Surrealism in Greece: An Anthology

Introduction

I n t r o d u c t i o n In the “Surrealist Map of the World” printed in the “Surrealism Special” of the journal Variétés in 1929, Greece is conspicuous by its absence. So, of course, are several other countries, but Greece and Italy in particular (insofar as having originated the “Greco-Roman” civilization) were reportedly seen by surrealism’s founder, André Breton, as symbols of an insipid rationality imposed upon what has come to be called the Western world. Yet the simultaneous absence of France and presence of Paris on the map should draw attention to the function of the emphatically present Constantinople: a Greco-Turkish hybrid (Turkey being equallyabsent), a crossroads between East and West. From the outset, Constantinople (the fabled origin of the surrealist Nikos Engonopoulos) marks a challenge to the assumed heritage of Greek civilization. It is thus that Greek surrealism has been blatantly conscious of the cultural practices and attitudes reporting to “tradition,” as well as of the complexity pertaining to the latter concept. The relationship of its major representatives with the Greek language itself will be addressed in the course of this anthology (as concisely as possible , given that such a relationship is by definition resistant to translation). Equally noteworthy, however, is the use of “indigenous” themes, especially by Greek surrealism ’s foremost figures, Andreas Embirikos and Nikos Engonopoulos. In the former’s paganist inclinations and in the latter’s pointed rejection of French rationalism and neoclassicism in favor of an idiosyncratic treatment of Greek themes, a crucial inversion takes place: to the earlier French surrealists’ repudiation of the classical heritage , Greek surrealism answers by promoting an alternative, expansive, and indeed subversive interpretation of this very heritage.     Introduction Certain critics, whose hostility toward surrealism is complemented by a tendency to pronounce definitive statements, often argue that the movement flourished in Greece to an extent unequaled in any other country, save perhaps France. This contention , which chooses to ignore surrealism’s international dynamics, rests on the impressively wide influence surrealist imagery has exerted on mainstream Greek poetry: an actual fact, albeit one alarmingly reminiscent of the “Chinese whispers” game, whereby the original explosion is too often evoked and eventually replaced by its tiny echo. Nonetheless, the phenomenon is not without its importance, for in Greece, unlike many other cultures (notably English-speaking ones), it has been impossible, even on the level of the most conservative literary tendencies, to ignore surrealism altogether. And this, in fact, is not hard to explain. Being a postcolonial state marked by financial provinciality and political instability and informed by countless layers of history and culture even though a mere century old, that Greece to which surrealism was introduced in the early 1930s boasted of neither a substantial, tried, and tested cultural canon nor a coherent prehistory of radical expression. This said, an anthology of Greek presurrealism such as that envisaged by Nanos Valaoritis1 in homage to Nicolas Calas (the first Greek writer who conceived of mapping the early mavericks, extremists, and experimenters ) would perhaps place the present work in perspective. It is also Valaoritis who has noted, on various occasions, that Embirikos, both through his work and through his physical presence (exerting as he did a quasipolar attraction on young poets), has attained in Greece a status similar to that of Guillaume Apollinaire in France. The comparison is particularly apt because troubling , for Embirikos, Calas, and (a little later, yet more aggressively) Engonopoulos propagated surrealism in a country that ignored the very notion of an “avant-garde,” with all the complications or limitations this term may entail. Greek surrealism thus knew no preparatory stages; the double result of which was, on the one hand, an overwhelmingly scandalous (if quantitatively modest) debut, in the shape of a few, albeit important, early books and interventions, and, on the other, a number of obstacles to its development. Other critics, equally (but less openly) hostile to surrealism, make the exact opposite argument, to the effect that Greek surrealism has never actually existed; and in fact, the extreme peculiarity pertaining to these two entirelycontradictory interpretations of the phenomenon would in itself suffice to render the latter remarkable . This second scenario is often based on the assumption that the appearance of the earliest surrealist-related events and texts in Greece came at too late a date (that is, around 1935!) to be either truly radical or unproblematically incorporated into a movement conveniently presumed to have died a little while before or...