Ransoms to Time: Selected Poems (review)

220 Reviews Andonis Decavalles. Ransoms to Time: Selected Poems, translated from the modern Greek with an introduction and notes by Kimon Friar. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. London and Toronto : Associated University Presses, 1984. Pp. 142. $18.50. "In a sense", writes the translator in the introduction to this book, "Decavalles has always lived on the churning margin of phenomena ." Margins have become fashionable today in the literature about literature; but the overused concept of marginality fits the poet Andonis Decavalles in other ways besides this. His own life has been largely spent on the margins of the Greek culture for which, and in whose language, he writes his poetry. The center of Decavalles' autobiographical poetic world is the island of Sifhos, the family home that was never his, and is, as so often with his contemporary Greek poets, a "lost center." As Kimon Friar rightly notes in his introduction, a recurring theme of Decavalles' poetry is nostos, the Odyssean homecoming which proves constantly elusive and can only be effected, as in Homer, by communion with the dead. Like almost all the Greek poets of his generation, Decavalles grows out of the shadow of Seferis. One of the poems of his first collection , "A Greek Trireme" (cunningly selected by the translator as the first in the volume) both echoes and responds to the famous opening section of Seferis' "Mythistorima." The "we" who speak in this poem are not, like Seferis' protagonists, awaiting an apocalyptic angel /messenger, but merely sleep. Their efforts, or vigil, are distracted not by "the savage wings of swans that wounded us" but by the everyday triviality of "the door that creaked for the cup of coffee/ brought by a girl friend,/ and the gross headlines of the newspapers ." In place of the panarchaio drama of Seferis' poem, the protagonists here have to be content with "an exhausted sensibility" that preserves "what remained most living among still-life paintings'" (my emphasis). The poem is not so much a parody, still less an imitation of Seferis, as a transposition into a lower key. The lost center or absent presence makes a stronger appearance in the poems that Decavalles wrote after his move to America. This is most evident, and least successful, in the highly personal poems addressed to members of the poet's own family. It appears at its best in more abstract poems like "Morpheus' Sonnet," which describes, at the moment of its vanishing, a dream about a lost poem, a poem "written by Sleep," and ends: Reviews 221 Bit by bit the light came and effaced the lines, the accents, the rhymes, the words, and left there the pain of absence, brilliant now, lucid and felicitous. In more mythological vein, the same theme is dramatized in words put into the mouth of Judith after the murder of Holofernes: "Do I exist or not without eyes to behold me?/Do I exist with Holofernes dead?" and the poem concludes: "She spoke thus to the urn that held the ashes of her beauty,/the ashes of a night gained and lost" ("A Tree of Fire"). If the center of things is perceived as a vacuum, there devolves upon the poet a unique responsibility to fill that vacuum, to create in the void; and here Decavalles has taken a lead less from Seferis than from Odysseas Elytis. The poet, for Elytis, is a microcosm of God the creator {Poietes) and has semi-divine powers to create a world out of words. In "For the Tree to Remember" Decavalles suggests that the normal processes of nature and artifice may be instantaneous and effortless: But it needs a little aeon for the word to become clay in your fingers to measure the size and to lift the weight of things, and it takes the flame a little aeon to chisel the ineffable. At his best Decavalles is master of the concise, unexpected image , as when he writes of the drummer "with his mechanical resurrections " ("Waterdrops and Drummer"), or of the female figure on an ancient stele: "In a corner I found her returned/as though Death were too small/to hold her" ("Melisto, Mnesikrates' Daughter"). And in a poem addressed to his...