Germanakos - An Internview With Three Greek Prose Writers

An Interview with Three Contemporary Greek Writers: Stratis Tsirkas, Thanassis
Valtinos, George Ioannou

Author(s): Stratis Tsirkas, Thanassis Valtinos, George Ioannou and N. C. Germanacos
Source: boundary 2, Vol. 1, No. 2, A Special Issue on Contemporary Greek Writing
(Winter, 1973), pp. 266-314
Published by: Duke University Press
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AN INTERVIEW
with
THREE CONTEMPORARY GREEK WRITERS:
STRATIS TSI RKAS, THANASSIS VALTINOS,

GEORGE IOANNOU
taped for
boundary 2
in
May 1972
by
N.C. GERMANACOS
The following interview was taped by N.C. Germanacos in May

1972 with three of the foremost fiction writers in contemporary Greece:
Stratis Tsirkas, Thanassis Valtinos, and George loannou, all of whom are
represented in this special issue of boundary 2.
Stratis Tsirkas, who was born in Egypt in 1911 and is the oldest
of the three, has published poetry, criticism (including his important Cavafy
and Times, which was awarded the Greek State National Prize in 1958), and
translations (Erasmus, Stendhal, Saint-Exup6ry, Malcolm Lowry, Cesare

Pavese, and others), but he is best known as a writer of fiction. This includes short story collections (Strange Man, 1944; April is the Cruelest,
1947; The Sleep of the Reaper, 1954; Nouredin Borba, 1957; and The
Cape, 1966) and the novel trilogy which is referred to in the interview.
Collectively entitled-Ungoverned Cities (and including The Club, 1961;
Ariagne, 1962; and The Bat, 1965), this massive work about the Greek
world in wartime was banned in Greece from 1967 to 1970. It was, however, published in French translation by Le Seuil in 1971 and was awarded
a major prize as the best foreign fiction of the year. The English translation
(by Kay Cicellis) to be published by Alfred Knopf is forthcoming.
Unlike Tsirkas, Thanassis Valtinos is a mainland Greek, born in
Kinouria in the Pelopponese in 1932. Although he is not as prolific, he
has written several novella-length stories that have made him one of the
most respected fiction writers in Greece. His story "The Descent of the
Nine," which is included in this issue of boundary 2, was first published
in 1963 and immediately became a very influential model, both in style
and content, for younger Greek prose writers. His latest work, The Chronicle of Andreas Kordhopatis (1971), a novella of a hundred pages, is the
longest he has written.
The third member of this group, George loannou, was born in
Thessaloniki in 1927, the son of refugee parents from Eastern Thrace, now
a Turkish province. He grew up in this city of profound Byzantine memories, and it was here that he experienced the War, the Occupation, and
267
the Greek Civil War, which marked him deeply. loannou was educated at
the University of Thessaloniki in history and archaeology and was for a
time assistant to the Professor of Ancient History. He soon left this position, however, to throw himself into a life of exploring the land in order
to write about the Greek people. Following in the tradition of ClaudeCharles Fauriel, the French Philhellene who initiated the collecting of popular Greek oral literature in the beginning of the nineteenth century, and
N.G. Politis, the Greek ethnographer, loannou has published a number
of collections of folk literature with commentaries (Demotic Songs of
Kinouria, 1965; Our Demotic Songs, 1966; The Demotic Song: Variations,
1970) and a collection (with introduction) of pieces from the popular
Greek shadow theater, the anti-hero of which, Karaghiozis, gives it its name.
Though he has written two volumes of poetry (Heliotropes, 1954 and

The Thousand Trees, 1963), his most recent creative work has been in the
short story or, as he prefers to call it, "prose-writing," and includes collec-
tions entitled For a Sense of Honor (1964 and 1966) and The Sarcophagus
(1971).
The interview was taped in two sessions covering a seven hour

period and then edited and translated by N.C. Germanacos. It is worth
quoting two extracts from Germanacos' explanation not only to establish
the particular context of the interview but also for the light it throws on
the profession of writing in contemporary Greece:
I think your remarks about the interview were really to
the point... and I was, above all, pleased that they were
sympathetic. I was quite aware, while we were actually
talking, of the lack of "sophistication." Most Greek

writers, especially prose writers, are unsophisticated
(though someone like Tsirkas is less so because he's an
Alexandrian). I wanted this to come out clearly in the
interview, so I did not persist in questioning them along
a line which would produce perhaps more sophistication
at the expense of honesty. Nor did I tamper with the
conversation in this area. The American reader will ob-
serve this--and observe that contemporary Greek writers

are not so much interested in ART or even IDEAS. They
are above all interested in, and keep coming back again
and again to, LIFE, HISTORY, NOW, HERE. As Tsirkas

says in the most moving statement of all, "a writer is an
accountant of souls." That's how they see their role.

268
They ask why did it happen as it did, why is it happening
now. At least their generation. And it's to their credit.

I could have posed profound philosophic or technical
questions to them, but they would have brushed them
aside, or simply refused to answer them to the point.
In fact, this is what they do on more than one occasion,
and this is what I had to keep. For better or for worse,
this is how Greek prose writers think.
As for that repetition you refer to in the latter part of

the interview, we recorded at least three of the questions
on two different occasions for the simple reason that the
first time we got so gloriously drunk on wine from Than-
assis' village that after a certain point we were talking

utter (and sometimes inspired) bullshit ....
269
GERMANACOS:
Let's begin with bread and butter: What are the practical dif
culties a Greek writer has to face today as a professional?
TSI RKAS:
Very few writers make any kind of living from their writing. A
rare case was that of Kazantzakis, but only when his books began
to sell abroad. Unfortunately, this is a general truth: a Greek
writer cannot sell his books at home, unless recognition comes
from abroad. It's a curse.
GERMANACOS:
Is there no reading public, Stratis?

TSIRKAS:
We can't say that, no. There is a reading public today, but it

turned more to theoretical and technical books. Especially the
young, who are desperate to find answers to the problems co
fronting Greek society today. They prefer to read theoretician
from Marx to Marcuse, rather than literature.
GERMANACOS:
Let's be concrete. How many copies can a good novel, by a reco

nized author, sell?
TSI RKAS:
Once it was regarded as a best seller if it sold three thousand copies.
Today, a book that sells a thousand copies covers its costs and
270
leaves a pittance to the publisher and author. Of course, things

are different for the poet. Costs are never recovered, unless the
man is a major poet. We have the cases of Seferis, who is now in
a sixth edition, Cavafy, Ritsos of course, and Elytis.
GERMANACOS:
Apart from having a book published, are there any other outlet
available to an author?
TSI RKAS:
Unfortunately the inter-war or post-war flowering of the magazine
has ended. This, as you know, is fatal. There are very few magazines around today, which means there is very little space available
for the young writer to get recognition. What invariably happens
is that the prose writer or poet will save up some money and go
to a printer and get his book published. He will then give most of
the edition away to friends, family, and the leading literary figures.
There is no such thing as "editorial policy" in our publishing

houses. Things are still done on a personal, fish-market level.
VALTINOS:
There are no professional writers in Greece. Writing in G

must be a side-line. You have to work hard all day for a m
little wage and try and steal an hour here or there to throw
lines on paper. There's another solution too, of course--yo

become a parasite on your family or friends, but I'd rath
that wage.
GERMANACOS:
Aren't there any other media open to a writer for earning som
money?
VALTINOS:
Yes, that's what I call "paraliterature." I know some people

work on radio and TV, but what they are doing has nothing
with the act of creation.
GERMANACOS:
In the West, you can be an excellent writer and also do good work
for radio and TV. Or films.
VALTI NOS:
I'm sure you can. But here? The level of our radio, TV, and cin-
ema is such that you must try to do your worst in order to stay i
business.
IOANNOU:
In the West, too, you have a large measure of freedom to write

what you want.... I believe that Greek writers would love to
become what you call professionals, but I don't think it's possible.
271
Remember, we write in a language that may have a long history

and tradition, but today it is spoken by no more than ten million
people throughout the world. Most of our people do not enjoy a
high standard of education, and most of us are so poor that we
can only think of earning a living wage. So, our reading public is
even smaller than would at first sight appear. Even a "best seller"
in Greece has a limited circulation, and anyway, it's absorbed so
slowly by the market that sales figures, finally, become meaningless in terms of financial benefit. Things began to look up when
paperbacks came into vogue a few years ago, but these editions
make very little for the writer, which means that any writer who
has no private income has to work. The result is that most, particularly after they've had a family, leave the profession. The rest
suffer enormously. There are no cushy jobs in Greece, and salaries
are low, and writers do not enjoy much social standing. So we
have to compromise constantly, not only with our time, but also
with our freedom and private lives--we are constantly trying to
avoid getting sacked from our jobs for being over-bold in our
writing, and, naturally, we have to conform to socially accepted
patterns as individuals. In the end, we form a second, conspiratorial personality to face the world. I myself have half a dozen
books to my name, but the money I earn from them can barely
support me for a month every year.
VALTINOS:
Yes, it's more than just an economic problem. It's a problem
of social acceptance. From the moment you tell people yo

writer, they regard you as something between a con-man
charlatan. A good-for-nothing loafer. Very few people re
you.
TSI RKAS:
I don't think people regard you as disreputable. I think they se
you more as a dangerous person, since if you're a writer it's almo

sure you have strong opinions of your own, which invariably cla
with prevailing ideas, which the majority of people hold in orde
to survive. And going back to the subject of paperbacks, I'd say
their profusion on the market is definitely not an encouraging
development.
GERMANACOS:
The opposite holds true in England and America. There they

vital to a writer.
TSI RKAS:
But in Greece the atrocious quality of the new paperbacks has

272
pushed the good paperback out of the market. As on radio and

TV there seems to be a systematic policy of pursuing the lowest
possible level of quality. There seems to be a systematic attempt
to turn the public into morons. It's possible, of course, that

things may change. But it seems difficult because it is a matter of
broader education and cultural development.
VALTINOS:
Don't expect big things, Stratis. Take the cinema as an exam

Our film-makers are not simply content with descending
level of the public. They seem to aim at actively destroyin
taste entirely. I've worked in films. Also any film that eve
motely tries to explore real problems, not just political bu
social ones, is rejected by the official censor, who, at the s
time, will allow any piece of rubbish, filth, or idiocy to pass
the pu bl ic.
GERMANACOS:
What's the extent of censorship in Greece?

