SIDON, 1970

Actually, we shouldn't complain.

Your company's good and congenial, full of youth,

Fresh young girls - stout-bodied lads

All passion and love for life and action.

And your songs too, good, with meaning and substance

So very human, so moving,

About infants that die in other continents

About heroes killed in former times,

About revolutionaries, Black, Green and Yellow ones,

About Man's grief in his overall suffering.

It's especially to your credit that you involve yourselves

In the issues and struggles of our age

You directly and actively make your presence felt - in view

of which

I think you more than deserve

In twos, in threes, to play, to fall in love,

And unwind, for sure pal, after such exertion.

(They've aged us prematurely Yorgos, do you realise?)

MURDERING AN INFANT

                  KAREN ALKALAY‑GUT

Born in London on the last night of the Blitz,KAREN ALKALAY‑GUT in Rochester, NY, where she received her PhD from the University of Rochester. She has lived and worked in Israel since 1972. There, she has raised a family and had a career as a writer in both English and Hebrew, as well as a translator into French, German, Italian, Romanian, Russian, Spanish and Polish. Her 31-page curriculum vitae details a rich and ranging intellectual life and career; it is clear that it would take more reams of paper than that to contain what her heart knows. But we can sometimes catch her in spoken word, as in the clip below from Bowery Poetry Project. WVFC was thrilled to receive an offer of the Pesach poem below. We bet more than one family will considers her words before next week’s Passover/Easter celebrations.

1957

We were slaves
to Pharaoh in Egypt,
we sang extempore —
each with a different tune
each with a different memory.

Born on the outer edge of war,
I envisioned only Cecil B. DeMille
and the myriads of extras drowned
behind a trick glass wall.

(No. That isn’t true.
Years before,
when we were in our old home
—flimsy and small—
I would fear
that when we opened the door for Elijah,
Hitler and his men would push in,
destroying all, but my consciousness.)

In the new house
with the massive cherry dining set
my father and I bought secondhand
and the flowered gilt dishes
my mother saved all year,
we were our own leaders.

Our guests leaned on their pillows
and admired the oversized turkey
(symbol I see now of America—
freedom and relief)
the tsimmis, the compote,
and all the extra courses
—fish, liver, soup —
they had only dreamed of
even before the war.

And while I focussed
on the Hagada drawings of Moses,
with his strong, Heston chin,
did my father
think of his years in prison?
Did my mother
recall the boat
that took them back
from the Promised Land to Danzig
on the eve Hitler came in?

On this night of nights
we sang together offkey
that once we were slaves
that now we are ப்ரீ

MURDERING AN INFANT

Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires

-‑Blake

Believe me I didn't know

you were within me—

thought myself merely curious:

devouring strange concoctions in the night

while the family slept its righteous sleep,

the nausea a function of a menopausal system,

the malaise, illness—not creation.

Then there you were

smiling in your cradle

my breasts suckling‑ready

I know

how lovely you would grow

which corners you would reach

how far you would have taken me

And it will be years

before the things I link with you

will neutralize, not bear

the heavy weight of trivial incidents

And though I take the pillow

here to your sweet mouth

your voice will never

leave mine

Milk and Honey.wmv - YouTube

Part of the European intellect.

