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21ST-CENTURY POETRY Poetic perfection from Chile and Greece

Collections from Pablo Neruda, Nicolas Calas and Tasos Leivaditis

READERS who only know the political poetry of Chilean communist poet Pablo Neruda (1904-73) will be surprised and delighted by The Captain’s Verses (Carcanet, £14.99).

Published anonymously in 1952, this bilingual edition is a reprint of the Anvil Press 2003 edition translated by Brian Cole. They are a series of poems written for Neruda’s third wife, Matilde:

“I did not pause in the struggle./I did not cease to march towards life,/towards peace, towards bread for all,/but I lifted you up in my arms/and I nailed you to my kisses/and I gazed on you as never/human eyes will gaze on you again.”

This is Neruda at his most, expansive, extravagant and ecstatic: “I bend down to your mouth to kiss the earth.” She is clay in his potter’s hands, there are rivers in her eyes. He is a condor, a tiger, an insect. Their love is a river, a beach, a meteor, an ocean, a tempest,. She is his world:

“When I look at the shape/of America on the map,/my love, it is you that I see;/the mountains of copper in your hair,/your breasts, wheat and snow… from your shoulders/the sugar-cane cutter/from scorching Cuba/looks out at me, covered with dark sweat,/and from your throat/fishermen shivering/in damp houses by the seashore/sing me their secret.”

The Greek poet Nicolas Calas (1907–88) was variously a communist, futurist, surrealist, Trotskyite and Freudian. He designed a chess set with Andre Breton, wrote an anthropological study with Margaret Mead, appeared in a film by Hans Richter and first translated Louis Aragon, Benjamin Peret and TS Eliot into Greek.

Translated and edited by Lena Hoff, Oedipus is Innocent (Smokestack Books, £8.99) is the first collection of Calas’s poems in English and they are experimental, satirical, mocking and shocking.

Here is his description of the blood on the streets of Athens after the police have attacked a peaceful demonstration: “I remember a child’s head/that had been trampled/afterwards/it took up a lot of space/the brain, the eyes, the blood/strange.”

Calas was especially good at writing about the violent stupidity of the Greek fascist junta: “The Greek flag flaps like a flag of convenience for money… the Greeks will fast three times a week/and follow a daily diet of morality and censorship/so that Freedom will grow thinner.”

Tasos Leivaditis (1922-88) was one of the best-loved Greek poets of the 20th century, part of the heroic generation of communist poets that included Ritsos, Vrettakos and Anagnostakis during the second world war. Leivaditis fought with the communist partisans and many of his poems were set to music by Mikis Theodorakis.

During the civil war, he was arrested and imprisoned on the islands of Lemnos, Makronisos and Agios Efstratios. Eventually released, he was charged in 1955 with “incitement to rebellion” for writing subversive poetry.

After the US-sponsored fascist coup of 1967, he was forced to write under pseudonym. But when Leivaditis died he was given a state funeral.

Translated by NN Trakakis, Autumn Manuscripts (Smokestack Books, £8.99) was Leivaditis’s last book and its lovely melancholy is comparable to Brecht’s Buckow elegies, Aragon’s Les Adieux or Ritsos’s last poems: “One morning a bird sat on the tree opposite and whistled something./Oh, if only I understood what it wanted to tell me, perhaps I would have found the meaning of the world.”

It’s a beautiful book of sly fables and strange dreams, farewells and departures, migrating birds and autumn leaves, embers and ash, dreams and doubt:

“everything happened so quickly, friends went their separate ways, some were lost in the war,
others at the turn in the road/lovers got married and now grow old next to strangers/at times in the afternoon a wind arises, the shutters are battered like pangs of remorse.”

Published a few months after Leivaditis’s death, Autumn Manuscripts is also about the political defeats of his generation, the bitter divisions inside the Greek Communist Party and the wider demoralisation of the European left: “The old comrades have not died but reside now at the far end of the roads — /whichever one you take you will run into them.”

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