Tuesday, February 9, 2010

With Face to the Wall: Selected Poems of Miltos Sahtouris



With Face to the Wall: Selected Poems of Miltos Sahtouris, Translation and Introduction by Kimon Friar, Washington, The Charioteer Press, 1968, (40pp, First Edition, 300 copies, sadly out of print for eons). Another book I have no recollection of buying, but the frontispiece does have a telltale $1.50 penciled in up in the right-hand corner, so I must have bought it somewhere, but where? Ah, yes, now I remember and can see a hand writing something slowly on a faraway wall. . . . . . . . .

”From this private country, Sahtouris sends us the image-laden and blood-spattered reports of an explorer from what seems at first to be another planet. At times they read like the reports of a missionary, a doctor, a diagnostician, an astronaut, a saviour, and at times like the cryptic declarations of a Cumaean Sybil, the mad but prophetic utterances of a Cassandra. It is from all these, arranged in chronological order, that I have chosen, icon after icon, the strange, obsessed, neurotic, yet nostalgic poems of Miltos Sahtouris, which, we begin to realize, reflect our own world like underwater traceries of our most familiar objects: The Forgotten Woman, 1945; Ballads, 1948; With Face to the Wall; 1952; When I Speak to You, 1956; The Phantoms or Joy in the Other Street, 1958; The Stroll, 1960; The Stigmata, 1962, The Seal or The Eighth Moon, 1964.


Perhaps the title of his third book best describes the stance and perspective that Miltos Sahtouris has taken: With Face to the Wall. His rigidity in that position is suggestive of many causes and many effects. It is that of a small child who has been placed in a corner facing a wall by parent or teacher. He stands there, not quite understanding why he is being punished, but beginning to feel, as time lapses into time, that he must indeed have been guilty of some great sin, some unspeakable crime. The only recourse of the child is to shut his eyes tight and fly off into a world of his own fantastic compensation. It is also a position taken on his own volition by a man in early youth who deliberately turns his back on the world that he may gaze into it more piercingly. The wall on which he now stares with a third, inner eye, is that which separates lover from lover, husband from wife, friend from friend, nation from nation, no matter of what material it is composed: iron, bamboo, silk, stone, invisible glass, or yielding air. It is at once barrier and barricade, stronghold and iron cage, prison and asylum wall. It is the Wailing Wall where every minority group—and whose numbers are more depleted than those of the true poets?—bewails its fate and thus the fate of all individuals and of all nations. And it is finally that
wall in Greece during the German-Italian Occupation of the early 1940s against which—as against all similar walls throughout the world—men, women, and children, poets among them (as in Spain), were ruthlessly propped up as hostages and shot down by rifle and machinegun fire. It is a nightmare world of Hitler and Hiroshima that makes the distorted and dislocated images of Sahtouris seem but pale depictions of actual events. He belongs to the postwar generation of poets who had seen the whitewashed walls of Greece suddenly splattered red, and all his poetry has been colored by this terror. . . one word colors all of his poetry: blood.

It would be correct to say that Sahtouris did not at first choose of his own free will to stand with his face to the wall. Like most of us during the past two generations, he was placed there first by parent, priest, or teacher for punishment, or out of original sin, then by the enemy, and finally by some Kafkaesque tribunal of the universe, unknown and mysterious. It was only later that he recognized his personal wounds as the stigmata of the entire world’s guilt. Like Maria, in the poem by that name, when everybody began to speak through him unbearably, as through a medium, he took refuge by beginning to fly in imagination round and round a room that was both prison and escape, for, as he writes in ‘The Saviour,’ ‘every room is an open wound.’ . . .In his early verses, image follows image without logical intent, as in the naturally surrealist world of childhood, evoking, in their totality, worlds of alienation, agony, lost innocence, love betrayed, fear, anxiety, guilt. It would be futile in many of these poems, and in the whole of Sahtouris’ work, to attempt any thoroughly logical deduction or sequential exegesis. ‘My poetry is many things which elude me,’ he once told me [Friar], ‘and which I do not understand. And if I did understand, I would not wish to reveal it.’ . . . His belief is that poetry, no matter how shattering, may transform tragedy by shaping it into the ordered beauty of image and cadence. He sprinkles ugliness with beauty, casts a shadow spray of colors among his gaping images, wants every spring to be judged by its own gladness, nails us to the pavement that we may admire the celestial advertisements, transforms mundane reality into cinematic art that defies death until one day, he declares, we may ‘pass through the black burning hole of the sun’”. [from Friar’s indispensible, probing, eye-opening, excellent Introduction]


Celebrated in many countries around the globe (the US not included) as one of the previous century’s outstanding poets, Miltos Sahtouris was born in Athens in 1919 and died there in 2005. Living in a world all his own, a world of inner consistency, he never traveled beyond the boundaries of Greece; in fact, he rarely left his Athens neighborhood, restricting his contacts with the world outside his small apartment in the suburb of Kypseli to a small circle of friends. Slow in being accepted by older, more conservative readers, primarily because his work was not adequately appreciated by the generation of poets preceding him, he nevertheless continues to be read avidly by a younger generation of Greeks. Readers of this blog who wish to read more of his work in English translation are kindly redirected to this
link which is a 52-page PDF document containing some of his finest poems.

