ABSTRACT
Twenty years ago in the Times Literary Supplement, I briefly reviewed John Stathatos’s British versions of thirty-six poems by Miltos Sachtouris (1919-2005). The other day, when I reopened Strange Sunday (Bran’s Head Books) in order to compare it to Karen Emmerich’s new, and much more extensive, rendering of the Greek poet’s work ( Poems 1945-1971 , Archipelago Books), I discovered that I had penned a red asterisk in the margin whenever the word “black” occured, an orange asterisk for “blood” or “bloody,” and a green asterisk for “dead” or “death.” Most pages of my copy are thus color-coded by at least one and sometimes two such reminders, while two short, skeletal poems are marked by as many as four asterisks; one fourteen-liner repeats “black” five times. Such is Sachtouris’s chromatic, obsessional poetics. The author of Colorwounds (1980) similarly employs only a very few recurrent symbols and motifs, some of them implicitly hued as well: fire (or burning), birds, dogs, the sky, the sun, the moon, and rain. Back then I wrote: “A metaphysics [of salvation] is rejected as an illusion in the terse, dark, occasionally nightmarish poems of Sachtouris. His is a minimalist poetry which evokes the innate tragedy of the human condition; twinges of sarcastic humor accompany the pervasive mood of hopeless impotence and imprisonment.”
