Translated People

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Michael Paraskos

Translated People

A talk by Michael Paraskos on the poetry of Giórgios Christodoulides delivered at the Cyprus High Commission, London on Tuesday 5 April 2022

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First published by the Orage Press 16A Heaton Road Mitcham Surrey CR4 2BU England © 2022 Michael Paraskos. All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or uQlised in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any informaQon storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in wriQng from the publisher.

Poetry of Giórgios Christodoulides is copyright Giórgios Christodoulides, all rights reserved, and is reproduced from Giórgios Christodoulides, Selected Poems (1996-2021), translated by Despina PirkeT (Nicosia: Armida Books, 2022).

ISBN: 978-1-9993680-4-3

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Translated People

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I am going to begin by reading the poem Smithereens.

Smithereens In the moment when the cup falls to the floor and smashes into a hundred shards, you realise the value of wholeness; that what we call enQre is on the verge of smashing — it is that which resists falling and breaking into one hundred shards, that which persistently withholds the sum of its parts, determined not to let on that it is as briale as a cup it is exactly that:

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one hundred shards clinging firmly to each other to feign unity.

I must admit I have become very fond of that poem.

But really I wanted to begin by reading it because I think any talk on a poet should start with the poet. Or perhaps I should say with the poetry. Doing that places the poetry at the heart of whatever the commentator — in this case me — is likely to say next, and reminds us that we are talking about a work of art that is — or should be — complete and immanent. It is its own interpretaQon. That is not to say that I am not honoured to have been asked to add my commentary to Giorgios’s

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work. I spend my life as an art historian adding my commentary to other people’s work, even though I know it oeen does not need it. Yet, when Despina asked me to speak tonight I was reluctant. ‘I don’t read Greek,’ I said, but that’s alright, it’s a translaQon she replied. ‘But I’m an art historian, not a literary criQc,’ I said, but she said that’s alright, we don’t want a literary criQc. ‘But I am probably going to say something rude and offend everyone,’ I said, but that’s alright, said Despina, we want you to be rude and to offend everyone.

Okay I made that last bit up, Despina didn’t say that, but I do suspect that what I am about to say might offend some people. But if that’s the case, then

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I think it’s probably the sort of people who deserve to be offended.

So here goes. The real reason I was reluctant was not any of the excuses I gave to Despina when she first asked me to speak tonight. The reason is that, as a member of what is rather euphemisQcally called the Cypriot, or Greek if you prefer, diaspora I have a difficult relaQonship with Cyprus. I do not always like the place. It has never felt welcoming to me in the way it likes to portray itself. Other people may have different experiences to mine, but I do not feel Cyprus is welcoming for so-called secondgeneraQon Cypriots like me. We’re not Cypriot enough; not Greek enough; not anything. We are, in a

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sense, some of the hundreds of shards who do not cling firmly to the whole. But the whole doesn’t seem to care.

Even as I walked into the graveyard, in the village near Larnaca, when we were burying my father following his death in 2014, someone thought it appropriate to berate me for not being a proper Greek. Not being fully Greek. What a nasty liale shit you are I thought. And so much for being part of the global Cypriot family that places like this claim to promote. It was then I decided not to pretend to be Cypriot, let alone Greek, any more. It is easier to deny it outright, although my name someQmes makes that difficult.

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The coastguardsman on his return When I discovered the existence of language I began learning beauQful words; I learned quite a lot, but they seemed inapplicable.

The people I found worthy were much fewer than the beauQful words.

The redundant ones I kept within poems as a collector keeps pressed carnaQons within cardboard boxes or the coastguardsman on his return at night entombs a shard of glow from the lighthouse inside of him to light up in good Qme.

So why would I want to talk about a book of Cypriot poetry?

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Well, perhaps because, whether you like it or not, or I like it or not, I am a Cypriot. I am a shard from that pot. In fact I must be a Cypriot because I have a piece of paper in my wallet that says so. I might not fit your definiQon of a Cypriot, your definiQon of a Greek or a Greek-Cypriot, but so what?

