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Nikos Karouzos
Collected Poems
translated by Philip Ramp,
Shoestring Press (318pp., £12.95. ISBN 1-899549-95-1)

WHILE cultural achievement in modern Greece might always be overshadowed by its classical heritage, the renown of poets like C.P. Cavafy, or the two Nobel laureates George Seferis and Odysseus Elytis has helped to adjust perceptions of Greek soil as one of irretrievably past greatness. History, however, can repeat itself: one feels that an apparent fixation on these poets’ laurels, while understandable, in turn deprives other major figures of the attention they deserve. Nikos D. Karouzos (1926-1990), whom readers of MPT have caught a glimpse of in the David Ricks-edited Greece Special Issue of 1996, is such a case; though his relative non-attendance in translation also has to do with Greek criticism only recently mobilizing (mainly in two symposia held at Athens University in the previous decade) to assert his significance. Here is a visionary poet of a truly unique and complex voice, astounding in its reach, enunciating both the profound and the selfevident in ingenious ways. And so the arrival, in Philip Ramp’s translation, of the hefty volume (over 300 pages) of his Collected Poems owes much to this reassessment. Ranging from the Poems of 1961 to 1991’s Discoveries in Blue Cobalt, appearing a year after the poet’s death, it is published by John Lucas’s Shoestring Press, which, backed by a number of Greek cultural bodies, has amassed in a short space a considerable catalogue of significant Greek poets - most notably Manolis Anagnostakis - till now conspicuous by their absence.

   As could be expected from someone originally intending to be a
philosopher, Karouzos’s poetry is conceptually dense, following ideas across history and culture as they collide and interweave, always boiling down to one word. For Karouzos the poet has ‘outstanding business with existence’ and I cannot think of many that have approached from so many fronts its many facets, zealously dissecting its intensities and reflective paradoxes in view of the terrible voids beyond. Surveying the deadends of existential desolation, it is at the world-shaping order of art that Karouzos consistently pauses, meditating on its staying power. His poems, many offering themselves as ‘music’ or ‘triptychs’, gravitate towards a host of figures (Plotinus, Bach, Modigliani, Rimbaud, Marx) as they bear witness to the transubstantiations of life and person into art.

   Keen as he is to find poetry in ideas and fuse both together in his own work, Karouzos never lets his eyes off the terrifying ‘schizophrenia of language’, the reality that builds both the noetic and poetic and is in turn created anew in truly great poetry. It is the rare self-identities in this intricate symbiosis that Karouzos is after, all too knowing that they can neither be approached nor conveyed easily; hence the often capitalized ‘big’ words, linguistic gymnastics and surrealist overtures in x-raying the imagery of mental states, of poetry that, for all its oral urgency, can appear cryptic and cerebral. One can see perhaps why both the critical unravelling of his oeuvre, as well as its translation, have taken their time. Time, this ‘skeleton without bones’, is another reality of constant concern. It grants Karouzos some of his most incisive and essential lines as he shifts through its alchemies with awareness, lamenting the moments passing (‘History of course/is not waiting for us/at the trolley stop’), summoning us to the seams when split seconds overlap with the historical, become personal myths.

   In his mature work, recurring fragments and lists, like drafts of what could never have been, resemble a sort of inverse Ecclesiastes for a disjointed consciousness. With the austerity and parity of distilled understanding, precise aphorisms and phrases of stunning clarity (‘the world is immortal because it dies so much’; ‘I and time devour each other’) remind us how we arrived at the timelessness of proverbs in the first place. Given the conviction with which they are stacked, it is not without significance that the language of numbers should increasingly partake in his. In ‘The Lethal Formulation’ it is enough to just note, ‘Life > Poetry / Life < Poetry /Offer yourself to non-endeavor.’

   Philip Ramp approaches a truly daunting task with admirable eagerness and insight. Though his choice of words will miss the mark every now and then, and sometimes he exacerbates Karouzos’s already knotty syntax, he successfully relays the essence and nuances of this multifaceted poetry in a language that, after all, does not have as an immediate access to its historical layers as Greek does. One often witnesses here what happens when the translator is also a poet and can be, in the space of a line even, both appreciative of the fragility of the verbal construct and forceful enough to have their version work as poetry. Results can be highly pleasing as in
‘Dross of Immortality’, a poem from the posthumous collection that perfectly summarizes Karouzos as he bids us farewell:

I always climb toward horror with greased boots,
                 famished now by flames
                                fluently secular
                                               fluently in tears
                 eternal choreographer of my diction
                                and unquestioned jasmine.
Badly spent illumination in mauve and other dullness,
                                ignoble horizon,
barking the creed of the dog, or an unbecoming
                                hallucinatory Universe,
pharaonic queen through mathematical piety.
                                I am what's involuntary of existence
my blend is not that of a flower, it is rawness,
                 I am disposed toward a thousand years even though I fall
                 eternally on bloody seconds;
                 the winds have pointed me out.