VALTINOS:
From 1967 to 1970 we had stringent pre-emptive censors

a long list of banned books. Since 1970, theoretically, the
been no censorship in Greece. Instead we have a Draconian
called Press Law, an unofficial index, and a host of ways of
idating writers into censoring themselves.
GE RMANACOS:
What about the theater and cinema--the radio and TV, of course,
are not worth discussing since they are run by the State.
VALTINOS:
We have very strict theater and cinema censorship. A filmhas to submit his script to the censor, and when the film is
it has to go once again through the censorship department.
theater we have the recent absurd examples of several plays
played in Athens all season, and when the companies took
on tour to the provinces, they were banned with no ration
planation given. And, of course, countless plays are never al
to be performed in the first place.
GERMANACOS:
Let's move on, shall we? . . It will come as a surprise to
American reader to learn that we have a serious "language p

lem" in Greece. I should think, in fact, we must be the only
ern country that enjoys this dubious distinction. George, si
you're a philologist, could you first give us a historical revie
this problem?
273
IOANNOU:
The Greek language has a long history. That is one of the reasons
we have many different forms of it. In ancient times--when writer
wrote in the language of the people--the spoken form of the lan

guage at any given time was recognized as its official form too
The evil--the split in the language--began at the time that Alex
ander's heirs ruled the world and "Koine," the "demotic" Greek
tongue, common to a multitude of conquered people, came into

being. (The Septuagint is in that tongue.)1 For, in spite of this
development, many scholars tried to keep on writing classical
Greek, and right into Byzantine times we see them trying to ape
Thucydides or Zenophon.2 There was a reaction during the Otto

man occupation, when many writers, mostly theologians--among
them the enlightened Patriarch Cyril Loukaris--used the languag
of the people as far as they were able to.3 Then, in the late eighteenth century, just before the War of Independence, Adamantio
Korais4 came up with the compromise solution of katharevousa
which was a combination of ancient Greek and the Greek spoke
by the people. It keeps the structure of the ancient tongue--though

not all of it--but includes many words from demotiki. Naturally
however, katharevousa is a long way from the demotic, and even
if common people understand it in part, they certainly cannot
feel it. Naturally, we have many great works written in demotic
from that period--I'm talking about prose....
GE RMANACOS:
Yes, that should be made clear because all the good poetry that
has ever been written in modern times has been in demotic. In
fact, just for the record, let me say that modern Greek can boast
a body of poetry as rich as that of any Western country--and here
I am including the vast body of folk poetry, "the demotic songs"
as we call them, which I think is among the best poetry western
civilization has ever produced. I think you would all agree with
me.
IOANNOU:
Fully. As I was saying, much good prose was written in demotic
then, best of all the Memoirs of General Makriyannis.5 How
ever, when the independent Greek kingdom was created, the new
State imposed katharevousa for aristocratic and reactionary rea-
sons.6 And it was a tongue far more backward looking than even
the one Korais proposed. The same story is being carried on today. The motives of the powers-that-be are reactionary and revea
274
their contempt for the people and the tongue they speak. Personally, I think there is no language problem for us writers. We write
in demotic. Our only problem is to enrich demotic with words
from previous forms of our language--language, remember, is not

vocabulary, but structure--and even from foreign languages. That
is one of our great obligations.
GERMANACOS:
It seems to me that the imposition of katharevousa has had chie

political motives all along. It has been the language of the for
of reaction for the last century and a half--a mandarin tongue
isolate the mandarin class, even linguistically, from the peop
they have been ruling. So don't you think that this dead langu
(it was never even born in any natural way) used by the rulin
class, the bureaucracy, our "scholars," and taught in our educ
tional system (which in Greece is entirely State controlled) h
brought about an incalculable corrosion not only of the langu
people speak but of their very minds?
TSI RKAS:
Yes, certainly.
GERMANACOS:
So language has been used as a means of propaganda and obfu

tion, not as a means of exploration and accurate expression.
TSIRKAS:
Of course, of course. According to George Steiner, the Germ

language was bulldozed flat by the Nazis' abuse of language, a
he believed that it would be many years before the damage co
be put right by great writers.
GERMANACOS:
George Orwell had it all there in 1984, Stratis....

IOANNOU:
Let me say that from my professional experience the State is

coming up against many obstacles in its attempt to impose kathar
evousa. Children have to learn to use it in order to get into school

of higher education, but they make sure they learn only enough
to enable them to pass their exams. Even so, I agree, this too
causes incalculable erosion.
VALTINOS:
I'm afraid that we do have a language problem, and I think

more serious perhaps today than it has ever been. Some say
writers have won their victory, but I think they're fooling t

selves. Grammatically, syntactically, yes, we've won, but in
stance we haven't made a step forward. In fact, we've gone
275
I agree with the need to fertilize the language. The people, with
their infallible instinct, see to that. In Mani in the Southern Peloponnese they still use archaic forms. All over the country we
encounter an astonishing sensitivity to language among ordinary
people. The damage is being done by the very defenders of demotic; for we have still not learned to call things by their right
names, gentlemen.
TS IRKAS:
Yes, we have not yet learned to say things precisely, and that is
not a matter of grammar or syntax.
VALTINOS:
It's a matter of language. Language is not a form, it's not a sh

There is its substance, the feel of it, which is everything. T
are examples of so-called demotic which can be described as lit
more than a rape of the language--take Kazantzakis' translatio
Homer's Odyssey into demotic.
GERMANACOS:
This enrichment that George spoke about before is done in the

natural course of things in English. Are you saying that Greek
writers must take over and do it consciously, George?
IOANNOU:
Only if they feel the need to. I'm not saying they should sit down
and spin off words.
VALTINOS:
Their duty is not to make the language, but to save it, to salv
it. There was nothing wrong with it, it was doing fine. Look
Makriyannis and Kolokotronis in their memoirs. Look at
demotic songs. But the deliberate policy under the new Gree
State was to destroy the popular language. The new State felt
need to find an identity. It mistakenly thought it would find
self in ancient Greece--by trying to revive a dead language.
trap of ancestor worship. Then, too, this policy served the p
sonal interests of men who could use the linguistic split to co
up their own deficiencies.
GERMANACOS:
Precisely what I was saying before. It is not only a cultural prob

lem but a political one as well.
TSI R KAS:
Quite. The use of katharevousa by the State marches hand in hand

with a host of ills that plague Greek society, and katharevousa
and wordiness go together. Whole generations have been brought
up with this disease. They cannot call things by their proper
276
names. They talk around the idea of things. That is why we have
difficulty in expressing ourselves, and that is why we have no
genuine prose tradition. Our writers learned to declaim, to make
rhetoric, they never learned to tell things as they are. This applies
to the users of katharevousa, but even more to the demoticists.
It is verbiage that has destroyed the proper feel of language, which
has its source in precise expression. It is a matter of feel. Seferis
dealt with this problem in his essay on Makriyannis. As Thanassis
says, the language was doing all right. It has never ceased to be
fashioned in the mouths of the people--even today. It is writers
who have strayed, because they were captivated or, rather, possessed by verbiage and rhetoric.
GERMANACOS:
Thanassis mentioned the Greek State's search for identity
seems to me that one of the major psychological problems fac

a Greek writer--and the one that sets him clearly apart from
western colleagues--is coming to terms with what I call "the aw
burden of the past." The questions: Who am I? What am I
not trouble a Greek as much as the question: Who and what am
in the geographical space and historical time that I occupy, a

what relation have I to the men who occupied this space befo
me? In short the dilemma is one of historical or perhaps eth
identity. Yes, we have this long and exciting history and lite
ture, but we never quite seem to know how it affects us and w
we are supposed to do with it now, today. Accept it in its enti
ty, reject it all, pick and choose from it--but what do we pick
what do we reject? Now, each of you has dealt with the p
Before we discuss your work individually and in detail, I'd lik

put the general questions: How do you see the past? How hav
you come to terms with it? Who are you?
TSI RKAS:
I believe I found the answer to my problems in Cavafy. Cavafy

deals with the Hellenic world created by the expeditions of Alex-
ander the Great.9 He does not see Hellenism confined to the

geographical space of Greece. It extends much farther. So, I,
who was born in Egypt, do not feel myself less a Greek, because
I found that I belong to a space created by a conquest, imperialist
if you like, but cultural too, which left its mark on all the space
it occupied, right up to India and Bactria, as Cavafy says. I do

not at all feel that I have to make any special effort to find myself, because I belong to the wider space of Hellenism, if you like,
and what connects me to the main body, if I am an offshoot,

277
is the language I speak and my traditions. I learned my demotic

tongue not in school, but from the mouth of my grandmother,
who was from the island of Chios and was illiterate. And if today
I can claim I use it with some ease, it's because I constantly ask
myself whether my grandmother would have said this or that.
GERMANACOS:
But isn't it true that

their past as much as
conversation it gives
about our fate, about
Greeks, more than any people I know, curs

they treasure it--even if it's done lightly
the show away? We are always agonizing
our inheritance. A while ago Thanassis used
the word "ancestor-worship." I don't believe the Italians fe
themselves debilitated by their past, though their history is almo
as long as ours. Doesn't it betray this deep psychological problem