[SIX POEMS BY MILTOS SAHTOURIS]


EXPERIMENTS FOR THE REPITITION OF NIGHT


My friends are leaving

they have come to say goodbye


I shall never see my friends again


one of them is leaving for the adjacent room

his face turned black

he wore a dark green material

night has fallen

he no longer speaks


the other is leaving for the other room

to find pins

first however he hid himself behind the curtains

he became frightened

afterwards he climbed on the window

to sleep


the other took off his shoes

with trembling hands

he took them to warm

the statue

he took it into the bedroom

he does not know how to make it stand upright


my friends have gone far away

I shall not see my friends

again


THE SCENE


On the table they had placed upright

a head of clay

they had decorated their walls

with flowers

on the bed they had cut out of paper

two erotic bodies

on the floor snakes scurried

and butterflies

a huge dog kept guard

in the corner


Strings stretched across the room

from all sides

it would be imprudent for anyone

to pull them

one of the strings pushed the bodies

to make love

The unhappiness outside

clawed the doors


MARIA


Maria was pensively

taking off her stockings


Out of her body

voices rose of other human beings

that of a soldier who spoke like a bird

that of a sick man who had died from sheep pains

and the weeping of a small niece of Maria’s

who in these past few days had just been born


Maria wept and wept

now Maria laughed

at night she spread out her hands

with her legs wide open


Afterwards her eyes darkened

black black opaque they darkened


The radio played

Maria wept

Maria wept

The radio played


Then Maria

slowly slowly opened her arms

and began to fly

round and round the room


LIFE


Night

in a pharmacy

a kneeling

horse
eats

the floorboards

a girl
with a strange

green

burn

is being healed

while the ghost

in despair

weeps

in the corner


THE STATION


In memory of Guillaume Apollinaire


In my sleep it is always raining

my dreams fill with mud

there is a dark landscape
and I am waiting for a train
the stationmaster gathers daisies

which have sprouted amid the rails

because no train has come

to this station for a long time

and the years have suddenly passed

I sit behind a windowpane

my hair and beard have grown long

as though I were very ill

and as sleep once more takes me

she comes slowly slowly

she holds a knife in her hands
she approaches me carefully
and plunges the knife in my right eye

8 comments:

  1. Thanks so much for the great post, Vassilis, and for the PDF link. The particular selection (Friar's) you mention is one I have, believe it or not, one I've returned to with pleasure over the years. I remember where I bought mine, though (I think!): at a used book store in Bellingham, Washington, called Bank Books (it was housed in a former bank building). This would have been 1973 or '74, when I was studying in Vancouver BC with the inimitable George McWhirter, who encouraged us all to read translations. (He himself translates from Spanish, notably José Emilio Pacheco and Homero Aridjis. Anyway, I just last year picked up a new Sahtouris (here Englished as "Sachtouris") from Archipelago Books, translated by Karen Emmerich. It's always fun to watch how good translators "move in the little ways that encourage good fortune," as Stafford put it. It all certainly makes me want to read him in the original!

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  2. My feelings exactly. What a fine introduction. I’m about ten pages into the PDF and I feel like I’m falling....

    My only experience with Friar is through his masterful rendering of The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel. Inspiration on each and every page.

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  3. Joe,

    Hmmm....we seem to have been traveling in parallel universes back in the early 70s--it's a shame we never met--Vancouver/Bellingham isn't that far from Seattle, is it? I would have never thought anybody I knew would have this little gem of a book (only 300 printed) but then again,it's nice discovering how wrong one can be. Thanks for the links and the comments!

    William,

    ......into the Abyss? Don't forget what Kazantzakis says at the beginning of his Spiritual Exercises!

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  4. Indeed. Well, I can certainly benefit from the daily exercise!

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  5. I can't get the pdf...Can you please send it to me directly...thanks

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  6. I was hoping to find 'One day we shall stop like a sky blue carriage amidst pale gold...'

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