Kostas Karyotakis

Kostas Karyotakis Poems

Detested by both men and gods,
like nobles who have bitterly decayed,
the Verlaines wither; wealth remains
to them, of rich and silvery rhyme.
...

From the depth of good times
our loves greet us bitterly

You’re not in love, you say, and you don’t remember.
...

I speak of lives given to the light
of serene love, and while they flow
...

A sweet hour. Athens sprawls like a hetaira
offering herself to April.
Sensuous scents are in the air,
the spirit waits for nothing any more.
...

We are some disjointed guitars.
When the wind blows through
discordant lines and sounds awaken
in the chainlike strings that dangle.
...

Death is the bullies bashing
against the black walls and roof tiling,
death is the women being loved
in the course of onion peeling.
...

In the garden the chrysanthemums were dying
like desires when you came. Calmly
you laughed, like little white flowers.
...

They turn the key in the door, take out
their old, well-hidden letters,
read them quietly, then drag
their feet a final time.
...

With calm, indifferent brow
I'll greet the afternoons, the dawns.

A tree, I'll stand and gaze at both
...

Make your pain into a harp.
Become a nightingale,
become a flower.
When bitter years arrive,
...

At sixteen they laughed
yonder, in the springtime afternoon.
Later their lips became silent
...

12.

Helen S. Lamari, 1878-1912
Poet and musician.
Died with the most frightful pains of the body
and with the greatest calm of the spirit.
...

Oh, our little orange tree
all full of flowers
and like a bride dressed
all in white
...

14.

In your current is the laughter of the gods,
Saronica immortal, the blessing of our ship,
like your deep calm, and just as deep the tempest
...

I stare at the ceiling's plasterwork.
I'm drawn into the dance of the meanders.
My happiness, I'm thinking, would
lie in height.
...

My verses, children of my blood.
They speak, but I supply the words
like fragments of my heart,
I offer them like tears from my eyes.
...

They betrayed virtue and the last came first.
With money the heart is taken and the friend is appraised.
...

This is no longer a song, no human
hum. It can be heard reaching
as a last cry, in the depths of night,
of someone who has died
...

On the sand the great works of the human race are built,
and like a little child Time wrecks them with his foot.
...

The hours have faded me, found once again
leaning across the thankless table.
(The sun slips through the window in the wall that
...

Kostas Karyotakis Biography

Kostas Karyotakis ( October 30, 1896 – July 20, 1928) is considered one of the most representative Greek poets of the 1920s and one of the first poets to use iconoclastic themes in Greece. His poetry conveys a great deal of nature, imagery and traces of expressionism and surrealism. The majority of Karyotakis' contemporaries viewed him in a dim light throughout his lifetime without a pragmatic accountability for their contemptuous views; for after his suicide,the majority began to revert to the view that he was indeed a great poet. He had a significant, almost disproportionately progressive influence on later Greek poets. In February 1919 he published his first collection of poetry: The Pain of Men and Things , which was largely ignored or badly criticized by the critics. In the same year he published with his friend Agis Levendis a satirical review called The Leg, which despite its success was banned by the police after the sixth issue. In 1921 he published his second collection called Nepenthe (Greek: Νηπενθῆ) and also wrote a musical revue Pell-Mell. In 1922 he began having an affair with the poet Maria Polydouri who was a colleague of his at the Prefecture of Attica. In 1923 he wrote a poem called "Treponema pallidum" , which was published under the title "Song of Madness" and gave rise to speculation that he may have been suffering from syphilis, which before 1945 was considered a chronic illness with no proved cure for it. George Skouras, a physician of the poet, wrote: "He was sick, he was syphilitic" and George Savidis (1929-1999), professor of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, who possessed the largest archive about Greek poets, revealed that Karyotakis was syphilitic, and that his brother, Thanasis Karyotakis, thought the disease to be a disgrace to the family. In 1924 he traveled abroad, visiting Italy and Germany. In December 1927 he published his last collection of poetry: Elegy and Satires . In February 1928, Karyotakis was transferred to Patras although soon afterwards he spent a month on leave in Paris and in June 1928 he was sent yet again to Preveza. From there he sent desperate letters to friends and relatives describing the misery he felt in the town. His family offered to support him for an indefinite stay in Paris, but he refused knowing what a monetary sacrifice like this would entail for them. His angst is felt in the poem "Preveza" which he wrote shortly before his suicide. The poem displays an insistent, lilting anaphora on the word Death, which stands at the beginning of several lines and sentences. It is shot through with a pungent awareness of the gallows, in the tiny mediocrity of life as Karyotakis felt it, mortality is measured against insignificant, black, pecking birds, or the town policeman checking a disputed weight, or identified with futile street names (boasting the date of battles), or the brass band on Sunday, a trifling sum of cash in a bank book, the flowers on a balcony, a teacher reading his newspaper, the prefect coming in by ferry: "If only," mutters the last of these six symmetrical quatrains, "one of those men would fall dead out of disgust.")

The Best Poem Of Kostas Karyotakis

Ballade To The Forgotten Poets Of The Ages

Detested by both men and gods,
like nobles who have bitterly decayed,
the Verlaines wither; wealth remains
to them, of rich and silvery rhyme.
With 'Les Chatiments' the Hugos are intoxicated
by their terrible Olympian revenge.
But I shall write a sorrowful
ballade to the forgotten poets.

Though the Poes have lived in misery,
and though the Baudelaires have suffered living deaths,
they ve all been granted Immortality.
Yet no-one now remembers,
and the deepest darkness has completely buried,
every poetaster who produced limp poetry.
But I make as an offering this reverent
ballade to the forgotten poets.

The world's disdain is heaped on them,
but they pass by, unyielding, pallid,
sacrifices to the tragic fraud that
out there somewhere Glory waits for them,
that wise and merry virgin.
But knowing that they re all due for oblivion,
I weep nostalgically this sorrowful
ballade to the forgotten poets.

And off in some far future epoch:
'What forgotten poet' I should like it to be asked
'has written such a beggarly
ballade to the forgotten poets?'

Kostas Karyotakis Comments

Ioulia tolia 15 February 2018

Karyotakis and K.P. Kavafis are the two Greek greatest poets of 20th century. Both should have win, at least, the Nobel prize. Their poetry is even now ahead of our time.

2 2 Reply
Felix De Villiers 07 January 2014

I find the poems of Kostas very moving. The is a feeling of underlying despair in them but it is covered by a veil of bitter-sweet melancholy. I have read quite a few of them but will read them all soon. Thanks to Facebbok the has come back to see the light of day.

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