Despite a number of perplexed newspaper reports on the emergent international movement, and a 1931 essay by Dimitrios Mentzelos (more on whom in the Nicolas Calas section), Greek surrealism really started with the poet Andreas Embirikos. A magnate’s son who, while living in Paris, had met André Breton and his circle around 1929,¹ Embirikos returned in the early 1930s with the dual intention of introducing psychoanalysisandsurrealism to Greece. His activity as an analyst would meet with international recognition later on, especially after the formation (in 1946) of the Greek Psychoanalytic Society around Marie Bonaparte and its collaboration with...

Born in Braila (Rumania), to an Andros family of shipowners. One of the great visionary poets, originator of surrealism and psychoanalysis in Greece. His work, ranging from automatic writing and love poetry to fairy-tale-like narratives and the most explicit erotic pages in Greek literature, reveals a utopian desire beyond metaphysics, reflected on a unique linguistic sensibility, whereby the dryness of the “official” Greek dialect is subjected to a hedonisticdétournement.Despite being less active in his late years, he remained interested in the continuation of surrealism, whose signs he was eager to detect; in the 1960s he made the acquaintance...

Born in Lausanne to an upper-class Athenian family, Nikolaos Calamaris soon chose the path of radical left-wing politics. The first published Greek surrealist (albeit in his presurrealist period), he was skeptical about the movement before being “initiated” by Embirikos; after leaving Greece he became an important figure of international surrealism, maintaining little contact with Greek activity until the 1960s, when he reemerged via Nanos Valaoritis’s journalPali.In the seventies and eighties he published his Greek poems and early essays in book form, while remaining an undesirable in the eyes of the Greek academic establishment. Translator of Benjamin Péret and...

Painter and poet. Born in Athens, he spent much of his early life in Paris; there, he discovered surrealism, which he perceived as a reaction to French “rationalism.” He thus devoted his life to redressing what he saw as an oppressive misconception of the Greek “tradition” (the word for which, in Greek, is the same as for “surrender”— cf. the homonymous poem herein). Introduced to Embirikos by Nicolas Calas, he was the second Greek poet to publish a surrealist book (in 1938), and to this day the best-loved (and most ridiculed) one. Although there is a visible decline in his...

Born in Crete. One of surrealism’s earliest champions in Greece, he later kept his distance from the surrealist movement, although his mature work is still marked by it (this selection includes excerpts from only one late text, “The Dreams,” one of his best and least discussed). Most, if not all, of his poetry has been translated into English, repeatedly in some cases, especially after he won the Nobel Prize in 1979. His numerous books not represented here includeSun the First(1943),Axion Esti(1959),Six and One Qualms for the Sky(1960),The Light-tree and the Fourteenth Beauty(1971),...

Close to the thirties surrealist nucleus, Gatsos produced but a slim volume in 1943 (the bulk of which is contained herein). His later involvement in writing song lyrics, most notably for Manos Hadjidakis, had mixed results, including some memorable ones (as in his many nonsense songs and his imaginative use of folk motifs, reminiscent of Lorca), the volume and popularity of his commercial work dimming the significance of his self-imposed silence. YetAmorgosremains a prime indication of a new sensibility brought to Greek writing by surrealism, with its creative-cum-subversive use of folk tradition, immersed in dark humor. His translations...

During the Nazi Occupation, Embirikos and his then-wife, the poet Matsi Hatzilazarou, had held regular meetings in their house; along with Engonopoulos, Elytis, and Gatsos, a number of young poets made their first appearance in this milieu. These included some of the most authentic voices of their generation: Miltos Sahtouris, E. Ch. Gonatas, Dimitris Papaditsas, and others, including the two figures who, of all those younger writers, would go on to display the most consistent surrealist leanings: Hector Kaknavatos and Nanos Valaoritis. A maverick case, Yorgos V. Makris, who would later become a vital member of thePaligroup, also...

