The importance of the sea and the seafaring man in modern Greek literature hardly needs to be stated. It dominates Greek poetry and prose in much the same way as the desert dominates Arabic and Hebrew poetry. In The Enchafèd Flood, W. H. Auden discusses the sea and the desert as an important pair of symbols, representing places of freedom and solitude in contrast to the city. Nowhere is the symbolism of the sea more evident than in the poetry of George Seferis. Fascinated by sailors, Seferis believed that all Greeks were sea-voyagers, even is they had “disembarked”. He also believed that in the voices of sailors, Greeks could hear something vital to their self-awareness – a clue to the mysterious and tragic condition of being a contemporary Hellene. When sailor and poet were combined, in the person of an Antoniou or a Kavadias, a new dimension was added to a theme which had become almost a cliché in Greek literature.
With the exception of Antoniou, Kavadias is unique in being a sailor-poet. His descriptions of the low-life of exotic ports, of the crude world of the bordello and the bar, narcotics and tattoos, have no doubt contributed to his popularity as a poet. He is read with the same voyeuristic delight that many people take in the rebetika. As Kimon Friar remarked: “ We read these poems with the same pleasure with which we read dime novels and penny-dreadfuls, delighting in and accepting coincidences and sentimentalities we could never accept elsewhere, as in the more adroit of soap operas. The longed-for lady of the heart’s desire, Beatrice, has not been turned into a harbor-whore, but ultimately she is only to be attained in reveries, hovering in the steering cabin, her white dress drenched with spray” (Modern Greek Poetry, 1982)
Friar’s judgement, and the general lack of serious critical attention to Kavadias’s work is based, I believe, partly on the beguiling success of his first volume of poems. Published when he was only twenty-three years old, they stamped him as indelibly as the tattoo on his arm as “Marabou”. There were a handful of critics, among them Kostas Varnalis, who recognized the potential of the young Kavadias. Linos Politis included him as one of the leading contemporary poets of Greece in his anthology Sikelianos kai oi neoteri, but for the most part Kavadias remained an outsider in the world of Greek letters despite, or perhaps because of his association with sub-canonical forms like the rebetika.
I think there are a number of reasons for re-appraising the work of Kavadias. He is not remarkable as a poet of exoticism, romantic escapism, or nihilism in the spirit of Karyotakis, Ouranis, or Baras. He is remarkable as a sailor-poet aware of the tedium and deprivations of his chosen profession, yet passionately committed to the sea and capable of describing his relationship to it in a way few writers have done before or since. In his preoccupation with the sea both as an escape from women and domestic ties and as its antithesis -- as a symbol of all-consuming Woman – Kavadias recasts the theme of the sea-voyage in ways that illuminate Greek literature as a whole. From Marabou, through the poems of Fog and Traverso, he also develops into a mature, original poet whose voice is as unmistakable as any of Greece’s major poets.
From the earliest poems of Marabou, Kavadias’s sailor-persona makes it clear that there is a sense of vocation about his choice, a commitment that involves the same deprivation as taking holy orders. In poems like “Mal du depart”, “Cafard”, and “Letter to the Poet Caesar Emmanuel”, he poses a dichotomy between the sailor and the non-sailor which is rigid and irreversible. The rituals of seaboard life are complex; its cramped, all-male world, drawn with bitter candor in “ Our Fo’c’sle” (“I plori mas”), may rob the sailor of his innocence, but he remains loyal to its demands. As he matures as a poet and becomes increasingly disillusioned with life at sea, his loyalty, paradoxically, becomes fiercer. To the sailor-turned-landlubber of “Kosmas of the Indian Ocean” Kavadias is merciless:
There the short Tamils who smelled so strong
swarms of Singhalese girls with high breasts.
Here you bend down with your wasted thighs
and pay homage to the Virgin, Giver of Milk.
The sailor who has saved up cash has betrayed his profession:
He’s cursed the sea and he’s pissing on her…
There is a growing awareness in the poems of Fog and Traverso of the sailor’s having unfitted himself for a life on land. Seferis noted in his Journal B:
…a very common feeling among the sailors when they travel, a madness, an incessant mania to see the shore; and the moment they set foot on shore, almost immediately they want to embark again and set out. This restlessness makes them more aware than most literary personalities and more concerned with what is wrong around them.
If the dichotomy between sailor and non-sailor becomes more pronounced as the sailor matures, there is another apparently implacable opposition that first appears in the poems of Marabou, one that resolves itself in Kavadias’s later poems in an unusual accommodation. The nature of a sailor’s life, not only unfits him for dry land, but handicaps his relationships with women. To a young Greek male, coming from a society where high store was placed on female virginity and modesty, the whores of the ports could offer the sailors of Kavadias’s day at best a brief, guilt-ridden release from sexual tension. It is not surprising that the young Kavadias made a sharp distinction between the idealized woman of his dreams, the“you” or “she”, and the depraved, diseased whores of the ports, who are addressed as “Woman”, a term he never uses for the object of his romantic reveries.
