Nikos Engonopoulos - Perhaps more so than any other poet he adapted surrealism to the Greek context, inventing a poetic system out of purely Greek elements—the mythical and legendary, the historical and topical, the exotic and commonplace, the sensual and intoxicating—and his poetry is characterized not by the complexes of the subconscious but by the ecstasy

Nikos Engonopoulos, Selected Poems, Trans. by David Connolly. Harvard University Department of the Classics, 2014.


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Nikos Engonopoulos belongs to a little-known yet extremely active and influential group of Greek surrealist poets and was one of its most orthodox exponents. Perhaps more so than any other poet, however, he adapted surrealism to the Greek context, inventing a poetic system out of purely Greek elements—the mythical and legendary, the historical and topical, the exotic and commonplace, the sensual and intoxicating—and his poetry is characterized not by the complexes of the subconscious but by the ecstasy. With these elements and drawing on all phases of the Greek language, in his poetry he reconstructs the world, making it more poetic, more intelligible, more real and, above all, more humane. Until recently, very little of his work was available in English translation. The present volume, introduced by the translator, contains some sixty poems, including representative selections from each of his published collections and the whole of his long poem Bolivár.




Nikos Engonopoulos, Acropolis and Tram: Poems 1938-1978, Trans. by Martin McKinsey. Green Integer, 2008.

One of the major Greek poets, Nikos Engonopoulos was a surrealist whose work achieved wide popularity in his home country. This new collection represents the largest English-language selection of his work to date.

“He was a born orthodox, as charged by Surrealism as an electrical pole is by electricity. No one could touch him without agreeing to suffer a powerful discharge.”
—Odysseus Elytis, on Nikos Egonopoulos
Surrealism moved through Greece like a wildfire in the 1930s, a period in Greek history ripe for the transformative flames of destruction and renewal. Andreas Embirikos’s Blast Furnace (1935) is usually cited as the first realized Surrealist work by a Greek poet, and Embirikos’s poems were ridiculed, but they did not engender the uproar created by Nikos Engonopoulos. Prior to Engonopoulos, Surrealism in Greece remained largely clinical in its directive to liberate consciousness. However, as Kimon Friar notes in Modern Greek Poetry: From Cavafis to Elytis, Engonopoulos’s first two books were “explosive, daring and revolutionary, outrageously yoking together the most disparate objects as in obedience to Lautreamont’s notorious ‘beautiful as the chance encounter on a dissecting table of a sewing machine with an umbrella.’ A girl’s hair is likened to cardboard, her mouth to civil war, her neck to red horses, her buttocks to fish glue, her knees to Agamemnon.”
Perhaps more than any Greek poet, Engonopoulos took Surrealism furthest, largely because he practiced both writing and painting (devoting himself primarily to painting after 1948). He also leaned more heavily upon the anarchist roots of Dada than his contemporaries, even translating Tristan Tzara in 1938. The poems in his first two books, Do Not Speak to the Driver (1938) and The Clavichords of Silence(1939), fuse the provocation of Dada with Surrealist juxtapositions, exploding Greek poetry into the then unknown. In 1939 he also showed his first paintings, cementing his reputation, as his translator Martin McKinsey describes, “as the ‘bad boy’ of the Greek avant-garde.”
Born in 1910, Engonopoulos came of age during the cultural upheaval of Modernism (George Seferis introduced Modernism to Greece through his translations of T.S. Eliot and through his own poetry, and Embirikos brought the first books of Surrealism from France). He also confronted the dictatorship of the Metaxas regime of 1936–1941. In late 1940, Mussolini marched upon Greece, followed shortly thereafter by the Nazis. Like other Greek intellectuals considered “troublemakers” by General Metaxas, Engonopoulos was drafted and sent to the front. Following a particularly gruesome battle on 13 April 1941, he was taken prisoner by the Germans and held in a work camp until his escape, when he wandered “over half of Greece on foot.”
Upon his return, “a friend of the Socialist Resistance” asked Engonopoulos to compose some topical poems for the Resistance in the tradition of Greek folk songs, but knowing the poet’s reputation, he requested something “less ‘incomprehensible’ than his work to date.” Engonopoulos wrote a series of traditional poems as well as his great book-length poem, Bolivar (1944). Yet Engonopoulos is not best known for these poems of social resistance, and rightly so. While Bolivar exhibits skill in fusing Surrealist humor with the Greek folk tradition, and is cast in the democratized line of Whitman, it represents only a small period in Engonopoulos’s lifelong practice of Surrealism, to which he devoted himself for the next forty years in semi-seclusion.
This is not to suggest that Engonopoulos was not a poet of social conscience. His greatest contribution was to the Greek language, which had been caught in controversy for a century. His often baffling poems fused the common language of Greek (Dimotiki) with the written language of government and newspapers (Katharevousa), which emulated ancient grammar—the language of poetry and the academy. While Kostas Palamas had already liberated Greek poetry by writing in Dimotiki at the turn of the century, Engonopoulos took this further. He wrote anti-poetry, melding words, disregarding grammatical usage, even incorporating localisms and terms borrowed from Turkish. The result was a charged discourse that also complicated notions of class by allowing language to mirror the breakdown of a rigid class structure—reflected, obviously, in the markings of speech.
Engonopoulos’s middle period from the 1940s is perhaps his most accomplished. “First Light,” for example, is marked with humor:

that in me which people
always found so
affecting
—and still do—
is my
amazing
resemblance to
Abraham Lincoln
once indeed when they raised a bronze statue of me
in some square or other in Piraeus
something
was placed
silently
at my feet
resembling
—I couldn’t see much from up there on the pedestal—
a holy relic
or else a copper
brazier
burning with
live coals.

