Abyss and Song: Selected Poems by George Sarantaris
Daniel Barbiero
October 2023
George Sarantaris
Abyss and Song: Selected Poems
Translated from the Greek by Pria Louka
World Poetry Books, 2023, 113 pages
Although not well-known today, the 20th century poet George Sarantaris brought a unique synthesis of content and style to Greek modernism. Sarantaris’ poetry was informed by a sensibility steeped in philosophical reflection, which he expressed with an economy of language and imagery. With her translation of a selection of his work, Pria Louka brings this singular figure out of obscurity and makes him accessible to contemporary readers of English.
Sarantaris (1908-1941) was born to Greek parents in Constantinople, after which the family moved to Bologna in Italy. Sarantaris received his primary and secondary education in Bologna and subsequently studied law at the University of Bologna, finishing his degree at the University of Macerata after his family relocated to Montappone. Despite having a degree in law, Sarantaris was more interested in poetry and philosophy, and he never entered the profession. In 1931 he moved to Greece to fulfill his military obligation, and remained there until his death in 1941, which occurred as a result of the typhus he contracted while fighting in the Greco-Italian War of 1940-1941. He was only 32. It was a cruel irony that he died while fighting for his native country against the country he grew up in. It was a further irony in that Sarantaris, a Greek poet writing in Greek, was educated in Italian, a language he may have been more at home in than Greek, which he spoke with an Italian accent.
Sarantaris was one of a generation of Greek writers who helped bring about a paradigm shift in the orientation of Greek literature. Like others of this Generation of the 1930s, as it was called, Sarantaris was drawn to Western European, and particularly French, models of poetic modernism, particularly Symbolism, rather than the Surrealism that attracted some of his contemporaries. Philosophically, both Benedetto Croce’s idealism and Kierkegaard’s existentialism were important influences for him. While some of the 1930s generation, especially the future Nobelists Odysseus Elytis and George Seferis, were to achieve recognition, Sarantaris was, by contrast, relatively neglected. There may have been several reasons for this. One was his having been educated in Italian rather than Greek, which – at least in the opinion of some critics – left him with a command of Greek that was inadequate in relation to what he was trying to express with it. A second reason was his indifference to politics, which set him apart from other writers of his generation. Instead, he was interested in exploring questions of a more fundamental nature, which gives much of his poetry a metaphysical, and at times even mystical, orientation. Finally, his early death held out the possibility that he hadn’t fully developed as an artist, a perception reinforced by the fact that, although he wrote prolifically, he published very little during his lifetime. Indeed, Louka translated many of the poems appearing in Abyss and Song from a collection of Sarantaris’ handwritten manuscripts in the Vikelaia Municipal Library in Heraklion in Crete.
Stylistically, the most striking feature of Sarantaris’ poetry is its tendency toward compression. A good number of the poems in Abyss and Song are brief in length and concise in their imagery; some are only one or two lines long and read more like aphorisms than like conventionally developed poems. In this regard they recall not only Symbolism, but the enigmatically evocative fragments of Heraclitus. Here, for example, is one poem in its entirety:
Rains fell upon our sea
Few rains and few doves
The imagery here is as economical as the form. The poem draws on only three images — rain, sea, and doves – whose association is obscure but apparently symbolic. The sea is “our sea” – not the sea as it is for itself, and not simply as a phenomenon of represented as a mental image, but rather as it plays some role in the life of the speaker, with a meaning specific to him. That meaning may be vague, but its vagueness allows it to evoke associations in the reader realized by the reader’s own capacity to draw correspondences between the images on the page and images, emotions, memories and so forth from his or her own experience. The same dynamic seems to be at work in the similarly short poem
The sea lifts her fingers and brags
Upright, the mountain fades behind clouds
This is the picture of a moment captured: a wave crests with a roaring sound while clouds drift across the face of a mountain. Both events are ephemeral – the rising of the wave, which will fall immediately after, and the obscuring of the mountain by clouds, which will drift past it and reveal it once again. In these two short lines Sarantaris seems to be saying something about the transience of phenomena and by extension of the material world behind them; we can read the poem as a modernist refiguration of Heraclitus’ equally compact expressions of the same idea.