I spoke about?
IOANNOU:
I'd like to see things more concretely, referring to my own case

and hope that it'll answer your question. I was born in Salonica o
parents who came there in 1914 as refugees from Eastern Thrace
which is today occupied by Turkey. My grandparents soon died
as a result of what they had suffered and my parents were neve
allowed by the Turks to visit their native country. Our pain over
the loss of our country, our struggle for food and a roof over ou
heads in a strange city, contributed to our inability to retain eve
one tradition of our lost land. We existed as though we had falle
from the sky, without customs, without laughter, without son
in the home. I grew up and was educated in this city, which is
full of Byzantine memories. I got myself a classical and human
istic education, but although I found all these things beautiful,
they never touched me deeply, these ancient Greeks. The ancient
are an alien race to me. I can never imagine I am descended from
them. I begin to feel more comfortable with the Hellenistic period
I believe, though, that my generation is a creation of Byzantium
Don't forget that Thrace was the nearest province to Constantinople. I don't mean to say that I am attracted to life in Byzan
tium; it must have been terrible. But that is what I am emotionall
and imaginatively: a Greek of Byzantium--and the Turkish occu

pation.10 In reaction to those that worship the ancients I respond
that I must be descended from Hellenised slaves, and so the idea
of a Hellenic-Christian civilization does not impress me. .... It's

strange, isn't it, that many of us Greeks, although we know th
history of our nation so well, know nothing about the history o
our families. Most of us, and especially we refugees, know, at
278
most, only as far back as our grandparents. Byzantine misre and

the Turkish occupation obliterated our roots.
VALTINOS:
Personally, I don't think I have any problems of identi
least, no more than any other human being. I believe that

civilization is universal property, a universal inheritance. It
be ridiculous for me to claim it exclusively as my own. No
more or less binds me with ancient writers than binds an Amer-
ican, a Frenchman, or a German, at least nothing that would pose

special problems for me. Naturally, I live in the same space as the
ancients, and my tongue is rooted in theirs, but these things do

not amount to any special privilege or obligation. I'd say they're
elements in a tradition, and tradition never holds a writer captive.
On the contrary, if one encounters it properly it becomes a powerful source of inspiration. I don't understand why this thing you
call "the awful burden of the past" should weigh on my shoulders,
or on my shoulders only and not, say, on an Englishman's. As
for the Greek people, I don't agree that they curse their past. They
curse all those who have tried--and have succeeded, alas--to distort
their relation to the past. The language problem is just one example of these monstrous efforts, which today, unfortunately are
being made with the same frenzy as before.
GERMANACOS:
I disagree with you in part. I think you gave yourself away sev
times--I think there is a problem even for you, though you
not admit it, Thanassis. The past is a dead hand, whether you
VALTINOS:
Our people are proud. Playing the role of the fallen aristo
imaginatively jerking themselves off with their memories o

glories does not suit them. The nightmarish thing, the tragic
lies in the following conflict: on the one hand you have a
constantly struggling and bleeding to stand upright, to see a

day, and on the other a bunch of carpetbaggers, an untale
jaundiced bunch of usurpers constantly shortcircuiting the p
aspirations. And let's not forget the degree of responsibili

must apportion to our so-called "friends" throughout our h
Immediately after 1821 we had three parties in Greece: the R
phile, the Francophile and the Anglophile, that's what they
called. Make a few changes here and there and you have the
picture today. By the way--what was the name of that Ame
Secretary of State that visited us recently?
279
GERMANACOS:
Rogers, I believe .... But, Thanassis, I don't believe the pict
you've given is quite as simple as that. The fact that we have

ways had the tendency, throughout our history, to sell out t
foreign interests is not something you can unload on the should
of a few carpetbaggers. I think it betrays far deeper and hig
disturbing elements in the Greek character as a whole. I thin
you may be idealizing "the people" a bit. After all, the carpet
baggers come from "the people," too.
TS IRKAS:
I'd like to make clear that the past I feel comfortable with dates
from the Hellenistic period. Pericles and the Golden Age do not
concern me. And I'd like to clear up something else: the War of
Independence had an ideological side that referred back to ancient
Greece, to Pericles and Leonidas. It was the doing of the Western
Philhellenes and scholars. But, the war itself, the Revolution, as
we call it in Greek, created a new mythology, which the Greek
people fell back on when the time came for them to fight again
for their independence. They did not refer to ancient Greece

when the resistance was formed against the Germans, when the
whole guerilla movement began. Our ideal then was 1821. This
indicates clearly that we have thrown off the distant past, the
curse of ancestor-worship; at least a large section of the people
has: the progressive, the politically alive. Now, if contemporary
writers return to myths the ancient tragedians used, it's not because
they feel they belong to the same intellectual world as ancient

Greece, but because these myths happen to tailor well to the measurements of the modern world.
IOANNOU:
In the final analysis, the language problem and ancestor-worship

have social and political roots. The same class that has tried to
impose the one has encouraged the other. It shows their contemp
for the mass of the people.
GERMANACOS:
George, and you Thanassis, you are both of the same generat
You are too young to have played an active part in the war, t
occupation, and the civil war, but you were old enough to rem
ber vividly and painfully what happened. How have these mo
immediate memories affected you? When I used the term "anc
tor-worship" and the expression "awful burden of the past" I w
not limiting myself only to the obsession many Greeks have w
classical Greece, but with the whole course of our history. So
280
let's see how you view the recent past.

IOANNOU:
Let me give you some of the facts of my life. When the last war
started I was about twelve. My early teens were thus spent under
the occupation, but I was older during the civil war that followed
Circumstances prevented me from taking part, and I lost several
friends fighting on one side or the other. From the very begin
ning I was fully aware of the magnitude of the events taking plac
around me. I lived through the German bombing--which, of course,
was insignificant compared to what is going on in Vietnam--and
lived through the horrors the Germans and their quislings perpe
trated here; then there was the systematic starvation our conquerors brought on us; the rounding up and liquidation of Salon
ica's sixty thousand Sephardic Jews; and finally the horror of th
civil war. I cannot believe in men entirely; I have seen how they
can change into beasts. But I've also seen how some, hardly noticeable, can rise to great heights. The resistance against the Germans was truly heroic. Our people, who today seem to have fallen
so low, stood so proud then. No, there is no more important
period in my life than the 1940's, and I don't think there ever will
be. That is where I belong, and I pray I may be able to express
it in my work.
VALTINOS:
I'm afraid it's hard for someone who did not live through
occupation and the civil war to understand the attraction
period may have for a man who was then a child. At the fo
age of my life I was hammered by appalling impressions.
changes with time, of course, but the blood continues to
I don't know. Perhaps I return to my past just as another
might return to his first loves. On the other hand, I may d
another reason: I feel a need to say certain things, things
must be said so that the events that unfolded during those
may be put in their proper place, may be seen in their pr
dimensions; so that, perhaps, they may never happen again
they happen, so more people may be conscious of what is
going on and may act accordingly.
GERMANACOS:
Stratis, you lived through this period in Alexandria. It has clea

marked you, for living in the middle of great historical even
prompted you, in fact, to write your trilogy.11 Do you still f
so involved in this past that you must continue writing about

or do you feel that you now want to tackle contemporary lif
281
TS IR KAS:
I don't feel that I should return, no. I may later, I don't know.
At this moment I'm working on a novel about contemporary life,
which does not, of course, exclude references to the past--how
else can you explain your heroes' roots? I'm fully aware of the
dangers of writing about current events, and it's hard going, and
it's taking me time. But I'd like to go back a bit to explain my
feelings towards the Greece of my time. My mother, remember,
was an Orthodox Christian born in Jaffa, who made no distinction
between Christian and Moslem Arabs, nor white and colored
people. I inherited her racial and religious tolerance, which I was
able to absorb even more thoroughly when I witnessed her attitude
towards the Egyptian people in their struggle to gain their independence which began after the first world war. My mother sup-
ported the Egyptians whole-heartedly. From then on I was an

anti-imperialist, and when I grew up I joined the ranks of those
men who tried to block Mussolini's conquest of Ethiopia, the

advance of the fascists in Spain, and the dictatorship of General
Metaxas in Greece.12 All these events went hand in hand. They
were parts of the same picture. Opposing Metaxas was not just
a Greek affair, but one that took on a universal meaning: one
had to oppose imperialism and fascism everywhere. Then we have
World War II: the parts of the Greek Navy and Army that managed to escape from Greece to the Middle East and regroup there
to carry on the fight brought Greece very close to us in Egypt.
Most of these troops came and stayed in Greek homes when they
were off duty. So we were able to see the tragedy of the occupation and the nobility of the struggle of the Greek people to liberate themselves from the Germans and Italians. This is perhaps
the most important period in my life.
GERMANACOS:
But you don't feel, as George and Thanassis feel, that you must
return to it again and again in your writing.
TSIRKAS:
No. When I finished the trilogy I shook that monkey off my b

I don't feel especially confident in tackling the present probl
of Greece, but I cannot return.
GERMANACOS:
It seems to me that very few Greek novelists have successfully

tackled the current urban realities of Greece. Not the "neigh-
borhood," which, in a sense, is little more than an extension of

the rural landscape, but the realities of the megalopolis with al
282
that that entails. No one has yet written the great urban novel
set in the Athens of the endless apartment blocks, traffic jams,
affluence, sexual emancipation, and all the pressures as well as
the liberations of mid-century bourgeois life. Do you agree with
my assessment? If you do, do you think you will be able to accomplish this aim yourselves or do you think we must wait some
time for someone younger?
TSI RKAS:
I've read hundreds of stories by young writers in recent years.