Treated by Embirikos, who, in a breach of psychoanalytic ethics, married her in 1940, Hatzilazarou combined in her work a remarkably bold sensuality with a constant will toward poetic experimentation, which perhaps yielded its best fruits with her outstanding late poems. Although her marriage to Embirikos lasted only until 1944, this crucial period (which coincided roughly with the Nazi Occupation) gave rise to the second generation of Greek surrealists via the wartime gatherings in the Embirikos/Hatzilazarou household. Hatzilazarou is a very interesting lyrical surrealist, and the relative obscurity to which her work was consigned by critics has more than a...

Particularly close to Engonopoulos, Sahtouris’s poetry is of vital importance in any attempt to distinguish between first- and second-generation Greek surrealism. One of the most celebrated Greek poets of his generation, the evolution of his work (unlike that of Kaknavatos or Valaoritis, whose constant transformations lie at the very antipodes of Sahtouris) does not display any particular acquaintance with, or at any rate influence by, postwar international surrealism; yet it is precisely its stubborn maintenance of a quasi-nightmarish repertory of images that invests it with a rare intensity and efficacy. “He is totally immersed in black humor. He keeps digging...

Born in Piraeus. A lifelong contributor to Greek surrealism with poetry, essays, and translations. Yet Kaknavatos’s first collection, in 1943, was followed by two decades of silence, partly owing to political prosecutions which also affected his professional status. A mathematician by training, Kaknavatos brought fresh tools to surrealist poetics. Besides his original work, he is mostly responsible for introducing the writings of Joyce Mansour (first presented by Nanos Valaoritis in the journalPali) to the Greek public; he has also translated works by René Char, Julien Gracq, and Marcel Schwob. “I callHectorismthe ardent temper of the Homeric Hector,...

Born in Lausanne, like Nicolas Calas; close to the “modernist” milieu of the 1930s from the age of eighteen, Valaoritis had an early mentor in Yorgos Seferis, but he soon frequented the Embirikos milieu and became a regular at meetings and discussions of surrealism during the war. Having developed a surrealist tendency by the mid-1940s, he spent the first postwar years in London, where he translated and introduced modern Greek poets. In 1954, Valaoritis came in contact with the French surrealist group via Marie Wilson, whom he later married, and participated in surrealist activity in Paris, Athens, and the United...

Particularly close to Hector Kaknavatos and E. Ch. Gonatas, Papaditsas is unique amidst the generation raised during the war in displaying a pronounced lyrical tendency, and a repertory of autonomous images reminiscent of Pierre Reverdy. Certainly one of the most original voices of his generation, his work assumes explicitly metaphysical overtones after his first two books, and the surrealist imagery therein becomes increasingly mild. “I dissolved into birds/With the wind’s instinct” (D. Papaditsas).

Stairs here stairs there glittering steels square beings no trees anywhere and yellow orchards infertile air. Swallow of joy you are pecking on my repetance. Precious pleasure...

One of the foremost storytellers of Greek surrealism, Gonatas has been a physically marginal figure in it. His solitary attitude (excepting a poetry journal undertaken along with Papaditsas in the late 1950s) is regrettable but reflects his programmatic unwillingness to court publicity. A lawyer by profession. The slim volume of his complete published works testifies to his eclecticism and has helped render him a “cult” writer, to use a rather tired expression. Gonatas’s stories involve a renewed sense of the marvelous, whereby curious revelations always remain at arm’s length. He has made several imaginatively chosen translations, including works by Coleridge,...

Nanos Valaoritis soon became the most vital organizing force in Greek surrealism: being the one consistent link between Embirikos and Breton, an effort toward the collaboration of both Embirikos and Elytis in French surrealist publications came to nothing, as we have seen, because of objective difficulties. But in the 1960s the conditions were ripe for a Greek attempt along those lines; hence thePalijournal.

Valaoritis’s own chronicle,Μοντερνισμός, Πρωτοπορία και Πάλι(Modernism, the “Avant-Garde,” and Pali) [Athens: Καστανιώτης (Castaniotis), 1997], provides a description of the conditions under which that publication was launched. While Yorgos Seferis, about to receive the...

