Article
Aphorisms and numbers
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January 18, 2006
The titles of his collections (The Forgotten One 1945, Fantastic Lays 1948, When I Speak to You 1956, The Spectres or Joy in the Next Street 1958, The Stroll 1960, Stigmata 1962, The Seal or The Eighth Moon 1964, The Receptacle 1971) could be categorised in multiple ways. Five of them are monolexical; four consist of several words; seven of them are nominal clauses; two are verbal. The first two allude to our folk poetry; the fifth and eight collections denote a predilection for surrealism by their very title; the remainder seem to move neutrally between the two margins, albeit with a latent tendency towards a modernistic point of reference.
I believe that one may derive certain impressions based on this numerical and grammatical delineation of Sachtouris’ work: the poet’s poetic production is characterised by a complex frugality with regard to both quantity and content; his poetry forms a system of ultimate equilibrium, which is ensured thanks to the subtle weighing of minute differences. There are no feverish, external antitheses to be found; the fever burns the poem from within, whilst the surface usually remains untroubled, just like snow, or glistens like ice.
The frugal system of his work corresponds to an equally sparse biography. One is tempted to quote the precious pieces of information gleaned by Yannis Dallas in To Dendro literary review (No 1, 1978, pp. 8-9) – which also included verbatim comments by the poet – in an effort to juxtapose them somewhat less linearly.
Hydra, as a birthplace, represents the buried ancestral honour and glory; Nafplion and Argolis stand for the sold property; Athens and Kypseli serve as the poet’s hermitage. In 1939, at twenty years of age, the poet loses his father; in 1955, when he is thirty-six, his mother dies. The death of his father, a judicial officer and legal consultant for the State, releases the son from his law studies and allows him to devote himself exclusively to poetry: he burns his law books and from now on makes himself and his poetic world “judicially homeless”, to use Dallas’ pithy expression. The death of his mother – extremely sensitive and silent as a ghost – in the words of the poet himself, emancipates Sachtouris to an even more profound and painful level. As he confesses, “when my mother died as well, I began to shed many things from me, both on the inside and the outside; bit by bit, my sight became more perspicacious and my hearing sharper so that I might better see and hear what things have to reveal behind their façade”. Having thus become freer also in this perspective, or to borrow another poignant phrase by Dallas, now also “maternally roofless”, the poet can peruse his inner and outer world, which has become inhumane.
I will say a few more words, though I run the risk of overstepping the boundaries of discretion with regard to a poet who has always kept his personal life out of the limelight. I want to talk about certain complementary contrasts: though of “stout and almost athletic” build, for quite some time his health has been rather fragile. Solitary to the extreme, yet he wastes his time engaging in odd “mundane” ceremonies: he frequents specific coffee houses at specific hours, both in summer and winter. Though his eroticism is unquestionably engraved on his face (sometime even to the point of coquetry), he remains so blatantly childlike and awkward that one might rashly derive the impression that it is mere affectation. Despite being a grand-grandchild of George Sachtouris, a famous naval officer during the 1821 Independence War, the poet kept nothing of his grand-grandfather’s accoutrement apart from “a pipe that is almost as big as he was”, according to Dallas. Even though he was a man in possession of immovable property, he ended up in a cramped, rented flat on 2, Imvrou Str. Raised though he was with the prospect of taking up a rather more prestigious profession, from early on he chose to take a position by the window of poetry, so that might look out at the garden and the pharmacy or coffee house across the road without the encumbrance of a job. No one is in a position to say anything specific about his political beliefs, and yet he remains a profoundly political poet.
from Miltos Sachtouris People – Colours – Animals – Machines.
What is paramount is the implication that, through their concise work, poets such as Solomos, Cavafy and Seferis in the end succeeded in demarcating a poetic land, whereas this was not the case with Kazantzakis for example, despite his torment and struggle to depict an entire continent. Or again, to put it in more familiar terms, Kariotakis, elegiac and satirical, perhaps opened a poetic territory, in that he became a local focal point (in a biological and poetic sense) for the specific bleak era that came to be called the Interwar years. As for Sachtouris, who is the subject of this treatise, I believe that he offered himself as a vessel of choice and expression for the post-war absurdity, and suddenly modern Greek surrealism rejected its ornamental opulence. At this point, however, I must move on from aphorisms to numbers.
