Poetry
Η τιμωρία των μάγων
Not translated into English
Nanos Valaoritis · 1947
Synopsis
Poems written during and just after the war, crossed by images of violence and destruction. Several take the fixed form of the sonnet and fill it with unexpected associations of images and ideas, in the manner of the Surrealists; one of them passes through the myth of the fall of Troy to speak of death and mourning.
Context
The collection appeared in London in 1947, in a private edition, while the author had been living there for three years and was translating the Greek poets of his generation into English. It is his first book, and the only one from his London years, ten years before the second; his poems were reprinted in 1983 in the first volume of his Poems, at Ýpsilon. There is no French or English edition of the collection.
Who it is for
A short collection, never given in French. It is as well to know that its author wrote it in Greek, in London, in the years following the war.
Prizes and reception
His first book, printed at his own expense: his poems did not reach the Greek public until they were reprinted in the Poèmes de 1983.