Some of them have captured the Athens of the apartment blocks,
but none of them has managed to produce a complete, rounded
novel of any sort. They are simply stories with pictures they have
given us. Glimpses. I believe it is imperative that such novels
should be written, but I cannot make any prophecies. The novel
I am now writing deals with contemporary urban Athens, but I
don't know whether I'm capable of bringing it off. It's not a question of age. I don't think, in fact, that it's going to be a young
man, fresh to the problems of the novel, who will be able to give
us the modern picture of Athens. I think it's going to be someone
who has digested the Greek novel from the Revolution onwards.
Athens has not fallen out of heaven, you know. It's not just the
super-modern life of the 1970's a novelist must give; he must also
give us the people, who carry inside them all the experience of
the occupation, the civil war, and the history of the post-civil war
social and political upheavals. These people have to be portrayed
as whole beings, and I'm afraid a younger writer may fall into the
dangers of writing either science fiction or something totally superficial.
GERMANACOS:
I disagree, Stratis. In fact, I would argue that only a young wr

born and bred in the post-war era can achieve such a novel. I
don't see why the fact that he hasn't lived through the great events
of modern Greek history can handicap him--the young inherit the
memories of their elders and often, the fact that they do not experience the events firsthand is an asset in their writing. I am optimistic.
VALTINOS:
I think there is no urban novel in Greece, because, quite
there has been no urban life until quite recently. We'v
hybrid set-up here. Take any Athenian, scratch the surfa

you'll find a peasant from the Peloponnese, Thrace, or an
Only now are things beginning to take a shape that an Am
283
say, may see as familiar.
TSIRKAS:
We've never really had a bourgeois class in Greece and I d
think we ever will. It has always been something between th

compradores, a snob class of parvenus--and you didn't know w
they belonged, here or there--and a class clearly rooted in its r
past, as Thanassis pointed out. In all the Western countries,
bourgeoisie gave us the bourgeois novel, the urban novel, as
call it, Nikos. In Greece the creation of a dominant, powerful
middle class has never been accomplished. Now other factors are
coming into the picture, like the invasion of foreign--and in particular American--capital, which will not allow a national middle
class to evolve. So, in Greece, I believe, we'll always have something in between, something only half-complete in the bourgeois
or urban novel.
GERMANACOS:
I still maintain that the young will be able to do it. Even if th

have not lived through what you have. Remember something e
a characteristic of many urban novels is that they have preci
little, if any, historical memory. It's in the nature of the thin
cities, modern, industrial cities have no memories; machines, c
crete, and plastic do not have the memories of marble. The ch
dren born after '45 may have no historical memories, so t

might give us the life of the Athens we see around us.
VALTINOS:
The children who never witnessed what we did, remember
the misfortune to have parents who did live through this

And you know how much more a child is shaped by his p
than by his physical or cultural surroundings.
TS IRKAS:
Fortunately, we have not come to the stage of writing novels without memories. I hope we never get there. Is that what they do in
the United States?
GERMANACOS:
I think this is what the urban novel has been doing all along to
lesser or greater degree. Fitzgerald's or Greene's heroes, to tak

the first examples that come to mind, or Sartre's or Updike's o
Beckett's, to take more recent and extreme examples, have pre
cious little historical past. The novelist is interested in objectiv
social, truth and observation or in the psychological state of his
characters, the ways they react to their surroundings and to ea
other--not in the past of their town or their fellow countryme
284
or their own grandparents, or their city.

IOANNOU:
I don't think we can do that. Certainly not my generation.

VALTINOS:
I agree. It would be impossible in Greece.

TSI RKAS:
I too would feel crippled if I tried to ignore historical reality. Even

in the neighborhood I live in in the heart of Athens, which I am
trying to put into my book, there are memories. There's a little
pine wood across from me, which is a favorite among courting
couples, a supermarket's being built further down, and the man
that owns the kiosk is a police informer--all these things I'd like
to put in my book. But as soon as the paint on the wall opposite
my window begins to peel, I can read "EAM, ELAS, DEATH TO

THE TRAITORS,"13 scrawled on the wall with red paint.
GERMANACOS:
But, Stratis, if the paint on apartment blocks peels the only th

it reveals is reinforced concrete.
TS IRKAS:
Maybe so, but the people living behind those walls are the same
that lived in the little house that was demolished to give way to
the block. What I want to say is that conditions in Greece are
special. It's just because Greece has not yet completed her
bourgeois and democratic revolution, that the novel, if it wishes
to be true to life in the city, cannot ignore the memories that are
still such burning issues. If Greece had come out of the trials of
war and occupation with less disastrous consequences, like France
or Belgium or Italy even, perhaps Greek writers would have felt
free to write the kind of novel you've been talking about.
GERMANACOS:
Do you think that the young, people under thirty, have thes
memories?
TS IRKAS:
If this generation had no family background it might release itself.

But, as you said, before, Nikos, the children inherit the memories
of their fathers in a community where the family is so strong. We

see this clearly in the attitudes of the young born after the war,
who deal with current problems facing our society in terms of the
commitments their parents held then.

VALTI NOS:
We've got an excellent example at hand--Jenny Mastoraki. How

have these memories registered on the mind of a young twenty285
two year old girl? She was born years and years after these events.
She never saw the war, the occupation, the civil war, and very
little of the sad decade of the fifties. Yet her poems, through
some strange mechanism, turn back.14

TS IRKAS:
Let's face it. All our ills arise out of the fact that the resistance
never reaped its rewards. All our progress towards a real democracy was interrupted. We had to go back to square one and start
from scratch.15 And at the moment all these problems are simply
left to rot and stink. That is why the Greek writer cannot find
release from his historical memory.
GERMANACOS:
It is indicative that you all use the word "release" in connection

with the immediate past. One can almost say that your work is a
kind of historical catharsis, an act of exorcism. This places you
outside most trends in other Western countries, I'd say, where
writer finds this "release" automatically in the very air he breath
(the Germans and the Russians, from the other side of the Curtain,
would seem to be exceptions.) An English novelist, for example

lives his experiences or witnesses those of others and writes abou
them a few years later. He will not seek to explore or justify a

historical past of his characters or his society. And he will not
use history as a point of reference for his characters' actions. Yo
appear to be obsessed, transfixed by history--at least recent hi
tory.
VALTI NOS:
The English or American writer never knew the meaning of an
occupation or a civil war....

GERMANACOS:
You're wrong. The American Civil War was only less terrible t
ours because the "right" side won. But it is revealing that
American South has produced so many great novels with hist

ical memories--sorry to interrupt...
VALTI NOS:
True, but the modern American writer has never known the lac
of fundamental rights, and he has never known the lack of food
he has never had to fight to keep his head barely above water an
simply be allowed to breathe--and I'm talking literally now.
GERMANACOS:
The American Negro writer. He has memories, too.

VALTINOS:
But he seems to be winning. We lost and we're still losing.

286
TSI RKAS:
Our literature cannot progress unless the problems that have not
been solved in our society are solved--basic social, economic, and
political problems whose solutions are taken for granted in the
Western democracies. That's why we are not in line with the

American or English novel, and I don't think that we are losing
much by being out of step either.
GERMANACOS:
Thanassis, let me concentrate on your case for a moment. Yo

have dealt exclusively with the past in your writing. Don't y
feel the urge to write about contemporary life? Do you think
can?
VALTI NOS:
The way things have turned out, we are in bondage to the pa

Nikos. The problems of fifty years ago are as urgent today as t
were then. I realise I cannot go forward unless I clear up cert
issues left over from yesterday and the day before. Perhaps if
novelists that came before me had done a more systematic job,
things would have been easier for me today. A huge area of o
life has been left unexplored by our literature. For a contem
rary writer, for me, it would be death to ignore it. Every mom
of my life I stumble into this area, which my predecessors larg
ignored.
GERMANACOS:
George, in your creative work you, too, have dealt exclusively

with the past, and what's more, you've kept to the same form
Your two books so far consist of short stories--you call them
"prose-writings"--some of which are no more than two or thr
pages long, all written in the first person. I can best describe the
as portraits, landscapes of a neighborhood. They are not set in
the large-city landscape we talked about before, the fast movi
mass-consuming society, but almost in a rural society, living o
the periphery of the twentieth century in many ways, yet plunge
into the worst of its historical horrors. Why have you chosen th
form? Do you think you will ever move in the direction of

novel?
IOANNOU:
Before I appeared in prose I had quite a long career in poetry,

and in many ways regard myself--in poetry--a student of Cavafy's.
I think my prose-writings are a continuation of my poetry by
other means. I purposely write them in the first person, first in
order to gain psychological release for myself, and secondly to
287
make them warmer, more casual. Some people believe they are
autobiographical, but they are not. I use my own experiences no
more or less than any other prose writer. As for the future, I shall
continue using this form because I still have many things I want
to say in it. But at the same time I've got other things to say which
only longer forms can manage to accommodate, but I don't quite

know how I'm to achieve this. My general view on prose is that
it should be based on the word and not the phrase. The words
must be chosen in such a way that with their sense, position, and
echo they evoke far more things than a writer can normally say.
I don't like literature that functions on a flat plane, that attempts
to describe one specific object. My ambition is to talk about a

glass, for example, and suggest to the reader the whole contemporary world, from my own personal problems to the present situation in Greece.
TSIRKAS:
My case is different from both of yours. I grew up at a time w
literature in the West was engage. So I see the role of literatur

a crusade, I see the role of the responsible writer as that of
accountant, an accountant of souls. He never compromises, he
never fears either authority or violence. From Aeschylus to the
Soviet writers perishing in Siberia, writers have asked the questions: Why have all these men been lost? Why did they sacrifice
themselves? Yes, a writer has a social function of a high order,
more demanding than a priest. A writer must sort out the accounts.
Take Seferis, Cavafy, Makriyannis--that's what they all wanted.

