{"id":9776,"date":"2018-10-08T20:26:39","date_gmt":"2018-10-08T19:26:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=9776"},"modified":"2018-10-08T20:37:51","modified_gmt":"2018-10-08T19:37:51","slug":"eleni-vakalo-before-lyricism-reviewed-by-ian-pople","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=9776","title":{"rendered":"Eleni Vakalo | Before Lyricism<\/em><\/strong> | reviewed by Ian Pople"},"content":{"rendered":"

Eleni Vakalo | Before Lyricism<\/em> | Ugly Duckling Press $18.00<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Eleni Vakalo\u2019s Before Lyricism<\/em> appears in Ugly Duckling Press\u2019 \u2018Lost Literature\u2019 series. Among other authors in this series are Laura Riding, Man Ray, Duchamp and Cesar Vallejo. Vakalo, herself, was clearly a very important figure in post-war Greek culture; having studied Art History at the Sorbonne, she and her husband, Yiorgos Vakalo, founded a school of Art and Design, at which she taught. She wrote seven books of art history, was a newspaper art critic and published fourteen volumes of poetry. Of these, Before Lyricism<\/em> comprises six book-length poems published between 1954 and 1966, and the book notes that these six had been gathered into a single sequence by Vakalo, herself. Something else to note is that Vakalo had been born in Istanbul in 1921, and her parents moved to Athens in 1922, so Vakalo, herself, was part of the great exchange of populations which occurred in those years; an exchange which these days might be called something else. One other important thing which colours this book is that Greek poetry of the early and mid-twentieth century was much influenced by the reading of French surrealism of the nineteenth and twentieth century, which Vakalo, herself, must have been exposed to during her stay in Paris. Vakalo\u2019s excellent translator, Karen Emmerich, doesn\u2019t mention this in her detailed and very useful afterword and perhaps I am making too much of this. However, the approaches of surrealism seem so present in the book that I find it a little strange that the word doesn\u2019t occur at all. <\/p>\n

Emmerich\u2019s afterword also outlines the difficulties of translating Vakalo\u2019s Greek. As Emmerich notes, Greek is an inflected language in which nouns are declined into gender and case, and verbs conjugated in tenses and persons. Vakalo played extensively with grammar from the start of her writing. As Emmerich notes, again, where grammatical function is shown with ending, a writer can move subjects and objects, for example, around the sentence in the knowledge that their grammatical \u2018place\u2019 will be understood and that ambiguities will be ironed out by the endings. However, Vakalo constantly undermines these kinds of understanding. Emmerich give the example of the fifteen short lines of the poem \u2018Digression about the Spider\u2019, in which there is no main verb, i.e. the sentence isn\u2019t actually a sentence there are three nouns which could act as subjects and several nouns which act as either subjects or objects. Vakalo also extensively uses what is known in English as the \u2018dangling participle\u2019 as in \u2018Mooing loudly, the farmer guided his cows across the road.\u2019 Here the \u2018ing\u2019 form (the present participle) floats free, to amusing effect. Emmerich comments that \u2018nearly all Vakalo\u2019s participles dangle.\u2019 The result of all this grammatical jiggery-pokery is that, in Greek, the poems will tend to float as entities; their directness relentlessly undermined. It should be noted here, though, that the book is not a bi-lingual edition. It is a testament to Emmerich\u2019s success as a translator that at least some of that airy-ness is present in so many of these translations. <\/p>\n

