KOSTAS G. KARYOTAKIS Poems and Prose Writings

This is a new bilingual edition (Romanian-Greek) containing an extensive selection of works by one of the most important early 20th century Greek poets, Kostas Karyotakis (1896-1928). Considered one of the most talented poets of his generation, akin in point of atmosphere to his Greek fellow poets Miltiadis Malakasis and Kostas Varnalis, but especially to European poets Heinrich Heine, Jean Moréas, Charles Baudelaire and Jules Laforgue, Kostas G. Karyotakis is praised for his poems’ remarkable metric wealth and variety, as well as for his philosophical breadth and the musicality of his verse. His work stands for a link between the generation ofVarnalis, Kavafis, Sikelianos and the one of Seferis, Ritsos and Elytis. “The themes he approached, his style and particularly the way he made poetry his destiny explain why Kostas Karyotakis was both a figure of the Lost Generation in Greece (and generally in early 20th century Southeastern Europe and the Balkans) and a unique, unmistakable voice, as Grete Tartler (who helped translate this volume, alongside Elena Lazăr) noted in the foreword.The sixty poems selected from the three booklets the poet published during his lifetime are accompanied by his literary prose writings, which belong to the same climate later named “Karyotakism.” In the foreword entitled «Kostas Karyotakis, a unique voice among “the inglorious poets of the century”, Grete Tartler introduces the Romanian readership to the traits that won the author of the Elegies and Satiresa place in his country’s literary history, from his neo-Romantic beginnings to the Symbolist techniques he mastered or to “his translations, genuine creations on a par with the originals.” “In this poet, prose-writer and translator one finds not only an ironist, not only a Romantic and a Symbolist but, beyond the suffering and troubles of his short life, a man avid for knowledge, standing for a true European bridge between cultures.”
Karyotakis was a keen traveller who, one year before committing suicide, had also travelled to Romania and that journey provided the opportunity for him “to part with himself,” as he confessed in a letter to a friend. In her introductory text, Thalia Ieronymaki proceeds from Karyotakis’ “adventurous trip to Romania,” where he visited seven cities (“Bucharest is bigger and more beautiful than Athens,” the poet wrote, “it has magnificent buildings and many commercial streets. A wonderful provincial town is Sinaia…”) and then analyses the motif of travel in his work as a way of escaping reality. Thalia Ieronymaki also provided a chronology presenting the poet’s biography in the troubled literary and historical context of the early 20th century.
This 20th bilingual edition issued by Omonia Publishing House, devoted to one of the most representative Greek poets, was published with support from the Kostas and Eleni Uranis Foundation in Athens.