                          Eugenio Montale

Eugenio Montale, born in 1896, is one of the few obvious "true masters" of the last fifty years of Italian literature. Born in Genoa into a family of businessmen, he discontinued his secondary studies and started, on a private basis, to study singing with the baritone Ernesto Sivori. But the 1915-18 war (in which he served as an infantry officer), the death of Sivori and his decision to go in for a literary career, turned Montale away from that course, in which he had shown an extraordinary interest in melodrama, even its technical aspects. When he started to devote himself to poetry, he was already in possession of a rich and versatile culture and a taste for Bellini's and Debussy's music, impressionist painting and the art of the great novelists of nineteenth-century Europe, at the same time sharing the interests of the Ligurian poets Roccatagliata-Cecardi, Boine and Sbarbaro. However, the "regional" outlook of the poetry of his time was not allowed to limit the critical attention that he paid to Leopardi and Foscolo. It was not until after the war that the poet dedicated himself fully to creative activities and literature. In 1921, he contributed to "Primo Tempo", with Solmi and Debenedetti, revealing, besides his poetic gifts, a rare critical talent through his acuteness and independence of conventional patterns. His Omaggio a Svevo, published in 1925 in the Milanese paper "L'Esame", aroused much attention, determining, among other things, the fortune of the works of the Triestine writer.
Montale settled down in Florence in 1928, where he became director of the Gabinetto Vieusseux library. He was one of the first inspirers of "Solaria", always being one of the most active and politically non-conformist Florentine intellectuals until, in 1938, refusing to join the party then in power, he was dismissed from his directorship at the Gabinetto Vieusseux.
In 1925, he published his first collection of poems, Ossi di seppia, which quickly became one of the "classics" of contemporary Italian poetry; in his verses, sentiment appears desiccated by a severe intellectual rigour, evoked with intimate fullness in the fervid and striking sights of the Mediterranean landscape. Some critics aptly saw in Ossi di seppia a singular introspective continuity, as in a great modern novel, linked to the story of the protagonist, finding its most developed form in the poem "Arsenio".
When Le occasioni (1939) was published, it brought consistent confirmation of this inner line of development which, bearing a new classical-modern imprint, identified itself with the great contemporary metaphysical poetry. In Le occasioni, Italian poetry and culture as a whole were, from then on, to recognise a book that reflected the solitude and the agony over the human condition of one who lucidly opposed Fascist oppression, creating a song of noble stoicism.
Montale's biography is a chronicle of poetry. The Second World War saw the publication, in 1943, of Finisterre, a collection which, published in Lugano in two successive editions of modest print runs, constituted one of the cornerstones of the volume La bufera e altro, a consistent continuation of his whole work, printed in 1956. La farfalla di Dinard - which from the ninety-six pages of the 1956 edition was expanded, from one edition to another, into the 273 pages of the 1960 edition - showed Montale to be an original writer of autobiography and imaginative prose, almost a narrator, with malicious flashes of wit but with an elegiac spirit.
In 1961, Montale was awarded an honorary degree at the University of Rome and shortly afterwards, at the universities of Milan, Cambridge, and Basel. In 1967, President Saragat appointed him senator for life "in recognition of his distinguished achievements in the literary and artistic fields". This event relieved him, in a sense, of the obligation to go every day to the editorial office of the "Corriere della Sera", where he had been working as a music critic, editor and special correspondent since 1948. The following works, prose as well as poetry, confirmed the vitality of a writer who, true to the fundamental themes of his early career (the Universe marked by inevitable failure and pain as an existential stigma), managed to collect experiences and important moments from the spiritual transformations of our times. Auto da fé (1966 and 1972), Fuori di casa (1969 and 1975) and Quaderno di tradazioni (1948 and 1975) are books that give an idea of the vastness of his interests and of the versatility of his talent, later confirmed by La bufera e altro (1970).
In 1971, Mondadori published his fourth collection of poetry, Satura, which soon became a bestseller. The book, exhibiting the usual linguistic ambiguity typical of Montale, alludes to a poetry that disrupts its own and others' patterns, including, in a paradoxical manner, much more than is usual (even for Montale) to include in the stylistic and linguistic models of poetry: meditative solicitations, existential themes about man still in some way Christian and Western, a wisdom anything but senile, subtle and provocative humor in the face of a world that changes and proceeds along its tragic and mysterious route.
Montale's great poetry, in actual fact, is born out of the search for those presences that reveal and liberate the hidden world, such as spectres and amulets. Not insusceptible to the stylistic lessons of Pascoli and Gozzano, nor to contemporaries writing in English, Montale has in his turn influenced younger Italian poets, even post-Ermetismo poets and experimentators.
After a volume of cultural articles, La farfalla di Dinard, he published in 1973, still with Mondadori, Diario 1971-72, which contains more recent lyric poems, born of a moral meditation not very different from that which brought forth the poems of Satura.
Attentive to the effects of history, Montale's poetry stands out as congenial to spirits that are aware of the consequences (of which, from many aspects, we have not yet seen the end) of the second world tragedy, which the writer saw as temporary reflections of an evil without origin and without end, according to a parable which makes him belong to the more conscious part of the European intellect.

Some of his poems

At the Threshold

Be pleased if the wind that enters the orchard
brings back the surge of life:
here where a dead tangle of memories
sinks and founders,
there was no garden, only a reliquary.

The flapping you hear is not flight
but a commotion in the eternal womb;
you see how this strip of solitary earth
transforms itself into a crucible.

Beyond the sheer wall is rage.
If you proceed, you might bump into—
perhaps you might—the saving apparition:
here the stories are composed, the acts
that the game of the future will cancel.

Look for a broken link in the net
that holds us down, jump out and flee!
Go, I've prayed this for you—now my thirst
will be lighter; the rust less bitter. . .