Do you really think you maaer so much? And so when Giorgios’s poetry becomes available to me, and the thousands of people like me, as in Despina’s translaQon, maybe I do have something to say about it. In fact, maybe as a translaQon, it speaks even more to me, and the thousands of people like me, the second and third generaQon Cypriots, the diaspora.

We are, aeer all, each of us a translated poem.

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But then the quesQon is, what does it say to us? Well, I can only speak for myself.

A short while before the covid pandemic hit I was asked to speak at another book launch, held at Leeds University, for a newly published volume of poetry, that Qme by the English poet MarQn Bell. I say

by MarQn Bell, but in fact it was also a collecQon of translaQons, made by Bell of the work of the French Surrealist poet, Robert Desnos.

Bell died in 1978 and has been somewhat unjustly forgoaen in the decades since. I was asked to speak because Bell had been a good friend of my father, and they had travelled together to Cyprus in 1968, when my father was laying the ground-work for

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establishing the first art school in Cyprus, the Cyprus College of Art. Unfortunately Bell was a notorious alcoholic and his drunken anQcs did not go down well in the very conservaQve world of late-1960s Cyprus.

This trip was recorded by my father in a diary, and it was part of that diary I read out.

I must admit I felt bad about it aeerwards. I realised that what was intended as a lighthearted anecdote about Bell’s drunkenness on an unsuccessful trip to see the BriQsh Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins, who was holidaying in Kyrenia, might in fact have been a painful recollecQon of Bell’s alcoholism for his family in the audience.

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However, my point in menQoning this now is not to seek absoluQon for my unintended sin, but to bring Bell’s Cyprus poetry into the fray. Despite his alcoholism, Bell sQll wrote very good poetry, including some astonishing poems wriaen whilst in Cyprus.

They are different to his other poetry, and I suppose my father would have said they have spirit of place.

We might like to think of them as somehow capturing the Cyprus that existed then, a very different island, and in many ways inhabited by a very different people, to the Cyprus that exists now. Those Cypriots would be as alien to modern Cyprus as I am. But I don’t think that is quite adequate when thinking of Bell’s poetry. I don’t think he did capture Cyprus, like

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some sapient literary camera. I think he captured himself-in-Cyprus, in a brief and specific moment of Qme. His poems do not look outward, recording a scene accurately. They look inward, and we see in them the experience of being trapped perpetually, somewhere between drunkenness and hung-over, in that hot sultry summer of ’68 in the eastern Mediterranean.

Rather than a moment of capture then, I think they represent a moment of placement. Or, if we want to sound a bit more intellectual, a moment of emplacement. There is a kind of emplacement in Giorgio’s poetry too. It is also set in Cyprus and aspects of that Cyprus are recognisable to me. But

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sQll, it is different. It has to be. We may share certain common traits, the things that make us human and we share a great deal of common culture, the things that make us social. But the experience of our bodies in Qme and space is surely unique to every one of us.

Incarna6ons of the watermelon seller He sells watermelons in front of the bus stop.

In his past life he too sold watermelons though because in the 17th century there were no buses, he sold them next to horse and donkey dung, at the crossroads of the dirt tracks that joined the pastures.

One Qme he brought a juicy watermelon to the court of the Regina, didn’t win her favour.

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He suspects that in his next life too he’ll be selling watermelons.

Only he’d like to be younger, less hunched and beaer aTred.

Passing by in my flying car, I’ll see him and write the same poem.

I wonder whether Giorgios would write the same poem. A different body in a different Qme and space you see. It wouldn’t be quite the same. The emplacement would be different. Nonetheless, I have come to like that poem very much. Seeing the watermelon sellers all over Cyprus in the early summer, siTng in every lay-by and at every road

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crossing, with their giant stripy green fruit piled high on the backs of pick-up trucks, one oeen cut open to reveal the shocking red flesh — crass, vulgar and yet delicious — is like a throw back to a Cyprus where these transient street-hawkers might have been joined by a pastellaki seller, a koupes hawker or a mahelepi pedlar. Of course, they have largely gone, so only the watermelon sellers remain. But I am not being nostalgic in lamenQng their loss. I just recognise in it an essenQal truth that I also seem to read in Giorgios’s poetry. Cyprus can at Qmes resemble a post-apocalypQc landscape, in which we might recognise some familiar sights, but there is also a feeling of profound loss and dislocaQon. That sense of

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dislocaQon is there even in the apparent whimsy of the poem about the watermelon seller. Indeed, to my ear there is nothing whimsical about it. I find it terrifying — almost like some Buddhist nightmare of eternal reincarnaQon. Or to make another analogy, the narrator and the watermelon seller in Giorgios’s poem might almost be characters from a Beckea play, again resembling shards of the pot who cannot, or will not, cling firmly to the whole. Or do I mean dislocated shards of the pot to which the whole will not cling?

