Nikos Engonopoulos; Acropolis and Tram: Poems 1938-1978

Edited and Translated, with an Introduction by Martin McKinsey

Series No.: 172

ISBN: 978-1-933382-37-1, Pages: 125

Greek Literature, Poetry

Part of 50: A Celebration of Sun & Moon Classics

Nikos Engonopoulos (1907-1985) was a painter, poet, and early convert to Surrealism. Together with Andreas Embirikos and Odysseus Elytis, he changed the course of Greek poetry in the late 1930s.

Bruised by the reception of his first two books, he spent the next 40 years in semi-seclusion, evolving a theater of gesture and sign in which he acted out the drama of 20th-century geopolitics. For Greece, this meant military dictatorship, foreign invasion and occupation, a brutalizing civil war, and the subsequent Cold War lockdown. On the stage of his poetry, these events appear in costumes from other times and places. His Greco-Balkan cast of characters include fantastical Albanians, Montenegran monarchs, Orthodox warrior-saints, Bulgarian woodsmen, and Smyrnian beauties.

In a short lyric, he writes about “the Grand Initiates” who once...

by means of gestures

asked

that I meet them outside.

His poems, like the Initiates, beckon us outside to a meeting with the unfamiliar.

Acropolis and Tram, his first collection in English, spans his career from the early experiments in Surrealist disassociation to the late elegies for a lost world. It also includes the long poem “Bolivar,” his covert ode to the Greek resistance, first published in 1945.