The ancient Indian Tamil Poetics, to use Rananujan’s expression, divided poetry into two categories: the poetry of love and war. Alternatively, they are poetry of ‘within’ and ‘without’; of women and men respectively ( agam and Puram, in Tamil). Interestingly enough, the ancient Manipuri text, ‘Ainrol’ also speaks of the art of within and without. But Tamil and Manipuri texts on Poetics recognize the centrality and significance of time-space in art and poetry. For them space is not an abstract concept, but specific types of regions where men and women live, reproduce and produce the necessities of life and are characterized by particular flora and fauna. Further different regions bespeak of different shades and feelings of love. According to Tamils, the mountain is the backdrop for mating and the farmland for parting. The sea shore is the scene of discord and the wasteland, of complete breakdown of relationships. The interesting point is to note that the wasteland is not a geographical region, but any landscape can turn into a wasteland during natural or man-made calamity like famine or war.
How countries and cities turn into wastelands is a recurrent motif in modern poetry. The great poetry of Baudelaire, T.S. Eliot, Pablo Neruda, Brecht, Sefaris and several others dramatize this negative alchemy. History and archaeology bear witness to how sites of great civilizations have been devastated by man, nature or time. Sites of glory turn into sights of horror.
Modern Greek poetry whose power is no less than that of its classical inheritance has explored with great honesty what it feels like to be the heir of a great civilization now in ruins. The great modern Alexandra’s Greek poet Cavafy describes the state of ineffectual past glory as boredom, where even the coming of barbarians is welcome. But barbarians will never turn up. Says Cavafy:
Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
Those people were a kind of solution.
Says George Sefaris:
We have returned again to autumn
Summer like a notebook that has tired us with writing remains
Full of erasures, abstract scribblings
On the margins and question marks…
Says Elytes:
I feel like a seduced cypress
to which not even a tombstone remained
only empty plots rocks stone enclosures
and the inconsolable north wind
beating yonder on the factories’ high walls
enclosed there we all work as
elsewhere in History
the Future
years say spilled crude oil
set ablaze
help
The words of these poets have great poignancy and power. The tone of these poets is a lot more stirring than those of other European poets for whom Greece is a tutorial that does not quite belong to them. That a similar power and poignancy is being expressed by contemporary poet-heirs of earlier masters is demonstrated by the slim anthology of present-day Greek poems, ‘Crisis’ edited by Dinos Siotis, pet, fiction writer, translator and editor. Writes the editor in the introduction:
‘ The Illiad would not have been written if there hadn’t been a crisis-a crisis caused by the capture of Helen by Paris. The same goes for the Odyssey - Odysseus was under the heavy spell of 10- year-old crisis trying to return to Ithaca. Poets thrive through crisis.’
This slim, but rich anthology of poetic voices from contemporary Greece is an orchestration of poems which whisper, grumble, rumble and rage against the dying of light in a world by triple tyrants of money, market and fetishism. Though painfully aware of the lost world of fulfilment, they do not fall into the trap of nostalgia. Says Aphrodite in a poem by Kyrikose Charalambidis:
What will remain finally of the memory
Of a goddess that no longer rules the body?
The power of these poems is because they, to borrow a phrase from Octavio Paz, they enter the present, mythless. Says Demeris Angelis in ‘My Town Today an Underage girl’:
Each afternoon she plays music
With a spoon, counting the diamond shapes
On the barbed wire fence
George Douatzis heaves a sigh with these words:
If you only knew with how
Little love
The world could change
Says the grief-stricken Ilias Gris:
Now you know, night has no voice
To lament the sins
Of those who walk like posters into the future
Elsa Korneti tells us what a Greek woman is reduced to now:
Slow and steady of step
Faithful servant of law and order
Dogged follower of the straight and narrow
I freeze into my assigned position
At a time when economic crisis is eating into one’s vitals, Nektarios Lambropoulos says that the poet is the most trodden being. He further depicts the crisis with savage irony;
If you have no income
They will tax you because you’re a thief
If you have a small income
They will tax you because for sure you cheat
If you are on salary
They will tax you because you can’t do otherwise
If you are a banker
The more they can do is to export
(Capital)
Efttchia Panayiotou writes the epitaph of humanity thus:
For now humanity is a sound
Scratched glass call it an attempt for freedom
For lack of space, I am giving only a few random quotes from a rich woman orchestration of voices which speak with indomitable force of inheritors of a great civilisation strangled by the match of machine, market and globalisation. Unheedful of the false comforts of the post-truth world and not falling prey to the nostalgia for lost glory, they look the present day world straight in its face and question, quarrel and re-imagine it to the extant poetry can.
These poems are surely the extensions of the wasteland where words, if nothing else, blooms into poetry which is the ultimate antagonist of money and market. This is deftly summed up in the last poem in the book by Yiannis Yfantis:
‘ Do you make money’ they ask me’from poetry?’
‘ Money?’ I answer them’ money?’
Does the lover ever make money?
Only a pimp makes money’
