“student of the agapanthi,
dark-pupil of the ox-eyed daisy”
In Camus: Carnets, George
Kalogeris, translator and poet, transposes the life
of Albert Camus into a sequence of twelve-line poems,
a mirror consciousness of the late laureate. The poems
unfold as flashbacks “to past events and states
of mind that Camus re-experiences, just before he dies
from the impact of a car crash on January 4, 1960,”
giving us, forty-six years later, a book of stunning
originality.
Why write about Camus? The question
brings us back to the African lilies, the agapanthi.
In Stratis Thalassinos Among the Agapanthi,
Greek poet George Seferis writes: “I have to question
the dead / in order to keep going.” But the dead,
he reveals, respond to the “language of flowers
only.” The foreign flowers evoke the “Homeric
predicament,” as Kalogeris writes elsewhere, of
a traveler eclipsed between two worlds. The extension
of this image to Camus is apt because it draws attention
to his struggle between his native Algeria and cosmopolitan
Europe.
Likewise, George Kalogeris’ poetry
is the product of a tension between two distinct literary
traditions, the English and the Greek. Although he is
clearly influenced by the English tradition and its
master poets Eliot, Hopkins and Hill, it is the unique
presence of Kalogeris’ Greek voice, in capturing
the experiences of Camus’ world of French Existentialism,
which is his most striking achievement. In the poem
that begins “Halfway between poverty and the sun,”
he extracts a classical insight from Camus’ experience
in Algeria. He undercuts the current of change that
accompanies Camus, as it does each man in his life’s
journey, with the poetic insight: “The Grecian
urn before the age of images . . . Silhouette for the
first clay vase fired by Eros.” Here, echoing
Auden’s line, “Eros, builder of cities,”
Kalogeris reveals a thoroughly Greek notion of Eros
as a force at the heart of human experience. The presence
of his Greek voice extends beyond imagery; it is also
in the poet’s style and restrained expression.
For example, we see it when he describes the Left’s
“reappraisal” of Camus: “For twelve
years, by his very silence, / a standard was set:
Being and Nothingness.”
As its flame is extinguished,
the mind experiences a ‘quantum leap’ in
consciousness. In contrast with the jarring perspective
of the dying, the living are not only limited in perspective
but in their breadth of understanding, which we see
as Kalogeris himself reveals “Lucidity like the
lark that suddenly vanishes / beyond the thatched roofs.”
Yet, with his intimate knowledge of the Greek tradition,
its myth, folk roots and modern resonances in Camus:
Carnets, George Kalogeris offers a penetrating
vision of the man behind the name. This book is not
written in dedication; rather, it is an act of devotion
in which the poet gives voice to the man, or as much
of the man as is contained in the diary notebooks.