                                                              translated by David Young

Again and Again I Have Seen Life's Evil

Again and again I have seen life's evil:
it was the strangled brook, still gurgling,
it was the curling of the shriveled leaf,
it was the fallen horse.

I have known no good except the miracle
that reveals the divine Indifference:
it was the statue in the drowsy trance
of noon, the cloud, the cruising falcon.

                                                                translated by David Young

To Spend the Afternoon

To spend the afternoon, absorbed and pale,
beside a burning garden wall;
to hear, among the stubble and the thorns,
the blackbirds cackling and the rustling snakes.

On the cracked earth or in the vetch
to spy on columns of red ants
now crossing, now dispersing,
atop their miniature heaps.

To ponder, peering through the leaves,
the heaving of the scaly sea
while the cicadas' wavering screech
goes up from balding peaks.

And walking out into the sunlight's glare
to feel with melancholy wonder
how all of life and its travail
is in this following a wall
topped with the shards of broken bottles.

                                                                 translated by David Young

Glory of Expanded Noon

Glory of expanded noon
when the trees give up no shade,
and more and more the look of things
is turning bronze, from excess light.

Above, the sun—and a dry shore;
so my day is not yet done:
the finest hour is over the low wall,
closed off by a pale setting sun.

Drought all around: kingfisher hovers
over something life has left.
The good rain is beyond the barrenness,
but there's greater joy in waiting.

                                                                  translated by Jonathan Galassi

Bring Me the Sunflower

Bring me the sunflower so I can transplant it
here in my own field burned by salt-spray,
so it can show all day to the blue reflection of the sky
the anxiety of its golden face.

Darker things yearn for a clarity,
bodies fade and exhaust themselves in a flood
of colors, as colors do in music. To vanish,
therefore, is the best of all good luck.

Bring me the plant that leads us
where blond transparencies rise up
and life evaporates like an essence;
bring me the sunflower sent mad with light.

                                                                 translated by Charles Wright

The Dead

The sea that breaks on the opposite shore
throws up a cloud that spumes
until the sand flats reabsorb it. There,
one day, we jettisoned, on the iron coast,
our hope, more gasping than
the open sea—and the fertile abyss turns green
as in the days that saw us among the living.

Now that the north wind has flattened out the cloudy tangle
of gravy-colored currents and headed them back
to where they started, all around someone has hung
on the limbs of the tree thicket fish nets that string
along the path that goes down
out of sight;
faded nets that. dry in the late
and cold touch of the light; and over them
the thick blue crystal of the sky winks
and slides toward a wave-lashed arc
of horizon.

                More than seawrack dragged
from the seething that uncovers us, our life
moves against such stasis: and still it seethes
in us, that one thing which one day stopped, resigned
to its limits; among the strands that bind
one branch to another, the heart struggles
like a young marsh hen
caught in the net's meshes;
and motionless and migratory it holds us,
an icy steadfastness.
                               Thus
maybe the dead too have an rest taken away from them
in the ground; a force more pitiless
than life itself pulls them away from there, and all around
(shadows gnawed and swallowed by human memories)
drives them to these shores, breaths
without body or voice
betrayed by the darkness;
and their thwarted flights brush by us even now,
so recently separated from us, so close still,
and back in the sea's sieve go down...

                                                                   translated by Charles Wright

The Storm

Les princes n'ont point d'yeux pour voir ces grand's merveilles,
Leurs mains ne servent plus qu' à nous persécuter . . .
                                                    (Agrippa D' Aubigné: À Dieu)

The storm that trickles its long March
thunderclaps, its hail, onto the stiff
leaves of the magnolia tree;

(sounds of shaking crystal which startle you
in your nest of sleep; and the gold
snuffed on the mahogany, on the backs
of the bound books, flares again
like a grain of sugar in the shell
of your eyelids)

the lightning that blanches
the trees and walls, freezing them
like images on a negative (a benediction
and destruction you carry carved
within you, a condemnation that binds you
stronger to me than any love, my strange sister);
and then the tearing crash, the jangling sistrums, the rustle
of tambourines in the dark ditch of the night,
the tramp, scrape, jump of the fandango. . .and overhead
some gesture that blindly is groping. . .
                                                           as when
turning around, and, sweeping clear your forehead
of its cloud of hair,

you waved to me—and entered the dark.