Nine collections by Sachtouris, comprising 212 poems in toto; these poems cover twenty-six years of low-profile poetic presence in the publishing world, from 1945 to 1971. There were interims of fecund silence from one collection to the next; of two years minimum, these interims averaged four years, whilst the longest interval between two collections lasted seven years, from 1964 to 1971 (between the penultimate and his latest collection). Could we hope that the time is ripe for his next collection, glimpses of which seem to have appeared in literary magazines? The titles of his collections (The Forgotten One 1945, Fantastic Lays 1948, When I Speak to You 1956, The Spectres or Joy in the Next Street 1958, The Stroll 1960, Stigmata 1962, The Seal or The Eighth Moon 1964, The Receptacle 1971) could be categorised in multiple ways. Five of them are monolexical; four consist of several words; seven of them are nominal clauses; two are verbal. The first two allude to our folk poetry; the fifth and eight collections denote a predilection for surrealism by their very title; the remainder seem to move neutrally between the two margins, albeit with a latent tendency towards a modernistic point of reference.
I believe that one may derive certain impressions based on this numerical and grammatical delineation of Sachtouris’ work: the poet’s poetic production is characterised by a complex frugality with regard to both quantity and content; his poetry forms a system of ultimate equilibrium, which is ensured thanks to the subtle weighing of minute differences. There are no feverish, external antitheses to be found; the fever burns the poem from within, whilst the surface usually remains untroubled, just like snow, or glistens like ice.
The frugal system of his work corresponds to an equally sparse biography. One is tempted to quote the precious pieces of information gleaned by Yannis Dallas in To Dendro literary review (No 1, 1978, pp. 8-9) – which also included verbatim comments by the poet – in an effort to juxtapose them somewhat less linearly.
Hydra, as a birthplace, represents the buried ancestral honour and glory; Nafplion and Argolis stand for the sold property; Athens and Kypseli serve as the poet’s hermitage. In 1939, at twenty years of age, the poet loses his father; in 1955, when he is thirty-six, his mother dies. The death of his father, a judicial officer and legal consultant for the State, releases the son from his law studies and allows him to devote himself exclusively to poetry: he burns his law books and from now on makes himself and his poetic world “judicially homeless”, to use Dallas’ pithy expression. The death of his mother – extremely sensitive and silent as a ghost – in the words of the poet himself, emancipates Sachtouris to an even more profound and painful level. As he confesses, “when my mother died as well, I began to shed many things from me, both on the inside and the outside; bit by bit, my sight became more perspicacious and my hearing sharper so that I might better see and hear what things have to reveal behind their façade”. Having thus become freer also in this perspective, or to borrow another poignant phrase by Dallas, now also “maternally roofless”, the poet can peruse his inner and outer world, which has become inhumane.
I will say a few more words, though I run the risk of overstepping the boundaries of discretion with regard to a poet who has always kept his personal life out of the limelight. I want to talk about certain complementary contrasts: though of “stout and almost athletic” build, for quite some time his health has been rather fragile. Solitary to the extreme, yet he wastes his time engaging in odd “mundane” ceremonies: he frequents specific coffee houses at specific hours, both in summer and winter. Though his eroticism is unquestionably engraved on his face (sometime even to the point of coquetry), he remains so blatantly childlike and awkward that one might rashly derive the impression that it is mere affectation. Despite being a grand-grandchild of George Sachtouris, a famous naval officer during the 1821 Independence War, the poet kept nothing of his grand-grandfather’s accoutrement apart from “a pipe that is almost as big as he was”, according to Dallas. Even though he was a man in possession of immovable property, he ended up in a cramped, rented flat on 2, Imvrou Str. Raised though he was with the prospect of taking up a rather more prestigious profession, from early on he chose to take a position by the window of poetry, so that might look out at the garden and the pharmacy or coffee house across the road without the encumbrance of a job. No one is in a position to say anything specific about his political beliefs, and yet he remains a profoundly political poet.
from Miltos Sachtouris People – Colours – Animals – Machines.
© Dimitris Maronitis
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