Poetry
Υψικάμινος
Not translated into English
Andreas Embirikos · 1935
Synopsis
Sixty-three prose poems, without any punctuation, in which the sentences follow their own momentum towards images that nothing explains. The pen writes whatever comes without the will correcting it, following the automatic writing that the Surrealists of Paris had taught the author. The title, which means a blast furnace, announces less a subject than a heat.
Context
The book appeared in Athens in March 1935 from Kastalía, printed in two hundred numbered copies, two months after the lecture On Surrealism that its author had given on 25 January at the Artists' Club. These are short prose texts, written according to the automatic method that Breton had set out eleven years earlier, without punctuation, and the meaning slips away. Critics responded with scepticism and mockery. Jacques Bouchard translated it into French in 1991, for the Institut français d'Athènes and Actes Sud; Ioanna Kostopoulou produced a German version in 2022.
Who it is for
Seventy-six pages, sixty-three pieces, available in French. One must accept to read without trying to understand, as one looks at a sequence of images.
Prizes and reception
The first purely Surrealist text in Greek letters; with Seferis, it made its author one of the two major figures of the generation of 1930.