Book
launch of “Giorgos Christodoulides: Selected Poems (1996-2021)”, translated
from the Greek and with an Introduction by Despina Pirketti, on Tuesday 5
April, 6:30pm, at the Cyprus House, 13 St. James’s Square, London SW1Y 4LB.
by
Michael Paraskos
I am
going to begin with the poem Smithereens.
Smithereens
In the
moment
when
the cup falls to the floor
and
smashes into a hundred shards,
you
realise the value of wholeness;
that
what we call entire
is on
the verge of smashing —
it is
that which resists falling
and
breaking into one hundred shards,
that
which persistently withholds
the sum
of its parts,
determined
not to let on
that it
is as brittle
as a
cup
it is
exactly
that:
one
hundred shards clinging firmly
to each
other
to
feign unity.
I must admit I have become very
fond of that poem. But really I wanted to begin by reading it because I think
any talk on a poet should start with the poet. Or perhaps I should say with the
poetry. Doing that places the poetry at the heart of whatever the commentator —
in this case me — is likely to say next, and reminds us that we are talking
about a work of art that is — or should be — complete and immanent. It is its
own interpretation.
That is not to say that I am not honoured to have been asked to add my
commentary to Giorgios’s work. I spend my life as an art historian adding my
commentary to other people’s work, even though I know it often does not need
it. Yet, when Despina asked me to speak tonight I was reluctant. ‘I don’t read
Greek,’ I said, but that’s alright, it’s a translation she replied. ‘But I’m an
art historian, not a literary critic,’ I said, but she said that’s alright, we
don’t want a literary critic. ‘But I am probably going to say something rude
and offend everyone,’ I said, but that’s alright, said Despina, we want you to
be rude and to offend everyone.
Okay I made that last bit up, Despina didn’t say that, but I do suspect that
what I am about to say might offend some people. But if that’s the case, then I
think it’s probably the sort of people who deserve to be offended.
So here goes. The real reason I was reluctant was not any of the excuses I gave
to Despina when she first asked me to speak tonight. The reason is that, as a
member of what is rather euphemistically called the Cypriot, or Greek if you
prefer, diaspora I have a difficult relationship with Cyprus. I do not always
like the place. It has never felt welcoming to me in the way it likes to
portray itself. Other people may have different experiences to mine, but I do
not feel Cyprus is welcoming for so-called second-generation Cypriots like me.
We’re not Cypriot enough; not Greek enough; not anything. We are, in a sense,
some of the hundreds of
shards who do not cling firmly to the whole. But the whole doesn’t seem to
care.
Even as I walked into the graveyard, in the village near Larnaca, when we were
burying my father following his death in 2014, someone thought it appropriate
to berate me for not being a proper Greek. Not being fully Greek. What a nasty
little shit you are I thought. And so much for being part of the global Cypriot
family that places like this claim to promote. It was then I decided not to
pretend to be Cypriot, let alone Greek, any more. It is easier to deny it
outright, although my name sometimes makes that difficult.
The coastguardsman on his
return
When I
discovered the existence of language
I began
learning beautiful words;
I
learned quite a lot, but they seemed inapplicable.
The
people I found worthy
were
much fewer than the beautiful words.
The
redundant ones
I kept
within poems
as a
collector keeps pressed carnations
within
cardboard boxes
or the
coastguardsman on his return at night
entombs
a shard of glow from the lighthouse
inside
of him
to
light up in good time.
So why would I want to talk about a book of Cypriot poetry?
Well, perhaps because, whether you like it or not, or I like it or not, I am a
Cypriot. I am a shard from that pot. In fact I must be a Cypriot because I have
a piece of paper in my wallet that says so. I might not fit your definition of
a Cypriot, your definition of a Greek or a Greek-Cypriot, but so what? Do you
really think you matter so much? And so when Giorgios’s poetry becomes
available to me, and the thousands of people like me, as in Despina’s
translation, maybe I do have something to say about it. In fact, maybe as a
translation, it speaks even more to me, and the thousands of people like me,
the second and third generation Cypriots, the diaspora. We are, after all, each
of us a translated poem.
But then the question is, what does it say to us? Well, I can only speak for
myself.
