Kostas Karyotakis

Kostas Karyotakis, self portrait

Kostas Karyotakis (Greek: Κώστας Καρυωτάκης, October 30, 1896 – July 20, 1928) is considered one of the most representative Greek poets of the 1920s and one of the first poets to use iconoclastic themes in Greece. His poetry conveys a great deal of nature, imagery and traces of expressionism and surrealism. The majority of Karyotakis' contemporaries viewed him in a dim light throughout his lifetime without a pragmatic accountability for their contemptuous views; for after his suicide,the majority began to revert to the view that he was indeed a great poet. He had a significant, almost disproportionately progressive influence on later Greek poets.

Biography

Karyotakis gave existential depth as well as a tragic dimension to the emotional nuances and melancholic tones of the neo-Symbolist and new-Romantic poetry of the time. With a rare clarity of spirit and penetrating vision, he captures and conveys with poetic daring the climate of dissolution and the impasses of his generation, as well as the traumas of his own inner spiritual world.

Early life

Karyotakis was born in Tripoli, Greece, his father's occupation as a county engineer resulted in his early childhood and teenage years being spent in various places, following his family’s successive moves around the Greek cities, including Argostoli, Lefkada, Larisa, Kalamata, Athens and Chania.

He started publishing poetry in various magazines for children in 1912. It is solely rife speculation that he had felt deeply betrayed that a girl he had cared for in Hania in 1913 had married and sent him into melancholy. After receiving his degree from the Athens School of Law and Political Sciences, in 1917, he did not pursue a career as a lawyer. Karyotakis became a clerk in the Prefecture of Thessaloniki. However, he greatly disliked his work and could not tolerate the bureaucracy of the state, which he wrote about often in his poems. His prose piece Catharsis ('purification') is characteristic of this. For this reason he would often be removed from his posts and transferred to other locations in Greece. During these removals he became familiar with the boredom and misery of the country during World War I.

Adulthood and career

In February 1919 he published his first collection of poetry: The Pain of Men and Things (Greek: Ὁ πόνος τοῦ ἀνθρώπου καὶ τῶν πραμάτων), which was largely ignored or badly criticized by the critics. In the same year he published with his friend Agis Levendis a satirical review called The Leg, which despite its success was banned by the police after the sixth issue. In 1921 he published his second collection called Nepenthe (Greek: Νηπενθῆ) and also wrote a musical revue Pell-Mell. In 1922 he began having an affair with the poet Maria Polydouri who was a colleague of his at the Prefecture of Attica.

In 1923 he wrote a poem called "Treponema pallidum" (Greek: Ωχρά Σπειροχαίτη), which was published under the title "Song of Madness" and gave rise to speculation that he may have been suffering from syphilis, which before 1945 was considered a chronic illness with no proven cure for it. George Skouras, a physician of the poet, wrote: "He was sick, he was syphilitic" and George Savidis (1929–1999), professor of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, who possessed the largest archive about Greek poets, revealed that Karyotakis was syphilitic, and that his brother, Thanasis Karyotakis, thought the disease to be a disgrace to the family.

In 1924 he traveled abroad, visiting Italy and Germany. In December 1927 he published his last collection of poetry: Elegy and Satires (Greek: Ἐλεγεῖα καὶ Σάτιρες). In February 1928, Karyotakis was transferred to Patras although soon afterwards he spent a month on leave in Paris and in June 1928 he was sent yet again to Preveza. From there he sent desperate letters to friends and relatives describing the misery he felt in the town. His family offered to support him for an indefinite stay in Paris, but he refused knowing what a monetary sacrifice like this would entail for them. His angst is felt in the poem "Preveza" (Greek: Πρέβεζα) which he wrote shortly before his suicide. The poem displays an insistent, lilting anaphora on the word Death, which stands at the beginning of several lines and sentences. It is shot through with a pungent awareness of the gallows, in the tiny mediocrity of life as Karyotakis felt it, mortality is measured against insignificant, black, pecking birds, or the town policeman checking a disputed weight, or identified with futile street names (boasting the date of battles), or the brass band on Sunday, a trifling sum of cash in a bank book, the flowers on a balcony, a teacher reading his newspaper, the prefect coming in by ferry: "If only," mutters the last of these six symmetrical quatrains, "one of those men would fall dead out of disgust."

