Poetry
Ο χρόνος και το ποτάμι
Not translated into English
Nikiforos Vrettakos · 1957
Synopsis
Poems of return: the mountain, the village of Laconia, the mother, the light of the Peloponnese, a river that passes and the time that goes with it. One stops at a spring on Taygetus to say how good it is to live beneath the wheel of the sun, one watches a lark dance, one writes a letter that will never be delivered. Man is regarded there without anger, after the books that the war had dictated.
Context
The book gathers pieces written from 1952 to 1956 and appeared from Dífros in Athens in 1957, the year its author travelled to Moscow with Myrivílis. It marks a return to the native mountain and village, after the books of war and anger of the forties, and opens the period in which the poet seeks a balance between song and drama. It includes the Lettre jamais remise, the Danse de l'alouette and the Fontaine de l'oiseau, which bears the name of a mountain spring, three of the most frequently reprinted pieces of his work. There is no French translation of the whole.
Who it is for
Short poems, in clear language, never given in French in their entirety. It is as well to know that Taygetus and Laconia are the landscape of the whole body of work.
Prizes and reception
It is the collection that Greek critics single out from the poet's maturity, and two of its pieces are in every anthology.