GERMANACOS:
That's basically what Thanassis was saying when he talked of g

back to the past in order to put things straight.
TS IR KAS:
Yes. Of course, a writer must make judgments on the basis of his

own experience, his own point of view, and every man has his
own standards by which he apportions sacrifice and responsibility.
His canon of reference ultimately is himself, though I do not believe that writing is primarily a matter of expressing yourself or
satisfying your ambitions. You write in order to fulfill your social
role. And your social role is to keep an account of what has happened to men, what is going to happen to them tomorrow. And
if you have a progressive ideology, you always have the image of
the complete man before your eyes, a man free and responsible
for himself and his fellows. ....
288
GERMANACOS:
The Good Life, the Good City.

TSI R KAS:
Yes, that is our aim: to help man to become the complete man.
That's why we are so severe when we condemn all these abominations taking place around us, which lessen man, turn him back.
GERMANACOS:
George, do you see your role as fundamentally social in natu

IOANNOU:
Yes, naturally, although I begin from personal experiences. Of

course, I put my experiences across in such a way that they have
a more general reference and touch upon the common, basic prob
lems of mankind.
GERMANACOS:
Stratis, do you think you could have written your trilogy--a so
political novel--if you had been living in Greece?

TSI RKAS:
No, I must say that if I'd been living here I would have been following the trends of Greek literature in Greece. Since I lived in
Alexandria, which is a crossroad, I was able to learn several languages and thoroughly immerse myself in all the major contemporary trends. Also the city itself forced me to think in cosmopolitan terms.
GERMANACOS:
You, of course, have written an urban novel, but it's signific

that it was written outside the confines of the Greek State.
TSI R KAS:
Yes, because that's the kind of society I lived in, and since I base
everything I write on personal experience and observation that's
how it had to be. I cannot make up people or situations out of
my head, out of nothing, as some writers appear to do. If I tried
to invent things, they would strike me as false.
GERMANACOS:
And you regarded it as quite natural that politics should play
major part in your trilogy, just as it does in the life of the ur

dweller anyway.
TSI RKAS:
Of course.
GE RMANACOS:
Let me change tack, Stratis. Apart from your creative work you
have also written two books on Cavafy. By any standards they
are excellent critical works. Now I am addressing you as a critic:
289
Why is there no critical tradition in Greece? How far does this

affect Greek writers? And again, is there any hope that we may
get some worthwhile criticism in the immediate future?
TSIRKAS:
Let me clear something up: I'm not a critic. I simply found m

self face to face with a problem, the problem of Cavafy. Becau
I'd been born in Egypt and had become involved in the politic
and social life of the country, I realised that Cavafy might be
somebody quite different from the poet other critics had ma
him out to be. So I set out to investigate the question and see
who exactly Cavafy was .... Today we have no criticism. Th
was a period in Greek literature when we had two or three imp
tant critics--the period that coincides with the emergence of

Greek bourgeoisie, which believed it could come into power on
own and expand the frontiers of the Greek State to include a
the Greek nation.16
GERMANACOS:
What period is this?

TSIRKAS:
Around the turn of the century up until the Asia Minor Disas
in 1922, when it came to a close.
GERMANACOS:
Before you go on, let me make a distinction: when I say "cri

ism" I don't mean only the art of "reviewing" or even the jour
istic critical essay. I also mean the kind of work done by, say
Pound, Eliot, Leavis, Wilson, and in our day, Kermode and Fi
ler....
TSI RKAS:
No, no. We have never had criticism like that. Perhaps Fotos
Politis, 17 who had been influenced greatly by Carlyle, may have
laid down some guidelines, but we have never had a Pound or a
Leavis. What I was talking about was the kind of critic that smells
out talent like a hound, encourages and explains it. But that, as
you say, is only half the work of the critic, and we haven't had
many such hounds either. Now, why not? Why don't we have
any today? Because I think criticism presupposes a flowering of
literature, which it seeks to evaluate, to ask what it is, where it
comes from, where it is going. The critic must support himself on
sound foundations in order to evaluate. We have none.
VALTINOS:
Wouldn't you say that a critic's first duty is to create such f

ations?
290
TSI RKAS:
I would.
VALTINOS:
Does a critic precede or follow?

TSI RKAS:
It depends. One who precedes is a theoretician. We have none.

GERMANACOS:
To have one presupposes a long critical tradition, too, and we h

none.
TSIRKAS:
Right. You see, it's like Greek society in general: it's formles
unformed as yet; everything is "fluid," neither this nor that.
either a bad imitation of something foreign or it's assininely
demic. We've never had a genius who could see the course of
literature with a new and perceptive eye and point out its dist
tive marks and above all pinpoint the goals it is aiming for. Eve
thing is borrowed, dull, or anaemic.
GERMANACOS:
Also, a very important, down-to-earth reason for the absence

even good reviewing or essay-type criticism in magazines is
fact that Greek society is so small, and literary society even sm
ler. Everybody knows everybody else, and everybody depends
everybody else--if your fellow writers don't read your books,
will? It's inbred--and stifling. How can standards be maintain
in this kind of environment?
TSIRKAS:
Right.
GERMANACOS:
And this must obviously and radically affect the creative wr

TSIRKAS:
Terribly. A novelist works years to finish a novel, often pay
printer or publisher to bring it out for him, then waits for a y
perhaps for a review in some newspaper, having in the meant

gone through the whole humiliating process of sending off fla
ing letters, free books...

VALTINOS:
Bouquets of flowers ...

TSI RKAS:
And in the end, more often than not, he never gets the benefit
a review at all.
VALTINOS:
It's no accident that in all our papers there is only one cr

291
column, written by a novelist, as a matter of fact. In God's name,

what ...
TSIRKAS:
That's because so many appointed critics degraded or sold
their columns in order to keep them. And this is a consequen

of the general tawdriness of our society. We don't have a pr
and independent middle class, and we never will. All our crit
sold their columns for expediency's sake. From the occupatio
and after we haven't had one important critic who hasn't suck
up to the current ruling clique.
VALTINOS:
Still, I think there's a new generation of young people com

--and you know some of them, Stratis--who are well-read,
pendent-minded, intelligent, and modest, and might change
TSI R KAS:
The critic must be modest. As soon as the thing goes to his head
and he begins to fancy he's laying down the law, he'll start acting
crazy.
GERMANACOS:
You are now using the word "critic" to mean "reviewer," m

than . . .
TSIRKAS:
Yes. The other kind of critic, the creative critic, if you like
call him something else.
GERMANACOS:
George, you're a High School teacher. Do you think the educa

tional system we have, a system that puts emphasis on learni
by rote and actively discourages any sort of original or indepe
dent thinking, in fact any thinking at all, has something to do w

the absence of real criticism?
IOANNOU:
Of course. Our educational system, from the bottom up, is anti

quated and has very low standards. No contemporary literature
is studied in our universities, and no individual initiative is encour-
aged at any level. Our graduates in literature have usually not

read the literature of the last fifty years, and their training has
never encouraged them to read widely on their own initiative.
Such a system can only produce students whose primary interest
is getting a degree as painlessly as possible for the sake of earning
a living. It certainly can't produce critical minds.
GERMANACOS:
Do any of you think we'll ever have criticism in Greece?
292
TS IRKAS:
If we don't I think we might as well go and hang ourselves!

VALTINOS:
I think that in five to ten years time we'll have excellent, u

date criticism.
TSI RKAS:
And a thriving intellectual climate, too.

GERMANACOS:
You believe that?
TS IRKAS:
Yes. I'm sure. I see the young today.

IOANNOU:
But many things cannot be called by their real names....

VALTINOS:
It doesn't matter. They may not be able to call things by

proper names in public, but ...
GERMANACOS:
Didn't you have exciting young people in the previous generat

too?
TSI RKAS:
Let me tell you. I'm watching these children, their thirst, their
soul-searching, their independence. They are one of the finest
generations of Greeks.
IOANNOU:
I can't accept that. I don't think they're much different from

their recent predecessors. You're exaggerating things. You hav
little contact with these kids, so you're judging them from appe
ances only. I remember my generation. I'd say there hasn't be
a generation more vital and more intellectually alive than our
But the times, and the means we had, were against us. If we ha
only had the means . . .
TS IR KAS:
With that I agree.

VALTI NOS:
No objection, but we didn't. Today's young, however, have, and

that's the difference.
GERMANACOS:
And with the new spate of translations of contemporary literatu
they have access to what is going on outside Greece, particul

in England and America, in a way which no previous Greek gen
ation could have imagined. . . . Tell me, have there been any f
eign influences on your work, gentlemen?
293
TS IRKAS:
A writer cannot, of course, avoid influences. As long as he reads,

he will be influenced. When I first began reading, Hamsun, Dost-
oyevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev were all in fashion. In 1930 I1 discovered Stendhal and have remained faithful to him ever since.
Then Proust and Flaubert. Americans? I discovered them just
before the second war--Faulkner and Hemingway. And Caldwell

too, Dreiser, Langston Hughes. Oh, yes, I've forgotten Malraux-he was very important to me. Joyce, too, played a very important
role for me, when I first read him in French translation.
GERMANACOS:
In what did Joyce influence you specifically?