A short while before the covid pandemic hit I was asked to speak at another
book launch, held at Leeds University, for a newly published volume of poetry,
that time by the English poet Martin Bell. I say by Martin Bell, but in fact it
was also a collection of translations, made by Bell of the work of the French
Surrealist poet, Robert Desnos.
Bell died in 1978 and has been somewhat unjustly forgotten in the decades
since. I was asked to speak because Bell had been a good friend of my father,
and they had travelled together to Cyprus in 1968, when my father was laying
the ground-work for establishing the first art school in Cyprus, the Cyprus
College of Art. Unfortunately Bell was a notorious alcoholic and his drunken
antics did not go down well in the very conservative world of late-1960s
Cyprus. This trip was recorded by my father in a diary, and it was part of that
diary I read out.
I must admit I felt bad about it afterwards. I realised that what was intended
as a lighthearted anecdote about Bell’s drunkenness on an unsuccessful trip to
see the British Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins, who was holidaying in Kyrenia,
might in fact have been a painful recollection of Bell’s alcoholism for his
family in the audience.
However, my point in mentioning this now is not to seek absolution for my
unintended sin, but to bring Bell’s Cyprus poetry into the fray. Despite his
alcoholism, Bell still wrote very good poetry, including some astonishing poems
written whilst in Cyprus. They are different to his other poetry, and I suppose
my father would have said they have spirit of place. We might like to think of
them as somehow capturing the Cyprus that existed then, a very different
island, and in many ways inhabited by a very different people, to the Cyprus
that exists now. Those Cypriots would be as alien to modern Cyprus as I am. But
I don’t think that is quite adequate when thinking of Bell’s poetry. I don’t
think he did capture Cyprus, like some sapient literary camera. I think he
captured himself-in-Cyprus, in a brief and specific moment of time. His poems
do not look outward, recording a scene accurately. They look inward, and we see
in them the experience of being trapped perpetually, somewhere between
drunkenness and hung-over, in that hot sultry summer of ’68 in the eastern
Mediterranean.
Rather than a moment of capture then, I think they represent a moment of
placement. Or, if we want to sound a bit more intellectual, a moment of
emplacement. There is a kind of emplacement in Giorgio’s poetry too. It is also
set in Cyprus and aspects of that Cyprus are recognisable to me. But still, it
is different. It has to be. We may share certain common traits, the things that
make us human and we share a great deal of common culture, the things that make
us social. But the experience of our bodies in time and space is surely unique
to every one of us.
Incarnations
of the watermelon seller
He
sells watermelons in front of the bus stop.
In his
past life he too sold watermelons
though
because in the 17th century
there
were no buses,
he sold
them next to horse and donkey dung,
at the
crossroads of the dirt tracks
that
joined the pastures.
One
time he brought a juicy watermelon
to the
court of the Regina,
didn’t
win her favour.
He
suspects that in his next life too
he’ll be
selling watermelons.
Only he’d like to be
younger,
less
hunched
and
better attired.
Passing
by in my flying car,
I’ll
see him
and
write the same poem.
I wonder whether Giorgios would
write the same poem. A different body in a different time and space you see. It
wouldn’t be quite the same. The emplacement would be different. Nonetheless, I
have come to like that poem very much. Seeing the watermelon sellers all over
Cyprus in the early summer, sitting in every lay-by and at every road crossing,
with their giant stripy green fruit piled high on the backs of pick-up trucks,
one often cut open to reveal the shocking red flesh — crass, vulgar and yet
delicious — is like a throw back to a Cyprus where these transient
street-hawkers might have been joined by a pastellaki seller, a koupes hawker
or a mahelepi pedlar. Of
course, they have largely gone, so only the watermelon sellers remain. But I am
not being nostalgic in lamenting their loss. I just recognise in it an
essential truth that I also seem to read in Giorgios’s poetry. Cyprus can at
times resemble a post-apocalyptic landscape, in which we might recognise some
familiar sights, but there is also a feeling of profound loss and dislocation. That sense of dislocation is
there even in the apparent whimsy of the poem about the watermelon seller.
