Poet

Násos Vayenás

(Greece, 1945)

Biography

Násos Vayenás writes poems about love, death, Woman, and poetry. He writes about the ‘cracks in the void’ he hopes to find as a last resort, to help him go forward against all odds, realizing that he will have to make do with ‘what is left’. Ideals of a better world, a better Greece, still exist, but they are the ideals of a man who watches how all around him they are lost in daily routine and decay.

At best they offer him a last straw to hold on to amidst defeat and decline: heroic resignation, tempered with irony and relativization.

Vayenás was born in Drama in northern Greece. After studying Greek literature in Athens he went on to study in Rome and in Cambridge, where he obtained his doctorate in 1979 with a thesis on The Poet and the Dancer, a study of the poetics and the poetry of Seferis. After holding a professorship in modern Greek literature at the University of Crete (Réthymno) he was in 1992 appointed in a similar function at the Department of Theatre Studies of the University of Athens. He writes about poetry, especially about poetry translation.

Vayenás has published seven books of poetry.

[Násos Vayenás took part in the Poetry International Festival Rotterdam 2000. This text was written on that occasion.]

Publications (selection):
Field of Mars (1974), Roxani’s Knees (1981), Biography (1978), Wanderings Of a Non-Traveller (1986), The Fall of the Winged (1989), Barbaric Odes (1992); The Fall of the Winged II (1997).