Nikos Gatsos Amorgos: An Exploration in Translation and Painting

Text by Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos, Images by Christos Damianos, 2020

 

The focus of this Publication is a new translation of Nikos Gatsos’ Αμοργός (1943), which makes available in English one of the most remarkable modernist Greek poets. Gatsos (1911-1992) Arcadia, attended the University of Athens in the early 1930s. In 1943, during one of the darkest periods of Greece’s occupation by the Germans and their allies, he published Amorgos, a long poem written in a single night, Amorgos offers a re-imagining of the Greek poetic tradition that mixes Avant-guard movements such as surrealism, symbolism and modernism with the tradition of folk songs so popular in the Arcadia of his youth. Addressing the themes of loss and hope, of the lyrical and the erotic, of a deep passion for Greek landscapes, philosophy, history and culture.

 

Christos Damianos, a Toronto-based artist, has completed a series of paintings, some of which were included in 2008 at the Bata Museum). Damianos’s paintings, which work well with the text of the translation, follow Gatsos’ narrative, which may seem to describe the Aegean Island of Amorgos but actually deals with the entireness of Greek cultural history and the life and experiences of Greekness in the twentieth-century. Damianos’ work, like Amorgos the poem, illustrates the complexity of a constantly evolving world where everything is interconnected. The meaning of the poetry’s lines and the artworks inspired by them present a timeless. The poem’s fragmented, surrealist narrative can be seen as the sort of mosaic, with its countless symbols and motifs rooted in the landscape of Gatsos’ Peloponnese.                                                                   Professor Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos

University of Alberta, Augustina Campus