Indeed, to my ear there is nothing whimsical about it. I find it terrifying —
almost like some Buddhist nightmare of eternal reincarnation. Or to make
another analogy, the narrator and the watermelon seller in Giorgios’s poem
might almost be characters from a Beckett play, again resembling shards of the
pot who cannot, or will not, cling firmly to the whole. Or do I mean dislocated
shards of the pot to which the whole will not cling?
The
kiosk
Down
the street
a kiosk
closed.
It just
shut down one day.
One
morning it simply didn’t open
like a
tired man departs
quietly
and wilfully
for a
one-way journey.
The
kiosk owners vanished,
friendly
and decent fellows,
we have
never seen them again,
we
maybe never will.
Now,
every time I pass by,
I
glance at the remains of things abandoned
inside
the deserted store.
I look
at the shape
of what
has ceased to be
and I’m
surprised to find
it
doesn’t look at all like something absent.
Life,
when it
goes away,
leaves
something behind.
That
thing lingers on, gathers
like
fluff on the body of time —
and for
a while it keeps death from expanding
to
where there used to be
life.
I sometimes wonder if I have a morbid disposition. A tendency to see the
solitary cloud on a sunny day and predict it will rain. After all, in The
Kiosk doesn’t Giorgios give us a kind of hope, a feeling that something of
life lingers on even after apparent death. A kind of trace-memory of life. So
why am I drawn so much more to the first two thirds of this poem, where the
bafflement at the sudden and inexplicable departure of the kiosk’s owners is so
strong? As I say, it might be my own morose nature, but isn’t it also that, in
that first part of the poem, we have the most human element? It is there we
engage with the narrator’s inability to comprehend what has happened to the
kiosk’s owners, and we discover they were 'friendly and decent fellows’. To me,
the trace-element of life that lingers afterwards, ‘like fluff on the body of
time’, sounds suspiciously like a sad and lonely ghost.
But perhaps Giorgios does not see it in quite those terms. I think we are
similar insofar as we share a sense of that which seems whole is in reality on
the edge of dissolution. Nothing is permanent, no matter how seemingly solid,
no matter how good. But, unlike my own temperament, in Giorgios’s poetry
dissolution does not necessarily lead to complete disappearance or total loss.
Often something remains, even if it is not quite in the form in which we might
want it.
In
volumes
Just as
the deceased
are
placed reverently in coffins,
the
coffins
in
morgue chambers;
just as
the pictures of the missing
are
hung on police stations;
just as
the skeletons
of
prehistoric animals
are
transferred to museums,
so too
do poems
end up
in volumes.
Giorgios’s poetic voice inhabits a world of chance encounters. In this he is
the inheritor of a tradition that started with English romantic poets like
William Wordsworth. Wordsworth’s poetic voice travels the Lakeland landscape of
northern England, and runs into various characters, from little children who
believe their dead siblings still live with them, to a pedlar who explains the
reason for a cottage having been abandoned. In fact, I was reminded of
Wordsworth’s poem The Ruined Cottage when I first read Giorgios’s The
Kiosk. They are very different styles of verse, both of their times in a
way, but they are linked by a sense of bafflement at the mystery of
abandonment, and by an underlying sense that humanity is threatened by unseen
and inhuman forces that have the power to sweep seemingly full and happy lives.
A kiosk closes. What does it matter? A cottage is abandoned. What does that
matter? Well, maybe it doesn’t matter, such small bits of life when set against
the grand scheme of things, there’s always another kiosk, always another
cottage, always another pastellaki, koupes or mahelepi pedlar,
always another watermelon seller, always another wilderness on which no one has
built a condominium, always another beach on which rare turtles can nest,
always another… until there isn’t another and you realise that unseen
force, the deadly hand of human progress, has made our planet an inhuman
wasteland. I think it is the shards of what was once whole and are now lost in
a wasteland that Giorgios’s narrator encounters.
Poetry is often about the ability to find salient metaphors for life in
otherwise seemingly unremarkable things. Think of the devastating conclusion
Philip Larkin drew about lost hope in something as simple as failing to toss an
apple core into a rubbish bin. Giorgios is good at finding those metaphors too.