TSIRKAS:
He showed me the way to use interior monologue; I wouldn't ha

dared do it, if I hadn't read him.
IOANNOU:
Now that I think of it, I can't say that any foreign writer has influenced me, although I've read widely in translation. I've had
Greek influences, however. Cavafy has influenced my poetry,
for example. But I do believe that if a modern Greek writer has
been through the enormous body of Greek literature, he will find
most of the answers to his problems--even problems of form.
TSI R KAS:
It's one thing imitating a writer and it's another digesting and
absorbing what you've read. There are Greek writers trying to
imitate Faulkner--it shows. Nobody is born a writer. We all learn
our craft by studying others and using their example to solve our
problems. But finally we must acquire our own view of life, and
our own voice to express it. Then we have reached our destination.
IOANNOU:
Yes. A writer's views on life and his style depend far more on th
events that have colored his life than on his reading, which come
as an auxiliary means to help put him on his chosen road.
GERMANACOS:
In Stratis' case we have an example of a concrete influence: Joyc
teaching him how to use the interior monologue. Can you be con
crete too?
IOANNOU:
Once again, Greek writers have given me concrete assistance
Especially Homer. He taught me, among other things, how to use

the adjective, the unexpected adjective.
294
TSI RKAS:
To return to my case, I'd like to say that I began to acquire a

personal tone, a style, from the time I understood the secret of
Cavafy's poetry. Also when I read Makriyannis.
IOANNOU:
And from all my reading I arrived at the conclusion that I mus

listen to my own voice. All my reading liberated me to listen to
my own voice.
VALTINOS:
We cannot, of course, deny our debts to others, either in

in literature. One learns one's craft at the side of one's masters.
It's enough, at times, for a badly translated story of Faulkner's (as

happened with me many years ago) to open one's eyes to things
one couldn't see before. However, I can't say in all honesty that
foreign writers have influenced me in forming my point of view
or choosing my form or style.
GERMANACOS:
Hasn't Hemingway influenced you?

VALTINOS:
No. I really don't think so.

IOANNOU:
Many of the characteristics of Hemingway's tone and style Valtinos has by nature.
TSI RKAS:
Can I interrupt? Now that you've brought Hemingway up--I had

a problem in my trilogy. How could I make a political novel-describing the events of the Middle East during the war--that also
included love and sex, and make it true to life? I tried and tried
from 1946 to 1949 but got nowhere. Then, as I was travelling

by sea from Egypt to Marseilles in 1949, I found A Farewell to
Arms in the ship's library. That and a book by Vaillant, Dr8le de
jeu, gave me the answer. I knew then I could write a political
novel without writing propaganda.
GERMANACOS:
How, then, Thanassis, if you were not influenced by men lik

Hemingway, did you arrive at the stage where you could desc
action so simply, so sparingly?
VALTINOS:
I owe it to the Greek masters I studied. I don't know a
simply written account of action than the Bible. And Makr
I don't see why we should run to foreign literature to fi

solutions.
295
GERMANACOS:
I am not denying Makriyannis' genius nor his place in the Gre

literary tradition. But can he give solutions to you, living in t
Greece of 1972? I mean more than style or tone? It seems to
extraordinary that you and loannou seem not to have been in
fluenced by contemporary non-Greek literature. Is Greece

parochial in the great Western cultural family? Throughout
Western history there has been a constant and fructifying give-a
take between all European countries. And between Europe
America, first from us to America and now it seems from Ame
to us. Greece, it seems, stands outside all this in many ways. U

concerned, detached, turning in on itself. I notice this more,
course, in my own work in poetry. The younger Greek po
seem not only unaware of what is going on outside Greece bu

almost unconcerned. The last big influence from abroad was th
of the surrealists, but that's forty years ago. Since then nothi
seems to have penetrated behind our cultural wall except possib
all the worst examples of English and American pop culture,
debris from the Western cultural garbage-heap.
VALTINOS:
And even with the surrealists, I believe we have examples o
kind of poetry in our own tradition. The demotic song is a

realist as anything that came from France before the war.
TS IRKAS:
I disagree with you, Thanassis, and you, George. The fact is that
all European countries, some more slowly than others, proceed to
new forms of expression almost at the same time. There is a rec-
ognizable European civilization. Romanticism came to Greece-albeit twenty years late. Then symbolism, then surrealism. A
great poet somewhere discovers a new form of expression and
creates a school; the school comes to Greece in the nature of
things. If it happened that we discovered surrealism twenty years
too late, it's because our general standard of education and culture
is much lower. I don't think for a moment that if we had ignored
European trends and stuck to the demotic song we would have

discovered surrealism on our own. I don't think Seferis did any
harm either to bring "Eliotism" to Greece. Europe and America
constitute one cultural organism.
VALTINOS:
I don't disagree. But I do think that if there had been one

of genius here, we would have come to a surrealism based
own literary past.
296
GERMANACOS:
That's a big, big if....

TSIR KAS:
One craftsman of ours who has influenced the Western world is
Cavafy.
VALTINOS:
I don't deny the fruitful give-and-take. But what I kick v

at is our sitting back and waiting for foreign writers to
fashion and lay down the law in matters which we have an
for right in front of our own Greek noses.
TSI RKAS:
I agree that a writer must first know his own literary past through
and through.
IOANNOU:
The Greek writer must always be in the position to graft what h

learns from outside to his own vast tradition. That, I believe is
what Cavafy did. He grafted his enormous learning in foreign lit

erature to his Greek learning.
TSI RKAS:
Yes. First he had a profound knowledge of classical literature, the

Alexandrians especially, then he knew the Fathers of the Church,
and the Byzantine chroniclers. And then, as you say, he knew
what was going on in Europe: Baudelaire, Verlaine, the Symbolists, and the English poets of his time, such as Hardy, Browning,
Dowson, Wilde and others.
GERMANACOS:
You haven't answered my charge of parochialism.

TSI RKAS:
I don't agree that modern Greek writing is parochial. What Thanassis and George are doing is part of the concert of cultures that
comes from the different nations of our Western family. They are
contributing their own, genuine voice.
GERMANACOS:
But there is also a recognizable "Western Novel." A Western land
scape. A German can read an English novel and feel thoroughly

at home in it. A Frenchman can read a Faulkner novel (and he
a regional writer too) and recognize the landscape. And so o
Isn't there the danger of provincialism, or even exoticism in mu

of Greek prose?
TS IRKAS:
What can I say in answer? Why has Faulkner's South established

itself in the imagination of readers all over the world and not the
297
Peloponnese of Valtinos or the Salonika neighborhood of loannou? I think it's a question of the dynamism of the country the
literature comes from. Our culture is small, our means of communication few, our power limited. We have no presence in the
world.
VALTI NOS:
And, too, our society is very different. Take the example of

Kazantzakis, the only Greek prose writer who has made a mark
abroad. His view of Greece, albeit utterly false, was accepted in
Europe and America. But I'm sure that Greece can produce writers
who will tell the truth about our country and tell it in the language of great art. And then there will be a place in world literature for Greece, just as there is now for France or Argentina or
Spain.
IOANNOU:
I think that what happens with Thanassis and myself is, as I've
said before, that the years of our growing up left such a mark on
us that we have to keep returning there. That's what perhaps give

the impression that we are parochial.
TSI RKAS:
I shall refute that argument. Didn't the Spaniards have to live
through terrible times? Didn't the French live through the tragedy
of the occupation? What is it that makes the works of foreign

writers rise to a universally recognizable level?
GERMANACOS:
The language?
TS IRK AS:
No. In all these countries the political problem was solved one
way or another. Either through defeat, as happened in Spain,

and it took writers twenty years to find themselves again, or in
the natural course of things, as happened in France. Even in Germany it was solved, for the German defeat forced German writers
to ask themselves why, to apportion blame and responsibility. In
Greece, the political, social and constitutional problems all remain
in a limbo because of foreign intervention. And we haven't got

over it yet, none of us. And so it's inevitable that our writers
should keep returning to the same questions: Who is the master?
The people? The palace? The army? Who? So the problem remains unsolved and our writers cannot free themselves to deal
with problems and issues that are perhaps more internationally

recognizable, if you like.
298
IOANNOU:
I don't think you are refuting me, Stratis, you're supplementin

what I said.
GERMANACOS:
It's like a historical trauma, then. Something that a Greek write
has to keep going back to--as we have in this conversation--in orde
to purge himself of it. First he has to find out what exactly ha

pened, live through it again, and then, perhaps, find release.
TS IRKAS:
Yes. If a foreign critic took Greek writing from 1940 to the present day, he would find that the common theme that runs through
it all is the living, blood-soaked issue of why the Greek

failed to achieve their expectations. And why the Greek
have not been able to stomach this yet. And because the
feels his function to be a social one, he cannot but reflect
people
people
writer
those
feelings of the people he is writing about and writing for. I think

that a foreign critic should be able to see the creditable reasons
for this pre-occupation of Greek writers--and judge accordingly:
that they feel themselves responsible for a problem that remains
unsolved, and in their writing try to explain why.
VALTINOS:
And it would be a mistake for a foreign reader to find Gree

ature exotic.
GERMANACOS:
A while ago the subject of literary form came up in connection

with the question of our recent history. Let me put the subjec
in a more critically oriented way: What is the relation between
form and content in your work? How do your formal pre-occu
pations reflect the way you look at the world?
IOANNOU:
I do not depend on my imagination to invent things. I recreate

and analyze reality exhaustively. As I've said before, I write in
the first person, and am fed up with telling people that I'm no
doing autobiography. What I want to do is give a truthful pictur
of the lives of the Greek people--peasants, workers, and the petit
bourgeoisie. I try to be as truthful as possible in these stories of
mine, which seem on the surface to be of inconsequential matters
GERMANACOS:
Why don't your stories have any plot?

