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Reading Greece
Reading Greece1 day ago
📌 17 November commemorates the Athens Polytechnic Uprising in 1973, which was a massive demonstration of popular rejection of the Greek military junta of 1967–1974. The uprising actually began on November 14, 1973, and escalated to an open anti-junta revolt and ended in bloodshed in the early morning of November 17, after a series of events starting with a tank crashing through the gates of the Polytechnic.

The poetry collection titled "The Body and the Blood (One more attempt at a poem for the Polytechnic)" by Yannis Ritsos refers to the Polytechnic uprising, to the limitation of the body that acts and claims the “unfamiliar” within space, to the intervention of an extensional ‘youth’ that becomes ‘body and blood’. The moment the body stands against the tank, freedom is ‘re-invented’. Yet, there is no heroic action except an openness to death, the shaping of the conditions for the incarnation of the ‘generous’ action. In this framework freedom is constituted in action, in uncertainty, in the scope of reaction, the potential and the non-death.

II

One writes slogans on the wall, the other
shouts slogans above the streets, the third
framed by the window sings openly Romiosyni Romiosyni
they carried the wounded to the library
a vine leaf like a palm on the wounded knee
sorrowful statues amidst the smoke – where did you forget love
students, builders, curses, posters, cheers, flags
love is the dream, love is the world
lowered forehead of the bull, more and more people are coming
younger and older, schoolchildren with a handful of nuts, with
knapsacks
two red birds drawn crosswise on their notebooks
the newlyweds emerging from the photographer’s
they tie white ribbons on the iron gate
blind lottery vendors, an upright guitar, drugstore lamps
night falls in the city, lighted numbers, closed theaters,
closed notepads, underground poems, pierced flowers
the hidden landscape emerges silently above the night from the
unfathomable depths.
tonight is the time for everything- he says
tonight the continuation of everything – he says
tomorrow for all mankind, for the whole future
that is what he said on the roof
he was holding a huge steering wheel and turning the city
down on the asphalt one could hear the noise of the crowd
a black dog, a basket, a small mirror
two huge shoes of the bitter jester and the broken glass
and the odor coming from the stove of the chestnut vendor
large like a ship.

X

After the tanks the quietest silence, they gathered the burned
vehicles, the ashes
they washed off the blood at the early dawn
they carried away the dead to the iron gate, the broken trees
the young did not return home
shadows wander around the telephone booths
from window pane to window pane the face of the extinguished
fire
they found the one hanged in the rented room
the other in the locked closet
the other with his forehead on his knees as if reading his last
book […]

XII

What they called, in sum, glory or rebellion or sacrifice
a day so transparent as if nothing blameworthy had happened
the night before
a little farther down one could already hear the cheers
the window-panes were changing color, red dominated
the music wandered elsewhere, tall stools remained empty
the windows were being transformed into doors – he was saying – […]

[Excerpts from The Body and the Blood (One more attempt at a poem for the Polytechnic) by Yiannis Ritsos, translated by C. Capri-Karka and Ilona Karka]
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Reading Greece
Reading Greece4 days ago
📍 On 17 November, Greece honours the memory of the Athens Polytechnic Uprising, a massive student riot against the military dictatorship (1967-1974).

Greece was under military rule, and for three years writers had remained silent rather than submit to censorship. But in 1970 they rebelled and published a book called “Eighteen Texts” an innocuous title that camouflaged a piercing protest against dictatorship and repression. In the words of poet Manolis Anagnostakis, “Words must be hammered in like nails that the wind might not take them.”

“Eighteen Texts” consciously signalled the resumption, under an oppressive regime, of the cultural ferment that paralleled the political liberalization of Greece in the early sixties. The military regime had recently lifted preventive censorship, and although it was still very dangerous to challenge the policies regarding freedom of thought and freedom of the press, these authors took advantage of the purported relaxation of censorship to produce this volume.

The lifting of preventive censorship, they state in their Prologue, does not emancipate the intellectual life of a country if areas of creativity continue to be surrounded by barriers that hinder unconditional presentation of ideas and make their full evaluation impossible. The right to free artistic and intellectual creation is bound to the dignity of man.
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Reading Greece
Reading Greece6 days ago
📌Ιt was a year ago, on 12 November 2024, that distinguished poet Michalis Ganas passed away.

A Greek Ballad: Selected Poems” by Michalis Ganas, translated by David Connolly and Joshua Barley (Yale University Press 2019) is a stunning collection that draws from four decades of verse by one of modern Greece's most lauded #poets.

Originally from a remote village on the northwest border of Greece, Ganas witnessed the Greek Civil War as a young child, and was taken into enforced exile in Eastern Europe with his family. Weaving together subtle references to the events and places that have defined his life's story, Ganas's terse and technically accomplished poems are a combination of folklore, autobiography, and recent history. Whether describing the mountains of his youth or the difficulties of acclimation in Athens of the 1960s and 1970s, Ganas's writing is infused with striking and original imagery inspired by love, memory, and loss.

Featuring expert translations-made in collaboration with Ganas himself-by David Connolly and Joshua Barley, this volume also includes a scholarly introduction to the poet's life and work.

GREECE, YOU KNOW . . .

Greece, you know, is not only a wound.
Frothy coffee in your off hours,
TV and radio on the verandas,
bronze burnish, bronze body,
bronze bottle-top Greece at my lips.
In the yards the isinglass of the sun
traps your eyes like insects.
Behind the yards disemboweled houses,
playing fields, prisons, hospitals,
people of God and doorknockers of the Devil,
and the tram drivers drinking alone
Arachova’s stiff wine.

Here slept fine young men
with their rifles at their sides,
with barefoot children in their sleep.
Headscarves went sailing by,
carpets and rugs from the watermill.
Now it’s army boots grating gravel
in this great ginnery of the rocks
and the tram drivers drinking alone
Arachova’s stiff wine.

📷Konstantinos Pittas, Michalis Ganas in July 2021
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