The dichotomies of Kavadias’s early verse are closely related. The sea, for the young Kavadias, not only represents adventure, but the avoidance of family, specifically maternal ties. The 19 year-old sailor of “A midshipman on the bridge in an hour of danger” confesses his sins to his mother. They include robbery, stabbing, and worst of all, pederasty:
Forgive me, in Santa Fe one dark night
as a woman held me tight in her arms
I pulled from her stocking a roll of bills
she’d saved from a day of her awful work.
And more, Lord… here I’m ashamed to confess
(but his lovely lips were so red and moist
and someone strummed sadly a Spanish guitar).
I slept with a Jewish boy in Seville.
And yet the sailor of Marabou is far from a depraved participant in a life of sin. One of the most striking qualities of his early verse is Kavadias’s compassionate understanding of the weaknesses and suffering of his fellow-crewmen. Loyalty to crew, ship, and sea becomes a substitute for loyalty to family, home, and village. In order to expiate the inevitable sins committed in port, and accept the deprivations of shipboard life, the ship itself must assume the virtues of home.
In Kavadias’s first published poem “Marabou”, we see his most obvious statement of the opposition of depraved whore and virginal, idealized woman. The protagonist stands out from his fellow-sailors because he does not indulge in the usual pleasures of the harbor brothels. In a flash-back sequence that would become the hallmark of his narrative poetics, Kavadias tells us the story of the sailor’s innocent love for a young woman passenger who seems to him “a flower of the Alps”, remote and inaccessible.
By the time she disembarks sailor and passenger are sufficiently bound to one another to exchange gifts. He gives her a cross, she presents him with wallet.
The scene shifts to a foreign port where “disgusting women pulled the sailors in”. Drunk, the sailor allows himself to be lured by a whore. The crudity of the contrast between virgin and whore begins to dissolve as Kavadias notices the crumbling hovel where the whore lives, and her pitiful thinness, which allows him to count the vertebrae of her spine. Already she begins to interest us more than his “Alpine flower’. In the dawn light, the sailor is aware of his confused feelings: “she seemed so pitiful to me, so damned.”
The climax of the play has a touch of Solomos’s “Lambrou” to it as the whore and the sailor respond to the sight of the gifts they once exchanged:
…but she gave a sudden cry
and stared first at me with eyes quite wild,
then at my wallet. And I stood frozen too
for I had seen the cross around her neck.
There may be echoes of the melodrama of Solomos’s “Lambrou” in the scene, but the language of the poem removes it from any association with 19th century romantic poetry. What is striking is the skillful art with which the young poet tells his tale. Shifting his focus from the foreground of a ship tied up in a tropical port to an incident in the past, Kavadias describes his brief romance and the sordid encounter in a brothel with an economy and drama worthy of the best Greek folk songs.
The archetypal dichotomy of the idealized virgin and whore, even in “Marabou”, is never presented in its crudest form. What marks Kavadias out as a poet of greater complexity than Friar would grant him is the way in which he develops his youthful perceptions of good and bad women, deconstructing his own dichotomy. In the best of his later poems, we find an almost mystical acceptance of sensuous woman as she merges with the sea itself.
Some signs of the blurring of the boundaries are evident in “Gabrielle Didot”, the prostitute who:
…stood out from her sisters nonetheless
by being despondent, grave, and sad.
The poet is aware that his characterization of a whore as a troubled soul in the poem may make his readers “Laugh at its author with scorn”, but his sympathy for the prostitute is based on an understanding of what links her to the sailor. Both are victims of deprivation, both are bound to one another by the laws of supply and demand.
With the title poem of his second volume of verse Fog, Kavadias enters a new poetic landscape. Abandoning the straightforward narrative and descriptive style of Marabou, but retaining its strict metrics and rhyme, Kavadias employs an enigmatic, elliptical style that he will continue to develop and refine until his death. Lost in the fog of his own fantasies, the sailor addresses a woman, the “you” who will appear in some shape or form in so many of his later poems, and tells her to…
Be off! Dry land is what suits you.
You came to see me and missed me;
from midnight on I’ve been drowned
a thousand miles off the Hebrides.
We are confused by this female apparition. She doesn’t belong on board ship, and yet, in her white, drenched clothes, she seems more of a disturbing sea-wraith than a woman. What causes her not to see the sailor? Is she dismissed because she belongs to the category of landlubber? Is the protagonist aware that no shore-woman can ever satisfy the sailor married to his mistress: the sea?