Death and Legacy

On July 20, 1928 Karyotakis went to Monolithi and kept trying to drown in the sea for ten hours, but failed in his attempt, because he was an avid swimmer as he himself wrote in his suicide note. In the subsequent morning he returned home and left again to purchase a revolver and went to a little café. After smoking for a few hours, he went to a nearby seashore called Agios Spyridon and there, under a eucalyptus tree, he shot himself through the heart. His suicide letter was found in his pocket.

Today, there is general agreement on the importance of Karyotakis’ work, despite the fact that, for a long period, it was undervalued on ideological grounds. Greek idealists as well as spokesmen for the Leftist movement reproached him for being both pessimistic and decadent and some contemporary writers (F. Skouras, A. Papadimas) considered him seriously neurotic and they tried to stifle the striking effect he had on the younger generation. Despite being labeled as a minor poet by critics and philologists until 1970, poets amongst the Communists and surrealists of the inter-war, post-war and later years nevertheless recognized his leading role in the shaping of modern Greek poetry.

Karyotakism

The writing of Karyotakis, was characterized by his own personal language similar to that of Constantine P. Cavafy, which adopted verbal acrobatics between archaism and demotic language, as well as a deep pessimism, which is usually inflected by irony and set a fashion for melancholy and sardonic verse that became known as Karyotakism. Poets who adopted his style increased, especially after his swan song Elegies and Satires (1927), with followers such as Angheliki Varvitsiotis-Konti, Spyros Gouskos and Sotos Skoutaris.

Works

Poems and Collections

Manuscript of Kostas Karyotakis

• Xeprovodisma (1919) published in «Noumas» (638)
• When you Came... (1919) published in «Noumas» (650)
• Your Letters (1920) published in «Noumas» (671)
• The Pain of Men and Things (1919)
• Nepenthe (1921)
• Song (1922) published in «Pharos» (82)
• Lycabettus ( 1922) published in «Noumas» (765)
• Treponema pallidum (1923) published in «New Life» (322)
• the Ash beyond the Horizon... (1923)) published in «Noumas» (771)
• Varium et Mutabile (1923)) published in «Easter Anthology, 1923 (together with one of his friends Agis Leventis).
• Escape (1923) published in «New Life» (324)
• Prepare (1923) published in «Espero» (3)
• Elegies and Satires (1927) published by printing press "Αthena"
• Optimism (1929) [Posthumously] «Nea Estia» (6, 63)
• Sunday (1929) [Posthumously] published in «Pnoe» (1)
• Preveza (1930) [Posthumously] published in «Nea Estia» (8, 88)
• When we get down the stairs... (1933) [Posthumously] published in «Beginnings» (7, July 1933)

Translations

1. Elegias e Sátiras/Ελεγεία και Σάτιρες, Théo de Borba Mossburger (Trans.), In. (n.t.) Revista Literária em Tradução nº 1 (set/2010), Fpolis/Brasil, ISSN 2177-5141 www.notadotradutor.com

References

• Vangelis Hadjivassiliou (2001). Greece: books and writers. National Book Centre of Greece, Ministry of Culture.
• "Τέλλος Ἄγρας, Δοκίμιο γιὰ τὸν Καρυωτάκη" (in Greek).
• "Η Συνάντηση Κώστας Καρυωτάκης - Μαρία Πολυδούρη" (in Greek).
• Agras. T. Petros Charis, and Kleon Paraschos. "Κώστας Καρυωτάκης" ["Kostas Karyotakis"). Νέα Estia 16, 17. and IX (1928): 726-835.
• Skouras F. "Ό Καρυωτάκης, μπροοτά στό φράγμα της νευρώσεως" ("Karyotakis, Faced by the Barrier of Neurosis"). Nea Estia 15 (May 1943).
• Hadas. Rachel. "Enjoying the Funeral: Constanine Caryotakis". Grand Street 3. no. I (autumn 1983): 153-160.

External links

• Tribute to Kostas Karyotakis
• Poems from Nepenthe and Elegies & Satires (translated by Peter J. King & Andrea Christofidou
• another tribute to Kostas Karyotakis