The idea of transience recurs in these poems, in some instances taking the form of an intuition of the transience of human life – of its essential finitude. This is one of the existential motifs that Sarantaris addresses in his poetry, as in the two-line poem
Something neutral, like slumber, follows after
the sensation I have of the void, hides the fear.
The void Sarantaris confronts here – or rather that confronts him, and inspires fear in him – is the nothingness of his own inevitable non-existence. The “something neutral” that follows from this anticipatory intuition may be a way to dodge that fear, or it may be another anticipatory intuition, one that imagines what it is like to be that nothingness. Sarantaris addresses the matter of death in a number of his poems; here he does it in an indirect way that nevertheless couches it in the concrete language of sleep and emotion.
Counterbalancing Sarantaris’ preoccupation with death is his mysticism. As Katharine Cassis noted in her illuminating article on Sarantaris’ life and work, an important influence on him was the Greek Orthodox church’s mystical tradition of the divine. Once again it is a very compact poem that conveys Sarantaris’ engagement with this tradition:
There is a mirror within us: the sun
Like the sea, the sun occurs often as an image-symbol in Sarantaris’ work. Here it seems to function as the symbol of the emanation of the divine within the human, an idea that can be traced back to Neoplatonism and Gnosticism as well as to more orthodox forms of ontotheology. Consistent with this long tradition, Sarantaris evokes here the notion of the individual’s substance as containing an ontological reflection of, and dependence on, the transcendent ground of being. This reflection is at work even when the contingency of the mundane makes itself felt as it does in Sarantaris’ poem “Anxiety,” which speaks of how “My existence, abyss and song,/ roams the valley of appearances.” Or when the divine takes the form of deus absconditus:
The sun rests on the palm of a god
where his fragrant light melts;absent himself from human affairs,
the glint of his face dies
The god may have withdrawn, but the light that emanates from the sun presumably leaves its trace, even if only as a memory.
If for Sarantaris the “valley of appearances” — the phenomenal world we commonly inhabit – is an occasion for anxiety, it can just as well provide the occasion for a breakthrough of the transcendent, as when
Shadows of the other world drift in
When the garden’s mists
For a little while
Cease to sprinkle us
Here Sarantaris seems to hint that it is through a rupture in our presence to the phenomenal world – when for example we momentarily don’t feel the mist against our skin and turn away more generally from the immediacy of the given as it impinges on us – that we apparently can sense what is above or beyond that world. Transcendence here represents a negation of the world and its displacement by a metaphysical intuition. Conversely, the transcendent may be recognized as immanent in the world and may make itself known through the mute, insentient things that make up the world’s furniture, as it does in the poem “Philosophy”:
Conversation with the object
a lonesome thing;
deliberate silence
from an unknown listener
approaches us
and binds,
about us hums
a mythical insect
a God
Not all of the poems collected in Abyss and Song have metaphysical overtones; some are directly sensual, and others address personal states of mind. This doesn’t undercut the overall effect of philosophical engagement that runs through Sarantaris’ poetry, though; rather, it simply reflects the dual nature of his writing. As Louka points out in her introduction, Sarantaris “oscillated between the ‘abyss’ of contemplation and the ‘song’ of poetry”: he was both metaphysician and lyricist. In the best of these poems, the philosopher and the lyricist work together in a creative symbiosis that produces poetry that concerns itself with the concrete, experiential ramifications of a universal condition. Louka’s translations convey both sides of Sarantaris’ writing elegantly; her translations read like good poetry in their own right.
I am indebted to Katharine Cassis’ fine article “Getting Acquainted with George Sarantaris” (Modern Greek Studies Vol. 11, 2003) for background on Sarantaris’ life and influences.
George Sarantaris Abyss and Song: Selected Poems World Poetry Books →
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Daniel Barbiero is a double bassist, composer, and writer in the Washington DC area. His reviews of poetry and essays have appeared in Heavy Feather Review, periodicities, Word for/Word, Otoliths, and Offcourse. He also writes on the art, music and literature of the classic avant-gardes of the 20th century as well as on contemporary work. His music reviews have been published in Perfect Sound Forever, Point of Departure, Avant Music News, and elsewhere. Barbiero has performed at venues throughout the Washington-Baltimore area and regularly collaborates with artists locally and in Europe. His graphic scores have been realized by ensembles and solo artists in Europe, Asia, and the US. He is the author of As Within, So Without, a collection of essays published by Arteidolia Press.
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