ABSTRACT
Andonis Decavalles (b. 1920) belongs to that generation of Greek poets— some have called it the “Generation of Anguish”—which, as the poet observes in an interview included in Ransoms to Time (a major selection in English of his poems), saw its “youth taken away,” its “dreams destroyed,” and its “ideologies betrayed” by the Second World War and by the Civil War (1946-1949) that followed. The literary responses to that anguish, however, have been diverse. Manolis Anagnostakis (1925-2005) wrote a poetry of political commitment, Nanos Valaoritis (b. 1921) an erotic poetry influenced by Surrealism, and Takis Sinopoulos (1917-1981) a poetry whose principal theme is death. As for Decavalles, who also often meditates on death, he attempts “to create his own world of values in the heart of evil,” as the translator Kimon Friar notes in his thorough, perspicacious introduction to these sixty-five poems chosen from Nimule-Gondokoro (1949), Akis (1950), Oceanids (1970), and Joints, Ships, Ransoms (1976). (Two new poems are also included.) As in the poetry of Odysseus Elytis, continues Friar, for Decavalles “irrevocable tragedies and sorrows of life must be transcended into the higher realm of man’s assimilating imagination and there given their proper place in the ultimate glorification of the universe.”
