Poetry
Το φως που καίει
Not translated into English
Kostas Varnalis · 1922
Synopsis
Prometheus Bound and the Crucified answer one another above a people of slaves, each telling what his sacrifice has cost. Momus, god of mockery, retorts that their suffering consoles the masters and lulls those who toil, then turns to the living to ask what they intend to do with theirs.
Context
The poem was written on Aegina in the summer of 1921, at the end of the school year, and appeared in 1922 in Alexandria, in the review Grámmata, under the pseudonym Dímos Tanálias; the author revised it and had it reappear in Athens in 1933 in its definitive form, in which the Mother of Christ gives way to Mother Earth. The composition mixes verse and dialogue and pits symbolic figures against one another, Prometheus, the Crucified and Momus, then the Guide and the People. It opens the second manner of its author, the one that followed his turn to Marxism, and brought him prosecution, the loss of his chair, then excommunication by the Holy Synod of Greece in 1930.
Who it is for
A long poem in the popular language, never translated into French, half of which is made up of dialogue. A little knowledge of the myth of Prometheus and of the Passion narrative is needed.
Prizes and reception
Greek critics regard it as the first book of the country's left-wing literature and the father of its revolutionary literature; the stage has taken it up more than once.