Abstract:

Nikos Engonopoulos belongs to a little-known yet extremely active and influential group of Greek surrealist poets and was one of its more orthodox exponents. Perhaps more so than any other poet, however, he adapted surrealism to the Greek context, inventing a poetic alphabet out of purely Greek elements – the mythical and legendary, the historical and topical, the exotic and commonplace, the sensual and intoxicating – and his poetry is characterised not by the complexes of the subconscious but by the ecstasy. With these elements and drawing on all the historical phases of the Greek language, in his poetry he reconstructs the world, making it more poetic, more intelligible, more real and, above all, more humane. Until recently, very little of his work was available in English translation. The present volume, introduced by the translator, contains some sixty poems, including representative selections from each of his published collections and the whole of his long poem Bolivár.