The questions raised by “Fog” are not answered in any of the poems in Kavadias’s second anthology. Indeed, the confusion of the title poem deepens in “Land-sickness”, “Cambay’s waters”, “Esmeralda”, and “Salonika”. It is a new, disturbing protagonist who addresses us, one who reflects the poet’s own suffering during the years of occupation and war that separate the publication of Marabou from Fog. Kavadias’s poems rarely contain direct statements on the political events of his time, but having taken part in the Albanian Campaign and experienced the privations of war-time Greece, he was far from a-political. Kavadias made his views obvious in poems like “Federico Garcia Lorca”, and “Che Guevara”, but the poet of Fog remains first and foremost a sailor, his preoccupations unchanged. Only an increased bitterness, an inner torment reflected in the staccato phrases of the marconi remind us that the tragic events of the intervening years have left their mark on “Marabou”.
The privations of shipboard life have become harder to bear…. “difficult watches, bad sleep, malaria..” “the tar gets under your fingers and burns…” “in the meatime the ropes still harden your hands…”. The ship itself is “rotten and water-logged, cement and rust..” and a new, deadly apparition menaces the sailor. The waiting shark is still “ a thousand miles off” in “Landsickness” but it will reappear as a constant companion, a “pilot shark”, and finally as the “white shark” of the sailor’s dreams, analogue of the sea-death, half dreaded, half longed-for… “does he wait for me, hungry, or I for him?”
In the poems of Fog, we are made aware of the diseases and dangers of tropical ports. We know, too, that the ship itself is a rotten hulk controlled by a “parrot” or a captain who is “short-sighted and getting old”. It seems, now, as if a stubbornness verging on madness keeps the sailor at his post. His dream of an idealized woman has merged with that of a “wooden mermaid” … “the mermaid on the prow..(who) leapt drunken into the ocean waves”. Despite the new sophistication of Fog, the collection does not quite fulfil the promise of Marabou. There is a certain formulaic structure to the poems, and a bitterness and confusion emphasized by its title. If it were not for the posthumous publication of Traverso, we might be left with the impression of a poet still peering from the bridge on a murky night.
Traverso begins with poems in the style of Fog and ends with the charming “Tales for Philippos”. In the best of these late poems, we find a new acceptance of the sailor’s lot, an awareness that neither the idealized “you’ nor the depraved “woman” of the brothels is what he has been seeking, but the sea herself. The opposition of good and bad woman dissolves as the protagonist’s dichotomy of sailor and non-sailor becomes absolute. By embracing his lot as a sailor, the poet is liberated from the sense of sin that dominated Marabou. Now “He’s a sinner who doesn’t err and enjoy.”
To “Kosmas of the Indian Ocean”, the sailor who has betrayed the sea, even the possibility of Christian redemption is denied:
God is all good and forgives, Kosmas,
but relentless Poseidon takes his revenge.
Kosmas is offered only the last consolation of the sea – the eroticism of a sea-death:
The divers say they’ve seen it down there;
the ray’s tail tickling the oyster’s lips.
The poem which best represents the mature Kavadias is Fata Morgana/ If he had only written this, Kavadias would have been entitled to a place in the pantheon of modern Greek poets. I know of no other poem in Greek that so eloquently describes the marriage of the sailor and the sea..
Tha metalavo me nero thalassino,
stala ti stala synagmeno ap’to kormi sou…
What a marvelous condensation of the poet’s deep sensual and spiritual commitment to the sea! By taking Communion with sea water from “your body” the oppositions of the poet’s youth are resolved. The Christian sense of sin and the Freudian fear of sensuous woman that make the sailor’s relations with the opposite sex ambiguous are not denied but accepted in all their confusion. Intercourse becomes an ancient, repeated ritual whose sameness defies place and creed. Fata Morgana, siren and mermaid, becomes the sailor’s ideal partner. But we are not dealing, here, with an abstraction. Fata Morgana is a female entity whose sexuality can be smelled, tasted, touched…
Ocean oyster betrothed to the light,
pomegranate rind, the dry taste of quince
and the secret shade, more bitter and dry
that the Carthaginians used on vases.
Pale grass covers the Pythian tripod
and a burning river of molten tar,
wild, invincible, molten stream,
washes the sinners who loved you once.
Let the wineskin flow and Apollo the shepherd
Launch his dioscorini-soaked arrows…
In this rich profusion of Christian and pagan imagery it is fitting that Apollo, often confused with the Good Shepherd of early Christian iconography, should make his entry. His “arrows” initiate what seems at first to be a strange revelation. Rust, which until now has been the sailor’s constant burden, marking the decay of the ship’s body, becomes a sort of salvation:
The gloss – the holy rust that bears us
feeds us, is fed by us, and finally kills us.
The rusted iron of the ship is now sacred – it is a patina that, as it wears away at the boat and its crew, is also a coat of many colors, a skins that exhausts as it embraces.
In the refrain, the You and the whore are united and the biblical imagery reinforced. Exile and sin are united in the single word “Babylon’. The sailor’s destination, the eye of the cyclone, is identical with the female figure of his fantasies.
In a sense it is Death as much as Woman that the poet has come to terms with. Only by embracing what he fears most, death by drowning, the jaws of a shark, will the sailor find salvation.
Gail Holst-Warhaft