Like Tzara, Engonopoulos adopts self-deprecation in order to critique cultural idolatry. He moves well beyond humor in his prose poems of this period (his genre-bending, another strategy to interrogate poetic forms), in which writing intermingles with the concerns of visual art. In “Four and Ten Subjects for a Painting,” a prose poem dedicated to the Surrealist Raymond Roussel, Engonopoulos anticipates postmodernism, ingeniously presenting fourteen “subjects” for a painting, each of which revises earlier depictions, forcing a recursive reading of the text. Number 1 begins, “Three men. Two of them seated. The third, standing with his back turned to the room’s only window, lets his mild gaze stray across an infinite space,” while Number 2 says, “Three men. Two of them standing, the third is seated in the middle of the elegantly furnished interior, on an ancient marble capital in the Doric mode.” Number 4, simply reads, “Three men, seated,” and Number 5, also brief, extols, “Three men seated. One of them wears a beard; the look in his eyes is extraordinary.”
Modern Greek letters owes a tremendous debt to Nikos Engonopoulos for his daring and courage to push Greek poetry beyond its previous boundaries. As it has done with so many other “lost” writers, Green Integer has made another masterful poet available to our age. - George Kalamaras

Although Embeirikos’ poems were greeted with ridicule when they first appeared, they did not create as much of an uproar as the surrealist poems and paintings of Nikos Engonopoulos. Born in Athens in 1907, he was to remain faithful to the tenets of surrealism by expressing in his poetry and paintings as much a way of life as an aesthetic.

As Kimon Friar notes, whereas “surrealism in the early Embeirikos was almost clinical, liberating, didactic, in Engonopoulos’ two first books, Do Not Disturb the Driver (1938) and The Clavicembalos of Silence (1939), it was explosive, daring and revolutionary, outrageously yoking together the most disparate objects as in obedience to Lautreamont’s notorious ‘beautiful as the chance encounter on a dissecting table of a sewing machine with an umbrella’”. A girl’s hair is likened to cardboard, her mouth to civil war, her neck to red horses, her buttocks to fish glue, her knees to Agamemnon. Opposition to his poetry was intensified by the uncompromising and proud stance of the poet himself against all that had become sterile and stifling in Greek literature. To many, including established poets such as Palamas and Sikelianos, it seemed that Engonopoulos, Embeirikos and other surrealist poets (Nikolas Kalas and the early Elytis) were turning their back on the past and in particular the specifically Greek past. This of course was a misreading of their work but it is true that both Engonopoulos and Embeirikos went on to forge new (and as it turned out durable) links with some of the same constituent elements of the Greek tradition that are also prominent in more ‘orthodox’ writing of the time. One reason for the long-lasting effect of the Surrealist experiment in Greece – which contrasts with its more evanescent reign in France – can be explained by the fact that Engonopoulos and Embeirikos used the theoretical principles of Surrealism to draw upon and emphasize traits already present in the Greek literary tradition, especially in folk poetry and oral tradition.
This development is at its most striking in the long poem that Engonopoulos published in 1944, in the midst of the German Occupation, entitled ‘Bolivar’. Bolivar is not only the well-known South American hero and liberator, but also, as the work carries the subtitle A Greek Poem, all Greek great and lesser heroes of the Greek War of Independence and of the Resistance and, in the final analysis, is Engonopoulos himself, for the poet declares with pride in the poem that he is his son. Basic to this conception is the poet’s belief that the more national a poem the more international its scope. “Bolivar,” the poet exclaims with national pride and universal application, “you are as beautiful as a Greek!” As Roderick Beaton rightly notes, “by drawing on parallels between the South American revolutions of the 19th century and recent Greek history, topical allusions are displaced under a thin disguise”. Indeed apart from ecstatic invocations to its hero, the disguise is thin enough in this poem, which in the name of Bolivar rolls together an incantatory list of names and events in Greek history. The attempt in this long poem to unite the aspirations of a Latin American (turned Greek) hero-saviour with the broader quest of the Surrealists for freedom in a universal sense produced one of the major works in the history of Modern Greek poetry.
Engonopoulos, one should not forget, was not only one of the most significant poets of the generation of the 1930s, the generation that launched modernism in Greece, but also an accomplished painter, the foremost surrealist painter of Greece. He studied painting with Konstantinos Parthenis and engraving and woodcutting with Kefalinos and served for several years as apprentice to the painter of Byzantine murals, Fotis Kondoglou. All three artists exerted profound influence on his development both as a painter and a poet. His poetic oeuvre therefore, cannot be discussed without close reference to his work as a painter. - Haris Vlavianos


Notes
The poet reflects on his own work in painting and poetry.
Notes on ‘Bolivar’ by the translator, David Connolly
These notes are based on the explanatory notes provided by the poet.

Engonopoulos’ website
Contains a selection of his paintings, poems and an extended biography.