One of the French poets who may have influenced Vakalo is Yves Bonnefoy. Vakalo\u2019s poem \u2018My Dove\u2019 from the sequence \u2018The Meaning of the Blind\u2019 seems directly inspired by Bonnefoy\u2019s \u2018Douve\u2019 poems from 1953. Vakalo\u2019s sequence dates from 1962, and the particular \u2018My Dove\u2019 poem seems to pick on the phoenix-like quality of Bonnefoy\u2019s \u2018Douve\u2019, \u2018Its feathers engulfed by hot blood \/ Sometimes cracking the window \/ Gently \/ The departing breeze takes one \/ Lays it on the grass with the dew \/ And sends it away\/ Death quivering with that heat \/ And it\u2019s barely dawn\u2019. Here Vakalo plays off the imaginary with the exquisitely real, which is one of Bonnefoy\u2019s brilliances. On the one hand, we have the precise, visual detail of the breeze catching the feather and laying it on the grass with the dew. On the other, we have the presence of the cracked window, and the animation of death. Elsewhere in this sequence, the surrealism comes more to the surface, \u2018It was darkness and the great silent clot of wind that when it stands waiting is a dense king \/\/ And I had to visit the embassy of the unbridled where you sense but don\u2019t feel until the time comes\u2019 As Emmerich notes in her introduction, Vakalo cheerfully eschews punctuation, thus the \u2018things\u2019 in the passage run through and into each other. However, if we go back to the title of the sequence, \u2018The Meaning of the Blind\u2019 some sense of how these items might actually relate to each other does emerge.<\/p>\n

Preceding \u2018The Meaning of the Blind\u2019 by three years is the sequence \u2018Description of the Body\u2019. Again the title might conflate two of Vakalo\u2019s key themes the sense of artistic depiction and the clear sensuousness of much of Valako\u2019s world. It is in this sequence, in particular, that Vakalo\u2019s brilliance as a poet is perhaps most clearly shown. It is a real pity that the Greek originals are not published here as the language pushes and noses around ideas of the body, sensations and how the body might be found in the world, as in this example, \u2018The body you see with simple limbs, some again at rest, with slight constant tremors, the dull light bodies collect and the other from the sun they hide on days that suddenly turn dark, conceives \/\/ The great silent proliferations, in our sleep, of the lives of leaves\u2019. Other than the commas, there is no other punctuation here. And, as Emmerich comments in her afterword, Vakalo the art historian, deployed the lines very carefully upon the page; thus, in this edition, poem fragments are placed in space in the centre of a page, or put at the bottom of the page, so you almost come upon them on the white extent. In the case of \u2018Description of the body\u2019, the depiction of the body and the words on the page almost become one. Vakalo creates a kind of phenomenology bodily placement and sensation, and I wondered if she had come across this very same thing in the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty which was published in the \u2018fifties. <\/p>\n

At first the passage seems like a simple description of the body, \u2018you see with simple limbs\u2019; although we might ask what exactly is \u2018simple\u2019 about the limbs? And how are \u2018some\u2019 of the limbs at rest, while others are not. Then the bodies collect \u2018dull light\u2019 and \u2018the other from the sun\u2019. Do we assume that \u2018the other\u2019 means \u2018the other light\u2019 and that the noun is elided, here or is there a different \u2018other\u2019 involved? A sunlight which is held in the body and hidden on dark days to conceive, how? And then the suddenly move into sleep and \u2018leaves\u2019. Again, we might wonder if there was a rhyme in the original Greek between \u2018conceive\u2019 and \u2018leaves\u2019, or whether this was Emmerich\u2019s doing. However, what Vakalo\/Emmerich do here is work the sensuousness of the body into a kind of meaning of the body, and Vakalo\/Emmerich\u2019s achievement is create poetry in which language, meaning and form are at one and the same time wrested and skewed but also inevitable and right. <\/p>\n

by Ian Pople<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Eleni Vakalo | Before Lyricism | Ugly Duckling Press $18.00 Eleni Vakalo\u2019s Before Lyricism appears in Ugly Duckling Press\u2019 \u2018Lost Literature\u2019 series. Among other authors in this series are Laura Riding, Man Ray, Duchamp and Cesar Vallejo. Vakalo, herself, was clearly a very important figure in post-war Greek culture; having studied Art History at the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[13,283],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\nEleni Vakalo | Before Lyricism | reviewed by Ian Pople - The Manchester Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=9776\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Eleni Vakalo | Before Lyricism | reviewed by Ian Pople - The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Eleni Vakalo | Before Lyricism | Ugly Duckling Press $18.00 Eleni Vakalo\u2019s Before Lyricism appears in Ugly Duckling Press\u2019 \u2018Lost Literature\u2019 series. 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