IOANNOU:
I don't agree that they don't. Look, I find plot in depth, in my

analysis of the event, and the relationship between the event and
299
me. I always try to put my own personal position in each piece,

to make it appear as though I have lived through the event.
GERMANACOS:
I'd say that your prose-writings could be better described as r

material for a novel, both in form and content.
IOANNOU:
I hate dramatising things that can be said simply. Again, it's almost as if I refuse to set up the stage to say things I can say more
simply and more directly. If I do decide to write something bigger

it will be because a need has arisen from the things I want to say
not because of the feeling that writing a novel is the thing to do

And if I ever write a novel I think it will again give the impression
of being something that can be broken up into smaller pieces. But

since I can say what I have to say in small, tight pieces, why should
I try another form? Just to make literature?
GERMANACOS:
What's the difference between what you write, then, and a soc
ological essay?
IOANNOU:
I think a prose piece has to have many levels, and if it's about
events in history that a writer has lived through, it must also be
history, because I believe that over and beyond the aesthetic de

light he conveys and the ideas he presents, a writer must preserv
history in a way that academic historians do not. Here in Greece,
I and many other writers, have taken to making social observation
and analyses because, apart from all the other reasons, we simply
have no social sciences here, no sociology, no historians of socia
life and manners. So we have to look at all these bits of observa-
tion and find patterns in them and make them into art at the sam
time. My prose piece is not a very flexible form, you know. I
cannot invent things; I can't have my characters talking about
anything that is not real; but the absence of plot, as you call it
and the absence of dialogue allow me to juxtapose and compare
many things which in any other form would have been judged
irrelevant or damaging to the story.
TSI RKAS:
As I too have said before, the two great experiences of my life

that stamped me and therefore determined the course I was to
take as a writer were, first of all, the fate of the Egyptian people,
which I tried to present in my early short stories and poetry, and
the second world war, which I saw coming.
300
GERMANACOS:
You mean you knew it was going to happen?

TSIRKAS:
Yes. And I joined in the efforts of all thinking men to try an

stop fascism. When war came I gave all I could in the intellectu
field to defeat the evil. My great hope was in the resistance o
the Greek people, and I prayed that one day their efforts wo
bring success. When Churchill intervened in 1944 and turned t
clock of Greek history back a hundred years, I suffered the gre
est disappointment of my life.19 It was the greatest experience
my life, and it became the center of my creative effort. I want
to describe those events in my trilogy and find the reasons
things had turned out as they had. I couldn't have achieved m

purpose with simple narrative or in short stories. So for year
studied the technique of the novel--I read all the great master
especially their correspondence and diaries. I realised that the
drama of Greece could not be conveyed from one point of view
alone. I mean that all the contributory factors in Greece's defeat
had to be included: British imperialism, fascism, both Italian and
German. Then there was the landscape--the entire Middle East
arena, all those voices. These things forced me into painting a
mural, a many-faceted picture. There was no other way: I had to
attempt a novel with many voices, with many points of view. It's
Henry James' point of view, which Durrell later adopted. Yes,
many points of view criss-crossing, so that they give you characters and events in a kind of relief.
GERMANACOS:
And the style?

TS IRKAS:
And in style, too, I never hesitated to use examples from recent

American and French fiction, because I believed that these would
help me give a more polyphonic effect, a more complex, manysided picture. So, form and content are inseparable in my work,
the one determines the other.
VALTINOS:
I think that nowadays there's a great deal of anguish about f

especially in poetry and the arts. Every year we have a new s
it seems. It's a bit like the length of women's skirts. I think
is a symptom of satiation and an expression of sheer egoism.

GERMANACOS:
On the artist's part?

301
VALTINOS:
Yes.
GERMANACOS:
But in this constant search there have been significant contrib

tions made to our sensibility and our knowledge of the world
Revolutions in human thought.
VALTINOS:
I don't deny that. Of course there are artists who have not a
out of boredom or satiation, but who confronted the proble
of their place and time--problems which may be different f
those facing us--and who've experimented in form, not in or
make a big bang or to create a fashion, but because they fel
could better express the problems of their times with thei
form. But these revolutions you talk about happen over far l
periods of time than they appear to nowadays. There is an o
relation between the major issues of one's age and country
the form he is going to use to express them. And in the fi
analysis the only thing that counts is the result. So how m
such revolutions can you count in the last hundred years, s
GERMANACOS:
I agree. Why have you chosen the form of the very short nov
Thanassis, something that isn't a novel nor is it a short story
ther?
VALTINOS:
I don't believe long novels can be written today. Our m
habits have changed too much. Cinema, for one, has influe
us enormously.
GERMANACOS:
Do you mean that you consciously chose to write short novel

for these reasons?
VALTINOS:
I have asked myself that. I don't think it was conscious. I t

I was forced to write in a short form; I didn't make the ch
consciously.
GERMANACOS:
Couldn't the subject you were dealing with have been extended
VALTINOS:
I don't know. I don't think so. So many events have been p
into the last twenty years. The events themselves speak to u

brevity.
GERMANACOS:
In your first published novel (1972), how many years do

302
cover of your hero's life?

VALTI NOS:
About ten.
GERMANACOS:
Ten years in the space of not much more than a long story.
VALTI NOS:
I could have made it 400 pages. But who would have read it
GERMANACOS:
I don't think that's an argument.

VALTINOS:
Perhaps you're right. But the same things were said in 14

pages.
TSIRKAS:
I think it's just the way he works. That's how he sees thing
his work is short, spare, and tight. A short story, after all, c
a masterpiece.
GERMANACOS:
I agree. All I want to establish is that he did not write these th

as he did because people prefer to watch TV today rather th
read novels. But here's another argument, Thanassis: don't y
think you've been greatly influenced by the cinema?
VALTI NOS:
Perhaps.
GERMANACOS:
One sees clearly that your works are cinematographic in appro

and structure.
VALTINOS:
You are right.

GERMANACOS:
I can't imagine you, for instance, using interior monologue.

VALTINOS:
I may. I can't say now.

TS IR KAS:
If tomorrow he writes a book where he'll need interior monologue, where it won't be a foreign body in the book ...
GERMANACOS:
But that's precisely the point. I don't think he will write a b

or story where he'll need it. He'll instinctively turn what yo
might say in an interior monologue into action. Thanassis wi
always turn thoughts, that is, psychological, subjective states
action, and allow action to express what is going on inside the
character. Allow the inner world to be inferred.
303
TSIRK AS:
That's cinema, you see. Pictures ... Can we argue, then, that
the interior monologue was a technique that characterized our
culture and that it's doomed? That we shall pass on to a literature
of action and pictures?
VALTINOS:
I think that's where we're heading.

IOANNOU:
And I.
GE RMANACOS:
But look at what is happening in America, for example. Parallel

to the gigantic influence of visual forms, of pictures in one medium or another, you have just as intense an exploration inwards,
a subjectivism that almost amounts to esotericism or solipsism at
times: the whole syndrome of the drug culture, the flower children, and, before them, the Beats. And in the best American novels,
there is an intense turning inward.
VALTINOS:
Perhaps we can say that we have not yet reached the crest o
wave. We are still rising, but it will turn.
TSI RKAS:
Will it be a gain or a loss, do you think?

GERMANACOS:
This is all guess-work, but I'd venture to say that it will not end
It will simply carry on parallel to the art of action, or whatever
you wish to call it.
TS IRKAS:
Yes, the exploration of the soul, all the things the human mind
can reach, which cannot be expressed in terms of pictures.
VALTINOS:
I don't think this exploration inwards will ever end, but it w

conducted differently. In fact, right now it is being done d
ently.
TSI RKAS:
How?
VALTINOS:
Look, I don't believe there is such a thing as a monologue,

sense that a writer talks with himself--encounters and associates
and compares thoughts, ideas, or dreams. The exploration inwards

will be done indirectly, by encounter with the elements of the
outside world.
304
TSI RKAS:
But in interior monologue, too, you have the outside world evoked
by association.
VALTINOS:
Yes, but the emphasis of the thing is on abstraction. No,

logue will become a dialogue between the self and the oute
based on action.
IOANNOU:
A literature of pictures, you mean, which will stimulate projec

tions internally.
GERMANACOS:
George, you are in your middle forties, yet you've written v

little. Thanassis too. Many writers of your generation have p
duced little more than you have. Why do you think this is s
IOANNOU:
That's an observation that startles us too. Whatever else it may

be due to, I can assure you it's not due to any kind of laziness.
We work quite hard at our writing, but in the end we publish ver
little. We are, as a generation, strongly anti-rhetorical. We hat
the empty gushing of our predecessors. We want to say what we
have to say in as few words as possible, and we want those word
to enjoy the full weight they are capable of carrying. And there
another thing, too: we're thirsty for life. We had no youth, ou
growing up was bad. I don't even want to remember what I was
and what I missed when I was twenty. Even today I am still tryin
to compensate myself for my lost youth.
VALTINOS:
I don't know. There are so many problems. What is a w
Is he a silkworm chewing mulberry leaves and spinning its c

Perhaps it's not such a difficult thing to bring out a coupl
books every so often. And what then?
GERMANACOS:
What is it, then, for you? A social or a psychological problem?

VALTINOS:
Both.
GERMANACOS:
I think writing is an inner need.

VALTINOS:
Precisely. And where does this need lead you? You end up tr
to climb the literary ladder, getting your picture in the p
getting interviewed. Things have got a bit mixed up, you k
In order for us to speak about "need," about a man's inner
305
compelling him to speak out, we have to have the kind of conditions that prevailed many years ago. Look at our own demotic
songs:
/ have no more grief for you; / have no more sorrow;

how will you suffer that first night in the ground?
You'll find those embracing snakes; those adders all entangled.