The kiosk Down the street a kiosk closed.

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It just shut down one day.

One morning it simply didn’t open like a Qred man departs quietly and wilfully for a one-way journey.

The kiosk owners vanished, friendly and decent fellows, we have never seen them again, we maybe never will.

Now, every Qme I pass by, I glance at the remains of things abandoned inside the deserted store.

I look at the shape of what has ceased to be and I’m surprised to find it doesn’t look at all like something absent.

Life, when it goes away, leaves something behind.

That thing lingers on, gathers like fluff on the body of Qme —

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and for a while it keeps death from expanding to where there used to be life.

I someQmes wonder if I have a morbid disposiQon. A tendency to see the solitary cloud on a sunny day and predict it will rain. Aeer all, in The Kiosk doesn’t Giorgios give us a kind of hope, a feeling that something of life lingers on even aeer apparent death. A kind of trace-memory of life. So why am I drawn so much more to the first two thirds of this poem, where the bafflement at the sudden and inexplicable departure of the kiosk’s owners is so strong? As I say, it might be my own morose nature, but isn’t it also that, in that first part of the poem, we

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have the most human element? It is there we engage with the narrator’s inability to comprehend what has happened to the kiosk’s owners, and we discover they were 'friendly and decent fellows’. To me, the trace-element of life that lingers aeerwards, ‘like fluff on the body of Qme’, sounds suspiciously like a sad and lonely ghost.

But perhaps Giorgios does not see it in quite those terms. I think we are similar insofar as we share a sense of that which seems whole is in reality on the edge of dissoluQon. Nothing is permanent, no maaer how seemingly solid, no maaer how good. But, unlike my own temperament, in Giorgios’s poetry dissoluQon does not necessarily lead to complete

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disappearance or total loss. Oeen something remains, even if it is not quite in the form in which we might want it.

In volumes Just as the deceased are placed reverently in coffins, the coffins in morgue chambers; just as the pictures of the missing are hung on police staQons; just as the skeletons of prehistoric animals are transferred to museums, so too do poems end up in volumes.

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Giorgios’s poeQc voice inhabits a world of chance encounters. In this he is the inheritor of a tradiQon that started with English romanQc poets like William Wordsworth. Wordsworth’s poeQc voice travels the Lakeland landscape of northern England, and runs into various characters, from liale children who believe their dead siblings sQll live with them, to a pedlar who explains the reason for a coaage having been abandoned. In fact, I was reminded of Wordsworth’s poem The Ruined CoBage when I first read Giorgios’s The Kiosk. They are very different styles of verse, both of their Qmes in a way, but they are linked by a sense of bafflement at the mystery of abandonment, and by an underlying sense that

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humanity is threatened by unseen and inhuman forces that have the power to sweep seemingly full and happy lives.

A kiosk closes. What does it maaer? A coaage is abandoned. What does that maaer? Well, maybe it doesn’t maaer, such small bits of life when set against the grand scheme of things, there’s always another kiosk, always another coaage, always another pastellaki, koupes or mahelepi pedlar, always another watermelon seller, always another wilderness on which no one has built a condominium, always another beach on which rare turtles can nest, always another… unQl there isn’t another and you realise that unseen force, the deadly hand of human

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progress, has made our planet an inhuman wasteland. I think it is the shards of what was once whole and are now lost in a wasteland that Giorgios’s narrator encounters.

Poetry is oeen about the ability to find salient metaphors for life in otherwise seemingly unremarkable things. Think of the devastaQng conclusion Philip Larkin drew about lost hope in something as simple as failing to toss an apple core into a rubbish bin. Giorgios is good at finding those metaphors too.