                                                                          translated by Charles Wright

Copyrighted Material

Adelaide Crapsey-unconscious experimenter

Adelaide Crapsey

Adelaide Crapsey (1878-1914) was an American poet best known for establishing the five-line form known as the cinquain.
She had a deep appreciation for metrics and was an admirer of Japanese Tanka and Haiku. Her Cinquain was developed partly as an American analogue of these forms.

Her poetry was published posthumously in 1915 in a collection titled ,Verse, many poems of which were written in the last year of her life, and in the knowledge that she was dying of tuberculosis. Their publication in the year following her death was met with critical acclaim, particularly for the brevity, poise, and metrical sophistication of those she called Cinquains She is considered one of the first Imagist poets.

Her interest in Japanese poetry has also led some critics to link her to the Imagist movement that became popular shortly after she died and was led by the likes of Ezra Pound, H. D., and Amy Lowell. Louis Untermeyer, editor for many years of Modern American Poetry, for example, called her “an unconscious Imagist.” Although her untimely death precluded any chance for her to collaborate with these poets, Crapsey was undoubtedly influenced by some of the same factors that fomented their movement including a desire to pull back from some of the excesses of the Georgian poets. Like Crapsey’s cinquains, Imagist poetry is characterized by the precise use of imagery and economy of language.

She struggled to assemble the manuscript for Verse (which contains many poems still in draft form) as she neared death and clearly intended the collection to be, as Edward Butscher describes, “a sort of last testament and self-memorial.”4 This perception is underscored to her readers by the decision to offer the following poem at the conclusion of Verse:

NOVEMBER NIGHT
Listen . . .
With faint dry sound,
Like steps of passing ghosts,
The leaves, frost-crisp’d, break from the trees
And fall.

Amaze

I know

Not these my hands

And yet I think there was

A woman like me once had hands

Like these.

Niagara

Seen on a Night in November

How frail

Above the bulk

Of crashing water hangs,

Autumnal, evanescent, wan,

The moon.

TRIAD

These be
three silent things:
The falling snow . . . the hour
Before the dawn . . . the mouth of one
Just dead.

THE WARNING

Just now,
Out of the strange
Still dusk . . . as strange, as still . . .
A white moth flew . . . Why am I grown
So cold?

Milk and Honey.wmv - YouTube

At Baia

H. D.

On September 10, 1886, Hilda Doolittle was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. She attended Bryn Mawr, as a classmate of Marianne Moore and later the University of Pennsylvania where she befriended Ezra Pound and William Carlos William

She traveled to Europe in 1911, intending to spend only a summer, but remained abroad for the rest of her life.

Through Pound, H. D. grew interested in and quickly became a leader of the imagist movement some of her earliest poems gained recognition when they were published by Harriet Monroe in Poetry.

Her work is characterized by the intense strength of her images, economy of language, and use of classical mythology. Her poems did not receive widespread appreciation and acclaim during her lifetime, in part because her name was associated with the Imagist movement even as her voice had outgrown the movement's boundaries, as evidenced by her book-length works, Trilogy and Helen in Egypt.

As Alicia Ostriker said in American Poetry Review, "H.D. by the end of her career became not only the most gifted woman poet of our century, but one of the most original poets—the more I read her the more I think this—in our language."

Neglect of H. D. can also be attributed to her times, as many of her poems spoke to an audience which was unready to respond to the strong feminist principles articulated in her work. She died in 1961.

At Baia

I should have thought

in a dream you would have brought

some lovely, perilous thing,

orchids piled in a great sheath,

as who would say (in a dream),

"I send you this,

who left the blue veins

of your throat unkissed."

Why was it that your hands

(that never took mine),

your hands that I could see

drift over the orchid-heads

so carefully,

your hands, so fragile, sure to lift

so gently, the fragile flower-stuff--

ah, ah, how was it

You never sent (in a dream)

the very form, the very scent,

not heavy, not sensuous,

but perilous--perilous--

of orchids, piled in a great sheath,

and folded underneath on a bright scroll,

some word:

"Flower sent to flower;

for white hands, the lesser white,

less lovely of flower-leaf,"

or

"Lover to lover, no kiss,

no touch, but forever and ever this."

Helen

Helen   by H. D.

All Greece hates

the still eyes in the white face,

the lustre as of olives

where she stands,

and the white hands.

All Greece reviles

the wan face when she smiles,

hating it deeper still

when it grows wan and white,

remembering past enchantments

and past ills.

Greece sees, unmoved,

God's daughter, born of love,

the beauty of cool feet

and slenderest knees,

could love indeed the maid,

only if she were laid,

white ash amid funereal cypresses