Aravantinou’s early texts, influenced by Embirikos in their treatment of language and expansive freedom, but entirely original in concept, constituted one of the major tone-setting works aroundPali;language here at once constructs and describes a mysterious, nocturnal urban landscape. Largely ignored by critics and translators alike, her death from Alzheimer’s disease was a tragic irony, given her preoccupation in her works with the function of memory. “Here the narrative flow follows the direction of desire, of an impossible craving” (Nanos Valaoritis).

Along the safe one-way street we move, the woman of my past, the dwarf with the black wig...

His suicide and unwillingness to publish bring perhaps to mind Jacques Rigaut and his namesake Vaché—a facile comparison for an equally unique human case. A member of Embirikos’s wartime circle, close to Sahtouris and Gonatas, Makris evaded both work and “literature”; one of his poems, now lost, was titled “An attempt to become enchanted.” Introduced to André Breton by Nanos Valaoritis, Makris collaborated onPali,notably with his translation of Paz’sSunstone(based on Benjamin Péret’s translation and notes). Many texts by Greek surrealists (most famously Embirikos’s “King Kong”) have been dedicated to Makris (both before and after his...

One of the most brilliant Greek humorists (aqualityrather than a specialty), and a major, if elusive, contributor toPali,Alexander Skinas has spent most of his life in Germany, where he worked extensively for the radio, notably with his junta-era barbed broadcasts. Although, predictably, Skinas’s writing has been downplayed by critics for not being “serious-minded” enough, it would not be much of an exaggeration to consider him as perhaps the most original Greek writer of the postwar era, his boldness in stretching the limits of language with biting playfulness far surpassing the level of mere “literary innovation.” Skinas’s...

A vital member of the youngPaligroup, who has not remained close to surrealism. One of his generation’s most acerbic poets, he has translated works by Octavio Paz, Jorge Luis Borges, and others. “Seldom has a man given not a shit/For the collected values of the European spirit” (Tassos Denegris).

Flute water ski

Tarot prescience

On staircases

With wind

With darkness

On a Portuguese bed in the UN building

In the countryside on the Pnyx hill in Brittany

Anywhere

Like a dog wherever I find you.

Magic image

Bursary to my erection

Fox wandering in the marshes.

One by...

Writer, painter, graphic artist, director of surrealist shorts, and cofounder ofPali,whose intervention gave thetoneof an era. HisHistoriasconstitute a new kind of surrealist narrative and offer a fresh look at the world, albeit one rooted in a subversive reading of folk tradition and modern popular culture. In magnifying the everyday as well as in trivializing the apocalyptic, Koutrouboussis alludes to anew myth,barely discernible amid the prevalent misery and the debased, common use of popular artifacts. His influences include, by his own admission, Engonopoulos, Max Ernst, Barbara Stanwyck, the Three Stooges, and Zeno of...

A member of thePaligroup from the first issue on, Mylona published her first book of poetry much later, but she arguably never surpassed the freshness and cruel humor of these early prose pieces. She has translated selections of Baudelaire’s and Rimbaud’s prose poems. “Shuddering, I hear hollow sounds of human voices, of glasses standing on tables; I see ghosts of brilliant adverts” (Eva Mylona).

The king was very young. He wore a crown of Veronese green-colored ice. He lived at the bottom of a lake up north. That lake is covered with ice all year long, so no...

Having organized the first Greekhappenings,along with Koutrouboussis, Dimitris Poulikakos went on to meet Nanos Valaoritis, an event that led to the creation ofPali,to which Poulikakos contributed original texts (which testify to a remarkable grasp of surrealist narrative, while being wholly original in concept) as well as translations of Lautréamont, Ted Joans, Arrabal, and Aldous Huxley’sThe Doors of Perception.AfterPali’sdemise, he became a proponent of the semiclandestine (under the junta rule) underground rock ’n’ roll scene, although little of his work has been recorded. Much later, he reemerged, bafflingly, as a familiar face and...