The palm tree As luck would have it, years ago I found a palm tree thrown away 28

within my father’s orchard, barely the size of a child’s open hand.

“No use in planQng it,” he said, “It’s clearly a waste of Qme.” And yet I bowed and picked it up.

Now if you amble through my garden you see a mighty palm tree casQng its branches over the fence and singing all the while.

So when they ask me of my kids I say: “I have five and one almost died.”

I do like those lines, “casQng its branches over the fence / and singing all the while.” Yes, trees do sing as they sway in the breeze, but it evokes much more than that. It evokes something joyous about life, especially about life so nearly lost. The tree sings because it is happy to be alive.

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Who said I was morose?

It is this kind of metaphor-laden language that Giorgios uses so well. That does seem to be — I am going to say a LevanQne or Mediterranean trait, rather than a uniquely Cypriot one — in which the mundane and the metaphorical meet. It is a trait most of us will know from the most famous book to be wriaen in this region The Bible, but it imbues the wider Mediterranean and LevanQne story-telling tradiQon too. I have found it has become an integral part of my own wriQng pracQce, both as an art historian, where I suspect it has not gone down well in the oeen hidebound world of academia, and in my ficQon wriQng which has been enriched by it. I

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suppose that is another thing that makes me Cypriot, because — as Giorgios’s also wriQng shows — I find Cyprus is a land that constantly gives you metaphors for life. Like the Qme I was driving from Larnaca to Paphos and I decided to leave the motorway at the Yeroskipou exit to avoid going through the centre of town.

On the road that runs through the flat farmland between the motorway and the sea I saw an openback pick up truck in front of me. In it stood a dog, a kind of pug or French bulldog, surrounded by her puppies. The dog was agitated, barking franQcally, but the driver of the pick up truck just drove on. What he hadn’t realised was that one of the dog’s puppies had

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fallen out of the back of the truck and it was now running for its life along the road aeer its mother and siblings.

Driving behind it, I slowed to a crawl and began flashing my lights furiously to get the truck driver’s aaenQon. Eventually he did stop. He got out of his truck, saw what had happened, and when the puppy reached him he picked it up, gave it an embrace and put it back into the truck where it was welcomed by its relieved mother. The truck driver gave me a cheery wave as a thank you, got back in his vehicle and drove away.

Even at the Qme that felt like a metaphor for something.

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I think it is that ability to see the symbolic — the metaphorical — in the everyday that is such a strong feature of Giorgios’s wriQng.

Senex Rex Outside the house next to the school, there sits an old man.

He comes out at noon, when the sun is shining, on his crutches.

He sinks into his shabby armchair like a weary king; takes in the sun, the agitaQon of giggles, feigns a smile, but seems bothered.

He looks like a man at the end of his tether.

I am fixated on him.

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There’s nothing more interesQng here.

On days whipped by cold, he withdraws, retreats deep inside the house, to the kitchen perhaps, with an oil stove burning under the floor, in the secret lair of his youth.

His wife closes the shuaers Qght and double locks the doors.

Perhaps she thinks that death might think twice, and that with the next shae of sunlight the old man will rise again and reign in his court from his aged armchair.

But death knows all his tropes.

It’s been a while since I last saw

the old man reigning in his courtyard.

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How oeen I wonder will many of us here tonight have seen that old man sat outside a house or old shop somewhere in Cyprus, seated on ‘his shabby armchair’. When I read this, part of me thinks of my own father, Senex Rex, and especially of my mother double locking the doors. It has the authenQcity of the familiar, the almost mundane. ‘There’s nothing more interesQng here,’ the narrator tells us. But the poem also transcends familiarity, to become something metaphorical. A meditaQon on the passing of Qme — perhaps also on the way the world we inhabit seems to shrink — and on the inevitability of death. Dare I say it, it’s a kind of King Lear in miniature.

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But maybe I should end my talk in the tried and tested rhetorical fashion, by returning to where I started, to the quesQon of translaQon, to the quesQon whether I might offend some people.

Translated poetry, translated people.

