Surrealism in Greece: An Anthology

Afterword

A f t e r w o r d The importance of Pali, which has only recently begun to inspire some good-faith academic study, has been rather underplayed in Greece, for the simple reason that critics have shown a profound and indeed stubborn ignorance of the actuality of surrealism. Yet the journal’s heritage involved a dual movement: besides posing the issue of continuity, it encouraged a reappraisal of the earlier surrealists, one that extended beyond the options of hostile rejection or mute admiration.This is primarily due to Nanos Valaoritis, who inaugurated the mature period of surrealist theory, often focusing on the early works of Greek surrealists, examined for the first time with any degree of thoroughness. The climate of the era certainly helped: after the restoration of the parliamentary system in 1974, surrealism and Dada emerged vaguely in the context of Greek counterculture as precursors of May ’68, the situationist movement, beat literature, etc., while the indigenous surrealist writing was freshly appreciated via reprintings. Yet, as Valaoritis noted in a text included herein, no significant study of Embirikos’s work was written during his lifetime (he died a year after the junta’s downfall). This may not be irrelevant to the equally crucial fact that the actual texts of international surrealism were completely ignored and that, despite the gradual emergence of books from the French group’s early days, they continue to be so to a considerable extent. This fact may, as noted, be readily witnessed in certain recent accounts which, while purporting to assess Greek surrealism from the momentarily assumed viewpoint of the international movement, actually reveal only the faintest of acquaintances with certain early texts by Breton. And even though the latter’s thought did at last become partly available, this often happened in the context of 33 8    Afterword a facile pigeonholing: thus, for instance, a vogue in the seventies and eighties that gave rise to a vulgarization of situationism allowed surrealism some room as a dead and somewhat discredited precursor. Significantly, while a fair numberof publishers put out certain “classics” of surrealism, only one, Parallelogram Editions (which sadly folded too soon), with a tiny output and limited distribution, was exclusively devoted to surrealist works and relevant studies, even though, in that case too, the stress was placed on early French texts. Crucially, the postwar phase of the movement has been by and large ignored, with the exceptions of Octavio Paz (especially post-Nobel) and Joyce Mansour (mostly thanks to Hector Kaknavatos’s efforts). But even early surrealism is approached with a curiously selective attitude: not a single book by Benjamin Péret was published until very recently, while the introduction of Antonin Artaud and Georges Bataille to a largely receptive young Greek public followed for the most part the line of disengaging their works from surrealism owing to their brief disputes with Breton. Pali’s intentions regarding the coverage of old and new surrealism alike were thus not fulfilled. Frangiski Abatzopoulou’s anthologyof Greek surrealism, published in 1980, purported to be the first academic work to place the phenomenon firmly in its international context; yet despite including rare material by certain “forefathers,” the anthology coupled a brief account of surrealism’s principles via early French polemics and essays with a vague introduction and a near-random selection of Greek names bearing a certain debt to surrealism—in some cases an almost invisible one. Given that Greek writing (poetry in particular but also a great deal of prose and drama) has, as mentioned, displayed a strong surrealist influence over the years, albeit one that veers toward a sanitized, mildly lyrical, and politically dubious version of the movement’s poetic conquests, this double focus served to confuse rather than enlighten . Notable book-length studies have since been provided by such writers as Z. I. Siaflekis and Victor Ivanovici, along with a plethora of essays and articles by younger writers. At the same time, the fortunes of Greek surrealism in the English-speaking world have left much to be desired. Following the extreme conservatism of those AngloSaxon publishers who showed some interest in Greek poetry in the immediate aftermath of World War II, certain translations of Elytis were the only ones that had any impact to speak of.This situation was reinforced much later by Elytis’s Nobel, which has resulted in the availability of virtually his entire poetic output in English, albeit with little emphasis on his surrealist period, his early essays in particular. The...