A few months ago, I was doing some research on Cypriot contemporaries of Greek poet Kostis Palamas for a literature reading group I co-organize at Princeton.
Kostis Palamas (1869-1943), widely considered a ‘national poet’ of Greece, was one of the central figures of the Greek language question. He was a staunch supporter of the use of the vernacular, demotic Greek, as opposed to the artificially archaic katharevousa, the Greek state’s official language up until 1976.
This gave me the opportunity to re-read the work of Greek Cypriot poet Dimitris Lipertis, since Palamas had prefaced the second volume of Lipertis’ collected poems, Τζιυπριώτικα Τραούδκια [Cypriot Songs].
Dimitris Lipertis was born in Larnaca—my father’s hometown—in 1866. He studied languages, philosophy, and theology in Beirut, Naples, and Athens respectively. Upon his return to Cyprus, Lipertis taught French at the Pancyprian Gymnasium and at The English School—my alma mater—in Nicosia.
Lipertis wrote most of his poems in the Cypriot dialect of Greek, making his oeuvre part of the rich, and centuries-old, tradition of oral culture on the island. In his preface to Lipertis’ work, Palamas admits that he doesn’t understand much of Lipertis’ poetry. He refers to Lipertis’ use of local idiom [ντοπιολαλιά] as “the unfortunate element that keeps his work at a distance from us…[making it hard] to understand or feel it”. At the same time Palamas, contradicting himself, admits that Lipertis’ language is what constitutes the Cypriot poet’s genius, as much as it reveals the weakness of mainland Greek readers, who are ignorant of it.
The Cypriot dialect of Greek itself has variants. Most Greek Cypriots today speak a standard, ‘urbanized’ version of the dialect. As a result, many of the dialect’s local variants, usually associated with rural areas, and which were widely spoken and understood in Lipertis’ time, have fallen out of use. This means that a Greek Cypriot today may be as hard pressed as Palamas was in 1930 to understand much of Lipertis’ poetry.
Yet paying close attention to Lipertis’ language, and pushing through the initial obstacles that his poetry may pose to Greek Cypriots today, is an exercise worth the time and effort.
Attempting to translate a poem for the English-speaking members of the Palamas reading group—one titled “The Hollow of the Olive Tree” [“Η Κούφη της Ελιάς”]—I spent an afternoon mulling over the vivid sounds and images offered by the dialect’s vocabulary. I had the joy of re-discovering the lyricism, and affective power, of the Cypriot dialect through what has now become one of my favorite poems by Lipertis.
“The Hollow of the Olive Tree” is a love poem, but it is also a poem about things lost in the passage of time. The poetic voice addresses the love of his youth, Marikkou, who is now middle aged and greying. An endearing version of the name ‘Maria’, Marikkou undermines all of the comedic qualities associated with the rural variants of the Cypriot dialect, associations solidified in slapstick representations of characters who use such variants in Cypriot mass media. She is, instead, the complex object of the poetic voice’s affection.
I say ‘complex’ because this poem differs from some of the more didactic poems by Lipertis, in which women are completely subordinate to men. Marikkou got engaged (and then presumable married) to someone other than the poet-lover. This has caused the emotional demise of the poetic voice, which has lasted a lifetime. Whether Marikkou’s marriage was her own choice or her father’s remains unclear in the poem. The historical circumstances of women in Cyprus’ patriarchal society—particularly in the 19th and early 20th centuries—would make the latter the safer assumption, although the poem’s use of the word “αλοϊστα” (without common sense, recklessly) has made me think of Marikkou’s choice as one at least partially motivated by her own personal agency.
Granted, the poem is an entirely one-sided account of the relationship between the poetic voice and his ex-lover. But poetry is meant to be subjective and complicated, and much of the poem’s power comes precisely from how intensely the poetic voice remembers this relationship from a decidedly subjective and by extension male, point of view. In the second to last stanza, the poet-lover wonders whether Marikkou even remembers the scene that marks, for him, the apex of their relationship. After all, Marikkou was a teenager at the time: we know this from the poetic voice’s description of her breasts that were ‘barely hardened [taking shape] like walnuts’ (‘όσον τζιαι καρυδώναν τα βυζιά σου’).
The poem’s tour-de-force are its final two stanzas. Here, the poetic voice’s lyric powers are distilled into a recollection of an indelible experience from his past with Marikkou: kissing her in the hollow of an olive tree during a storm. Bucolic, yes; Romantic, even. The imagery is also nothing short of cinematic. (Think of The Notebook’s iconic kiss-in-the-rain scene).
This moment is carried over into the present in the poem’s final stanza, where the poetic voice reveals that he has purchased that very olive tree. It’s a (vain) attempt to hang onto the highlight of his relationship with Marikkou by making an intangible memory material, the only way for him to possess a part of her. I could turn the analysis towards how the male subject of the poem uses a monetary transaction to keep a hold of his ex-lover. But that wouldn’t be true to what I feel when I read that stanza: an enormous sense of grief, the bittersweet kind, for loves and moments lost, and for our desperate attempts, as mortal beings, to grasp at their traces for solace.
Below you’ll find the poem in the original Cypriot dialect of Greek, as well as my English translation of it.
N.B. Translating poetry written in the Cypriot Greek dialectic idiom is especially hard because much of the poetry’s charm—and meaning—comes from a poem’s rhythm and rhyme scheme. I tried to keep most of the rhymes, where possible, so that English-speaking readers can get an idea of the prosodic elements of the poem, the very reason why Lipertis’ poems are called songs.
