Poetry
Ο τάφος
Not translated into English
Kostis Palamas · 1898
Synopsis
A cycle of poems for a four-year-old child who has just died. The father builds him a house that is neither of iron, nor of gold, nor of sculpted marble, but made only of the spells of the mind, raised in a place without matter that time does not reach. The child speaks, the mother speaks, the earth speaks; memories return in flashes, and grief seeks a form that will hold it.
Context
The collection brings together the poems written after the death of Alkis, the author's son, carried off by meningitis at the age of four in 1898. It is a funeral song for several voices, in which the child, the mother and the earth speak in turn. It is written in the spoken language that the author defended against learned Greek, in a debate that then divided the country to the point of riot. It is the only one of his books drawn from an event in his own life, in a body of work that includes some twenty collections and that his bibliography puts at two thousand five hundred essays, articles and notes. Hubert Pernot gave poems from it in French as early as 1900.
Who it is for
A collection translated into French only in part. It is worth knowing that its author was then leading the fight for demotic Greek against the Greek of the learned.
Prizes and reception
Together with the previous year's collection, it fixed its author's place in the national heritage, and of all his books it is the one most often quoted.