MILTOS SACHTOURIS
POEMS
by
Translated by Karen Emmerich
Archipelago Books
Paper, 235 pages
ISBN 0-9763950-6-1
Previously published in Bloomsbury Review
Karen Emmerich s translations of the poems of Miltos Sachtouris ensnare us within the nightmarish quality of his surreal vision. These poems, written in Sachtouris native Greek between 1945-1971, inject us with the raw emotion of a poet in the turmoil of his times the fascist dictatorship of General Metaxas, the Axis occupation, the civil war, and the military junta. While none of his poems seem to deal with a specific person, a specific geographical setting, but instead draw with bright colors a series of abstract and anonymous vignettes, they each contain an unexpected punch which can leave you emotionally shaken. Consider this from Beauty:
He lost his voice
it was stolen by the
frantic woman
who cut off her head in
the red waters
and the poor man has no
more voice to sing
and the river rolls the
quiet head
with closed lids
Singing
This view of the world seems something that Sachtouris never escaped, as if he spent his life surrounded by visions of grotesque violence, even though, as he says in The Savior:
with my naked heart I seek (not for myself)
a sky-blue window
It s a window he didn t often find. But when he did, it was a matter of exquisite beauty, as in Natura:
They all put on the new greenery
and took the infants of
the world in their arms
they hold dewdrops in palms of dawn
As translated by Emmerich, the poetry of Sachtouris uses each length of line as a form of its own measure of beats, with the absence of punctuation leaving the end of the line as a natural pause. The repetition of phrases, akin to what Catullus did, reinforces the rhythm and works to build the cadence and emotion of each poem. But more often it is Sachtouris arrangement of both image and action that snaps our attention to his words and makes us see a world through a prism we haven t looked through before. In Images, he writes:
A leaf fell
from the tree
at night
and started
to jump
howling
on the ground
And this from Stranger:
you plead
leave
stranger leave
I have a tame bird in my
head
if I let it out
its teeth will tear you to shreds
And this from Evil Image:
Eggs cracked
and sick children
came into the world
like broken stars
In the work of Sachtouris, death rarely goes away. It peers through the window in the morning. ( Morning and Evening ). It could be his heart on the table, where he sliced it in two with a bread knife. ( The Drowned Man ) Even children s dolls would blacken with fear. (Sparrows ) And where one might normally find beauty in a sunset, Sachtouris saw pigeons fly backwards. ( Sunset ) He wrote with a fire that whitens within me and the wax drips/hot in my heart, so that you marble moon/you shatter me. ( I Turn )
But if the violence and injustice of his world lead us to believe it left him broken inside, his poems remained remarkably consistent in style and tone and subject-matter throughout his life, and if his work often seems surrealistically obtuse, this might simply be his defense and code against the potential suppression of his art by a militaristic authority. As he says in The Inspector:
I
heir of birds
must
though with broken wings
take flight
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