There is a story that in the 1980s, when the BriQsh establishment was just beginning to recognise that Britain was a mulQcultural naQon, a BriQsh government department decided to produce a guide in various languages other than English on how to register to vote in local elecQons. Because of the large Greek-Cypriot community in Britain one of those languages was Greek, and so a civil servant who said he was able to speak Greek was given the task of

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translaQng the complex set of instrucQons on how to get your name onto the electoral roll. Once complete, the translaQon was duly printed and distributed, but soon reports started to come back that there was a problem with the Greek guide. It was said none of the Greek speakers who requested it could understand a word of it. An invesQgaQon followed, and it was soon discovered that the civil servant who had made the translaQon could only read and write the ancient Greek he had learned at Oxford. Perhaps from that we should acknowledge that even modern Greeks might be translaQons of the original.

But of course no one wants to hear that, because it’s too easy to dismiss translaQon as a

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second-best version of the original. But I think that’s a very blinkered view. SomeQmes translaQons can go beyond the original. Take the BriQsh Empire.

Whatever one thinks about the legacy of that Empire, a legacy that is so oeen so negaQve, there is no denying the English culture that underpinned it is an astonishing thing. The civilisaQon that gave us the colonial horror of the Amritsar Massacre, is the same civilisaQon that gave us King Lear. But what I find more astonishing sQll is that the English culture that gave us King Lear is a culture built on translaQon. And a very specific translaQon at that. It is built on the translaQon of the Bible into English by William Tyndale in 1536. Without that translaQon coming into

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being it is hard to imagine English culture as we know it exisQng at all. The language of that translaQon, so beauQful and charged with addiQonal meaning, was the engine that powered the work of almost all English writers who followed it, from William Shakespeare to T. S. Eliot and beyond. There’s nothing second best about it.

In fact, one of my favourite English poems is one I first learned at university, and it is a translaQon. Wriaen by Thomas Wyaa in 1557, it is called Whoso List To Hunt, and it is a translaQon from an Italian original by Petrarch. Of course there are now beaer translaQons of the Petrarch original — beaer in the sense they are more accurate and no doubt more

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emblemaQc of Petrarch’s original intenQons. But none of them are to my mind as mournful and haunQng as that by Wyaa. It too is not second best.

And I, as a translated person — the product of two voices coming together, just like a translaQon, my English mother from Yorkshire, and my Greek father from Cyprus — I also refuse to be called second best.

If that’s what you think I am, I don’t care. You do not maaer that much.

Those who know me will be aware I have studied a great deal the work of Herbert Read over the years. Herbert Read was a poet, novelist, art theorist, educaQonalist, anarchist and more. He argued that to survive human society needs art

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because the funcQon of art is to reconcile the myriad of seemingly disQnct and separate forces we encounter in life, and that through the ongoing and conQnual process of that reconciliaQon, or hybridisaQon, our understanding of reality is brought into existence. In other words, the shaaered shards are reconciled. And I cannot help seeing the translaQon of poetry as something very like that. It is a kind of mysQcal union, a reconciliaQon between the poet and the translator. The product of that union might not be pure any more, it might not be pedigree, but someQmes, to echo Giorgios’s poem Smithereens again, it is more than the sum of its parts. And in that I suppose we might almost say a

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translaQon is the product of a marriage, it is the child of two parents, it is the offspring of the poet and the translator.

I hope you will enjoy reading Giorgios’s poetry as much as I have done. As an art historian I study painQngs and sculptures and other works of visual art in a great deal of detail, and this year is my thirQeth year working as a lecturer in higher educaQon, so I have also spent a great deal of Qme over those years talking about art and trying to give my best guess as to what it might mean. In all of that Qme I have not had so much opportunity to think long and hard about poetry, although it was my first love as an undergraduate student. So, despite my iniQal

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trepidaQon in giving this talk, the process has been a welcome chance to do that. It will probably sound a bit trite for me to claim this, but I can honestly say I feel changed at having spent so much Qme reading, re-reading and thinking about Giorgios’s work, so much so, that it has even entered my dreams on a number of occasions. As I say, I feel changed by it, and that change is, I think, for the beaer.

So I would like to thank Giorgios for wriQng these wonderful poems, and Despina for translaQng them. They are your children and I think you have every reason to be proud of them.

Michael Paraskos Cyprus High Commission, London 5 April 2022

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