Kosta

His letters to me always started with φιλοσ and closed with αγαπη, and although I sometimes had difficulty in translating the squeezed calligraphy of his English, the two Greek words formed a sort of epistolary umbrella under which our friendship could thrive. Not that Kosta was generally unfriendly to anyone; on the contrary I know no one who was more universally regarded with affection. It was just that, like a balloon that had reached—and perhaps slightly surpassed—its capacity for expansion, his absorption in his incredibly extended Greek-American family and the small circle of writers he had joined at Ann Arbor, where he earned his doctorate in the 1960s, was so complete and isolating that there seemed to be no room for an additional breath of relationship. I am not suggesting that he would have burst in any metaphorical way, or that this was a considered strategy on his part. To the world outside and inside his sphere of daily occupations, he presented a serene decency that made the word sweetness a recurrent epitaph that almost everyone I know included in their commentaries after his death, even though it was obvious that there was more to Kosta than a passive, slightly detached acceptance of whatever life offered him. Since his death I have been trying to sort out the elements that made his character so pomegranate rich and our friendship so warm and fructifying.

Kosta was, I believe, a pure poet, a voluntary galley slave of language, caught inextricably between the American English in which he was schooled, submerged, washed inside and out from his birth in Steubenville, Ohio, and the demotic Greek of his family, his church, his fellow Ikarian emigrants to Pittsburgh, and the cerulean syllables of Solomos, Sikelianos, Kazantzakis, Seferis, Gatsos, Cavafy, Ritsos, and Elytis to which he aspired. Thus the use of φιλοσ and αγαπη in his letters to me was more than a convention. It formed, I choose to believe, a yoke of absolute commitment, an unbreakable covenant, sealed by the radiant words of friend and love—classical words hallowed by centuries of wine-dark wear and polished daily in the rituals of the Greek Orthodox Church.

When I suggest that Kosta (or “Gus,” as American-English impertinently democratizes Constantine’s imperial name) was a “pure” poet, I am not referring so much to the lines he wrote, as the life he was. Ordinarily I believe in the experiential definition of identity: we are what we do when we are in the process of doing it. A writer, a farmer, a schoolteacher can be defined by their occupations only when they are actively engaged in them. When they do other things—cook, play with their children, go to the bank, love, or loaf—their working personae recede and other facets of the rich human potential that everyone possesses come to the fore. In fact this multiplicity of personality may be one of the survival strengths of our species, allowing us to adapt nimbly to always changing circumstances, while providing us with opportunities to refresh our energies by refocusing them.

Kosta almost never ceased being a poet. Of course he was a son, a brother, a husband, a father, a professor, a gardener, a friend, and, in the last decade of his life, a devoted papou, but—more than anyone I have ever met—he engaged the quotidian world with a poet’s receptivity. I don’t mean that he twisted circumstances into sonnets or wrestled to replace life with words. I refer rather to the way he typically responded to the workaday events of his life. Whether he was visiting his local Yonkers barbershop, driving relatives to hospitals, attending innumerable funerals, passionately pruning bushes and raking leaves, religiously scanning the Greek newspapers to see what new outrage the right-wing parties in Athens were inflicting on his beloved ancestral country, or sitting at the dining-room table for hours, eating pastry, drinking coffee, and cracking walnuts as though it were an Olympic event that he was lucky enough to have won a permanent entry in. To whatever life presented him, his initial response was something like a receptive awe. This...