The
palm tree
As luck
would have it, years ago
I found
a palm tree thrown away
within
my father’s orchard,
barely
the size of a child’s open hand.
“No use
in planting it,” he said,
“It’s
clearly a waste of time.”
And yet
I bowed and picked it up.
Now if
you amble through my garden
you see
a mighty palm tree
casting
its branches over the fence
and
singing all the while.
So when
they ask me of my kids I say:
“I have five and one almost died.”
I do like those lines, “casting its branches over the fence / and singing all
the while.” Yes, trees do sing as they sway in the breeze, but it evokes much
more than that. It evokes something joyous about life, especially about life so
nearly lost. The tree sings because it is happy to be alive.
Who said I was morose?
It is this kind of metaphor-laden language that Giorgios uses so well. That
does seem to be — I am going to say a Levantine or Mediterranean trait, rather
than a uniquely Cypriot one — in which the mundane and the metaphorical meet.
It is a trait most of us will know from the most famous book to be written in
this region The Bible, but it imbues the wider Mediterranean and Levantine
story-telling tradition too. I have found it has become an integral part of my
own writing practice, both as an art historian, where I suspect it has not gone
down well in the often hidebound world of academia, and in my fiction writing
which has been enriched by it. I suppose that is another thing that makes me
Cypriot, because — as Giorgios’s also writing shows — I find Cyprus is a land
that constantly gives you metaphors for life. Like the time I was driving from
Larnaca to Paphos and I decided to leave the motorway at the Yeroskipou exit to
avoid going through the centre of town.
On the road that runs through the flat farmland between the motorway and the
sea I saw an open-back pick up truck in front of me. In it stood a dog, a kind
of pug or French bulldog, surrounded by her puppies. The dog was agitated,
barking frantically, but the driver of the pick up truck just drove on. What he
hadn’t realised was that one of the dog’s puppies had fallen out of the back of
the truck and it was now running for its life along the road after its mother
and siblings.
Driving behind it, I slowed to a crawl and began flashing my lights furiously
to get the truck driver’s attention. Eventually he did stop. He got out of his
truck, saw what had happened, and when the puppy reached him he picked it up,
gave it an embrace and put it back into the truck where it was welcomed by its
relieved mother. The truck driver gave me a cheery wave as a thank you, got
back in his vehicle and drove away.
Even at the time that felt like a metaphor for something.
I think it is that ability to see the symbolic — the metaphorical — in the
everyday that is such a strong feature of Giorgios’s writing.
Senex Rex
Outside
the house next to the school,
there
sits an old man.
He
comes out at noon,
when
the sun is shining,
on his
crutches.
He
sinks into his shabby armchair
like a
weary king;
takes
in the sun,
the
agitation of giggles,
feigns
a smile, but seems bothered.
He
looks like a man at the end
of his
tether.
I am
fixated on him.
There’s
nothing more interesting here.
On days
whipped by cold, he withdraws,
retreats
deep inside the house,
to the
kitchen perhaps, with an oil stove
burning
under the floor,
in the
secret lair of his youth.
His
wife closes the shutters tight
and
double locks the doors.
Perhaps
she thinks that death might
think
twice,
and
that with the next shaft of sunlight
the old
man will rise again and reign in his court
from
his aged armchair.
But
death knows all his tropes.
It’s
been a while since I last saw
the old
man reigning in his courtyard.
How often I wonder will many of us here tonight have seen that old man sat
outside a house or old shop somewhere in Cyprus, seated on ‘his shabby
armchair’. When I read this, part of me thinks of my own father, Senex Rex, and
especially of my mother double locking the doors. It has the authenticity of
the familiar, the almost mundane. ‘There’s nothing more interesting here,’ the
narrator tells us. But the poem also transcends familiarity, to become
something metaphorical. A meditation on the passing of time — perhaps also on
the way the world we inhabit seems to shrink — and on the inevitability of
death. Dare I say it, it’s a kind of King Lear in miniature.
But maybe I should end my talk in the tried and tested rhetorical fashion, by
returning to where I started, to the question of translation, to the question
whether I might offend some people. Translated poetry, translated people.
