A Pyrotechnic of Multiple Puns: Decoding the Political Satires of Nicolas Calas

In the 1960s and 1970s, the Greek-American poet and art critic Nicolas Calas wrote a series of satirical poems with highly political content. While most of his postwar poetry was written in a dense language characterized by cryptic word-games, the three political satires which attacked the monarchy and the junta are almost overloaded with multilevel puns that need careful decoding in order to be fully understood. Their conversion to English becomes an important part of the deciphering process. Several of the caricatures which emerge border on the grotesque as Calas mercilessly exposed and ridiculed the objects of his scorn. The exaggerated gestures of these political satires make us see the society that he criticized through a magnifying glass, or, rather surrealistically, in contorting fairground mirrors.