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