Poet
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Yoryis Pavlópoulos 1924-... country: Greece language: Greek |
was born in Pyrgos in the Peleponesos. His poems have appeared in literary journals since 1943. In 1972 he published his first collection To katógi (The Basement) and four more volumes of his poems have appeared since. He has translated work of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. In many of his poems Yoryis Pavlópoulos describes some scene or event which can only occur in a dream or in our imagination, yet he does so in the concrete, realistic terms we normally use when talking about everyday occurrences. He writes about death, which was a common enough occurrence in Pavlópoulos’ Greece in the 1940s (German occupation and civil war), about life and love, about body and woman with all their lighter and darker sides. And often about the writing of poetry, with all kinds of mirroring effects between art and reality, yet always playful and imaginative, never theorizing. Pavlópoulos builds on the modernism of his mentor Seferis and Seferis’ other pupil Sinópoulos (Pavlópoulos’ fellow-townsman and friend), but adding touches of surrealism à la Sachtouris, and with a certain admiration for Borges. Earthy, human, mysterious-simple, personal, ‘effective without embellishment’ and always with depth (Seferis about Pavlópoulos in 1972), with Doric control and explosiveness. Yoryis Pavlópoulos was born in 1924 in Pyrgos, a provincial town on the west coast of the Peloponnesos (not far from Olympia), well-represented in Greece’s literature with such writers and poets as Nikos Kachtitsis, Ilías Papadimitrakópoulos, Takis Sinópoulos and Pavlópoulos. Unlike the others, Pavlópoulos has – except for a few years’ unfinished law study in Athens in the 1940s – always remained in Pyrgos, where he worked in the office of the local bus company. With some 170 poems to his name, Pavlópoulos cannot be said to be a poetic mountain torrent, rather a dripping stalactite. His first collection was published in 1971, but already in 1943 he had his first poem published in a magazine, and he has insisted on naming his recent collected poems Poems 1943-1997. All in all, he has published five collections of verse, and selections from them have also appeared in German, French, Italian, Spanish, Russian and Polish. Author: Hero Hokwerda Translated by Ko Kooman To katóyi (1971); The Cellar (1977); To sakí (1980); Ta andiklídhia (1988); Triandratría chaïkou (1990); The Passkeys (1994); Lígos ámmos (1997); A Little Sand (1999); Piímata 1943-1997 (2001). Poets: |