There is a story that in the 1980s, when the British establishment was just
beginning to recognise that Britain was a multicultural nation, a British
government department decided to produce a guide in various languages other
than English on how to register to vote in local elections. Because of the
large Greek-Cypriot community in Britain one of those languages was Greek, and
so a civil servant who said he was able to speak Greek was given the task of
translating the complex set of instructions on how to get your name onto the
electoral roll. Once complete, the translation was duly printed and
distributed, but soon reports started to come back that there was a problem
with the Greek guide. It was said none of the Greek speakers who requested it
could understand a word of it. An investigation followed, and it was soon
discovered that the civil servant who had made the translation could only read
and write the ancient Greek he had learned at Oxford. Perhaps from that we
should acknowledge that even modern Greeks might be translations of the
original.
But of course no one wants to hear that, because it’s too easy to dismiss translation
as a second-best version of the original. But I think that’s a very blinkered
view. Sometimes translations can go beyond the original. Take the British
Empire. Whatever one thinks about the legacy of that Empire, a legacy that is
so often so negative, there is no denying the English culture that underpinned
it is an astonishing thing. The civilisation that gave us the colonial horror
of the Amritsar Massacre, is
the same civilisation that gave us King Lear. But what I find more
astonishing still is that the English culture that gave us King Lear is
a culture built on translation. And a very specific translation at that. It is
built on the translation of the Bible into English by William Tyndale in 1536.
Without that translation coming into being it is hard to imagine English
culture as we know it existing at all. The language of that translation, so
beautiful and charged with additional meaning, was the engine that powered the
work of almost all English writers who followed it, from William Shakespeare to
T. S. Eliot and beyond. There’s nothing second best about it.
In fact, one of my favourite English poems is one I first learned at
university, and it is a translation. Written by Thomas Wyatt in 1557, it is
called Whoso List To Hunt, and it is a translation from an Italian
original by Petrarch. Of course there are now better translations of the
Petrarch original — better in the sense they are more accurate and no doubt
more emblematic of Petrarch’s original intentions. But none of them are to my
mind as mournful and haunting as that b
y Wyatt. It too is not second best.
And I, as a translated person — the product of two voices coming together, just
like a translation, my English mother from Yorkshire, and my Greek father from
Cyprus — I also refuse to be called second best. If that’s what you think I am,
I don’t care. You do not matter that much.
Those who know me will be aware I have studied a great deal the work of Herbert
Read over the years. Herbert Read was a poet, novelist, art theorist,
educationalist, anarchist and more. He argued that to survive human society
needs art because the function of art is to reconcile the myriad of seemingly
distinct and separate forces we encounter in life, and that through the ongoing
and continual process of that reconciliation, or hybridisation, our
understanding of reality is brought into existence. In other words, the
shattered shards are reconciled. And I cannot help seeing the translation of
poetry as something very like that. It is a kind of mystical union, a
reconciliation between the poet and the translator. The product of that union
might not be pure any more, it might not be pedigree, but sometimes, to echo
Giorgios’s poem Smithereens again, it is more than the sum of its parts.
And in that I suppose we might almost say a translation is the product of a
marriage, it is the child of two parents, it is the offspring of the poet and
the translator.
I hope you will enjoy reading Giorgios’s poetry as much as I have done. As an
art historian I study paintings and sculptures and other works of visual art in
a great deal of detail, and this year is my thirtieth year working as a
lecturer in higher education, so I have also spent a great deal of time over
those years talking about art and trying to give my best guess as to what it
might mean. In all of that time I have not had so much opportunity to think
long and hard about poetry, although it was my first love as an undergraduate
student. So, despite my initial trepidation in giving this talk, the process
has been a welcome chance to do that. It will probably sound a bit trite for me
to claim this, but I can honestly say I feel changed at having spent so much
time reading, re-reading and thinking about Giorgios’s work, so much so, that
it has even entered my dreams on a number of occasions. As I say, I feel
changed by it, and that change is, I think, for the better.
So I would like to thank Giorgios for writing these wonderful poems, and
Despina for translating them. They are your children and I think you have every
reason to be proud of them.
*Michael Paraskos is a Senior Teaching
Fellow in the Centre for Languages, Culture and Communication at Imperial
College London