Welcome to Greek poetry - December 2004

18 januari 2006 Embiricos lived in Paris during the late 1920s and early 1930s and associated closely with Andrè Breton and various surrealist poets and painters. He was analyzed and trained by René Laforgue. When Embiricos returned to Greece in 1932, he lectured on surrealism, set up a practice as the first psychoanalyst in Greece, and in 1935 published his first volume of poetry, Blast Furnace, prose poems in automatic writing of the purest surrealist cast. Eleven years later he published Hinterland, surrealist poems in free verse, and throughout his life continued to write poetry remaining true to main tenets of an inspiration that wells up primarily from the subconscious.

In a wonderful prose poem entitled ‘Amour Amour’, published in 1960 (translated into English by the late Nikos Stangos and Alan Ross), as a kind of ‘introduction’ to the poems of the collection Writings, or Personal Mythology, Embiricos described his original poetic search and vision in the most vivid and truthful way. It would be best to let him speak adding no further introductory comments.

Once, many years ago, while on an excursion to Switzerland, I stopped to admire a huge waterfall which pounded over granite rocks among rich vegetation. During that period, which I could call a period of intense research, forced by an inner necessity that was almost organic, I was trying to find a more immediate and fuller expression in the poems which I then wrote. The sight of the waterfall gave me an idea. As I saw the water falling from high up to continue on its gurgling way, I thought how interesting it would be if I could use, in the sphere of poetic creation, the same process which makes the flowing of water such a rich, fascinating and indisputable reality, instead of describing this flowing or some other phenomenon, event, feeling, or idea on the basis of preconceived and predetermined plan or formula.

I wanted, in other words, to weave in my poems all those elements which, whether we want this or not, are precluded from or evade us in traditional poetry. I wanted to include in my poems these elements in a such a way that a poem would not merely consist of one or more subjective or objective themes, logically specified and developed within conscious limits, but of any element which would appear in the flux of its becoming regardless of any conventionalized or standardized aesthetic, ethical or logical construction. In this case, I thought, we could have a dynamic and total poem, a self-subsistent poem, a poem-event in place of consecutive presentations of static descriptions of certain events or sentiments, in this or that technique . . . I would still be searching today if what was a shattering confrontation with surrealism had not opened my eyes.

From that day on, I can say that almost at once I made out where the road lay and threw myself with enthusiasm and true exaltation in the stream of this historic movement . . . And so a new world opened up from me, like a sudden bursting into bloom of inexhaustible miracles, a word around me and in me that was unending and immeasurable, a truly magic world to which surrealism has given us once and for all the right keys.