And one snake, a black snake, a snake with two black heads,
went and made its nest inside your darkened brows.
They're all anonymous. The man or men or women that made

them were driven by a need, a passion, a sob, wild joy. Byzantine
icons were done by nameless men too. Perhaps we write so little
because we so seldom feel such a need. And perhaps we may
return to such an anonymity, and it might be a good thing.
GERMANACOS:
My final question to you is this: What has been happening
Greek writing in the last few years, and how do you see the pr
pects for the future?
IOANNOU:
I think there has been a definite standstill in the last five years
It's true that after the lifting of pre-emptive censorship, there ha
been a boom in publishing, but this has been chiefly in theoretic

books and in translations. We're talking about creative writing
and for the moment nothing much is happening. I don't see an

significant new writers appearing. The older ones are often eith
treading water or simply repeating themselves. I don't kno
where we're going. I had never imagined that the political clima
could influence every aspect of life, right down to the most in
significant details. I'm overwhelmed with despair.
GERMANACOS:
You talked earlier about the new generation as one of the fi

that has ever been.
VALTI NOS:
The new generation hasn't given us its work yet. It will do so

ten or fifteen years time. But for the immediate future the pr
pects look grim. The climate we live in is stifling. Everything y
see around you is offensive.
TS IRKAS:
Let me be specific. Before 1967 we had a significant number

of first class prose writers. It was a flowering of our prose, really,
and there were wonderful hopes for the future. In 1967 we spon-
taneously decided not to publish as a protest against what was

happening in Greece and against pre-emptive censorship. We
306
kept this up for three years, until we saw it was time to speak
up again. Now we are beginning to publish once more.21 But

much damage seems to have been done during those years of
silence. Still I am not so pessimistic. I think we're in a transitional period. The older writers will find their old rhythm again,
although this may well depend on some light appearing on the
political horizon, and on whether they believe their books will be
published and read. And I hope the young will experiment and
try new things and one day tell us about their times. I can't imagine a country remaining without fiction for very long, even if the
climate is unpropitious.
GERMANACOS:
One of the strange things one observes in Greece, Stratis, is t

almost nobody under thirty or thirty-five is writing prose.
England and America we have countless examples of novelists p
lishing their first novels in their early twenties. Here, everyb
wants to write poetry, damn it, and it's nearly always shockin
bad poetry. I hardly know of anybody under thirty who says
wants to be a prose writer.
TSIR KAS:
Right. It's basically a practical and economic problem. A young

man is not going to sit down and write 300 pages, if he knows
it's going to stay in his drawer.
VALTINOS:
And there's very little hope, once you are published, of ever
read abroad. There's been no hope at all, in fact, until very
ently. Look, going back to a previous question. I insist again
the reason why so much good Greek writing may appear pro
cial is the problem of language, of translation. Take the ex
of Tsirkas. His trilogy takes place in Alexandria, like Durre
Alexandria Quartet, yet it took fifteen years before it was t

lated into French or English. Durrell's book, on the other h
has been selling well ever since it came out in the late fifties.
TSIRKAS:
I must defend Durrell against an implication. It's true that th

Alexandria he describes is nowhere near the true Alexandria. H
created a myth, just as Dante's Florence is a myth, but he man

ages to recreate that extraordinary atmosphere of sexual tens
that prevailed at the time. There's much poetry in his boo

though little reality.
GERMANACOS:
Let's get back to the present situation of Greek writing, shall we?
307
VALTINOS:
All right. I'II be a bit more optimistic. I don't know when

period will end, but I think it'll ultimately prove extreme
tile. Not just for writers active today but for ones that h
yet appeared. They'll have all the material they want. Tim
day are difficult, and the climate is unbearable, but we'll

IOANNOU:
Isn't there a danger, though, that if things continue as they are,

whole generation might disappear?
TSI R KAS:
I think that the damage has been done already.

IOANNOU:
In fact, the next generation too might disappear. The young o

twenty to twenty-five today, who may be experiencing contem
porary events more acutely than us, may not be in time to wri
these things down.
VALTINOS:
Yes, you're right, if things continue like this for another ten
or so.
IOANNOU:
And God knows what will happen in those ten years that may
push our own days into the background. It's a general problem
of freedom. Things aren't going well when writers do not fee
free to create.
GERMANACOS:
A pertinent question, then, would be: What are writers doin

enlarge the area of freedom?
VALTINOS:
There's the sad point. The writer is, by the nature of his j
to a desk with a pen and a sheet of paper. What can he d
had the balls he'd ...
IOANNOU:
Are we talking as writers now?

VALTINOS:
Well, anyway, he'll do anything but write in times like the

GERMANACOS:
I don't agree with you. I believe that by telling the truth, tel
things as they are, he gains some ground, wins a small victo
VALTI NOS:
And who'll know about it? Answer me!

GERMANACOS:
Not many people, perhaps, given the way things are in Gree
308
IOANNOU:
But that's something. Something must be kept alive, especially

among the young. Today every bit of quality in life and creativ
work is an act of affirmation and integrity.
VALTINOS:
Fine, and how far can this good quality go?

IOANNOU:
It can't go very far, perhaps, because, as we said before, there

is ...
VALTINOS:
How many chances do you have of saying what you really

to say and getting it published?
IOANNOU:
Not many, I must admit.

VALTINOS:
So what are the prospects then?

IOANNOU:
But / can't remain silent.

VALTINOS:
Oh, no! You won't stay silent. You'll conduct a dialogue

your drawer. And then?
TSIRKAS:
Look, it's a problem of political prospects, basically. I belie

that spring is not far behind.
IOANNOU:
I base my opinion on what I see around me and the effect on the
future that conditions today will have. I think we might lose a

generation.
TS IRKAS:
My optimism is not based on any facts. I can't give you any examples, I can't point to X or Y, young writers publishing in such
and such a magazine and say, "Nowv there's a promising talent."
Maybe I haven't read enough, but someone else would have and
they would have told me. But we have, as I said before, a marvellous group of prose writers in their forties. They're still around,
don't forget. They may not be publishing at this moment, they
may not even be writing, but all is not lost yet. And, anyway, ask
yourselves, does Greek society, the way it's developing, need the
novel? Why don't you put it that way? Personally, I hold that
even if the younger generation does die, the one after it will be
hungry for fiction telling about the events of our own days. They'll
want to unearth those books lying in drawers to find out how the
309
novelist saw and experienced these times. Or maybe you, your

generation, the ones in your forties, will sit down, when you re
sixty or seventy and write about these things. It's been done before, you know, in our literature and others. And they've written
great things.
IOANNOU:
But we aren't to know how much damage will have been don
by then.
TSI R KAS:
George, I said it in a public debate not long ago, and I say it now:
Censorship and intimidation create blockages in a writer's creative
urge, and many things are lost that can never be said again. The
damage has been done and is being done, we know it. But that is
no reason for us to lose heart.
IOANNOU:
I'II not take back what I said.

TS IR KAS:
Everyone to his own opinion. That's what democracy's all about.
310
NOTES
Since modern Greece is a culturally--and politically--remote nation to

most Americans, including critics, scholars, and writers, the editors of
boundary 2 have thought it useful to append the following notes to th
interview.
1. A Greek translation of the Old Testament.
2. The "language problem" to which loannou is referring can be c
ified by the hypothetical example of the establishment of, sa

Chaucer's time insisting that learning and writing be carried on
Old English.
3. Born in Venetian Crete and educated in Italy, Cyril Loukaris became patriarch of Constantinople in 1620. He was executed by
the Turks for subversive activity in 1638.
4. Adamantios Korais was born in 1748 in Smyrna and educated in
France, where he came under the strong influence of French neoclassicism and began editing the ancient Greek authors in his Hellenic Library. This, in part, explains his conservatism, his emphasis on ancient Greek in his linguistic program for the emergent
modern Greek nation. The word katharevousa literally means
"pure language"; demotiki, on the other hand, means "the language of the people."
5. The Memoirs of General Makriyannis (1797-1864) covers the

period between the Greek War of Independence and the deposition of King Othon in 1862. An illiterate throughout most of
his life, this charismatic hero of the revolution learned to write
in order to recount the early history of the modern Greek nation.
The memoirs remained unpublished until the great scholar Yannis
Vlahoyannis edited them in 1907. But it was not until the period
between 1925 and 1935 that they began to make an impact on
modern Greek literature. See The Memoirs of General Makriyannis, ed. and tr. by H.A. Lidderdale (London: Oxford University
Press, 1966).
6. Greece achieved its independence from Turkey in 1830. After
the assassination of President Capodistrias (elected in March 1827),
the great powers, England, France, and Russia, created the Kingdom of Greece and chose Prince Othon of Bavaria as the first
king. He assumed the throne on his arrival at Nauplion in 1833

7. Theodore Kolokotronis (1770-1843), a Klepht Kapetan and one
of the great heroes of the Greek Revolution, became supreme
commander of the armies after his celebrated defeat of Dramalis
311
Pasha at the Battle of Dervenaki in the passes between Corinth and
Argos. His memoirs, The Narrative of the History of the Greek

Race, dictated to the poet George Tertseti, have been published
in both Greek and English.
8. See George Seferis, On the Greek Style: Selected Essays in Poetry

and Hellenism, tr. by Rex Warner and Th. Frangopoulos (Boston:
Little, Brown, 1966). This significant essay was first presented as
a lecture in Alexandria, Egypt, on May 16, 1943, when Seferis
was with the Greek government in exile.
9. The important distinction to which Tsirkas refers here and elsewhere in the interview is between the Classical and the Hellenistic
periods of Greek history. The Hellenistic period, which Cavafy

evokes in his poetry, begins with Alexander the Great at the end
of the fourth century B.C. and extends into the third and fourth
centuries A.D. During this period the cultural focus shifts from
mainland Greece to Asia Minor and Egypt, especially Alexandria.
10. Beginning in 1453 with the Fall of Constantinople, Turkey occupied mainland Greece without a break until the Greek Revolution
in 1821. The occupation is called the Turkokratia.
11. Ungoverned Cities (1961-65). See the introduction.

12. Following a coup d'6tat in August, 1936, General John Metaxas
established an extremely repressive dictatorship that lasted until
his death in 1939.
13. ELAS (Greek Peoples' Army of Liberation) was the guerilla army
of the Resistance during the German occupation. EAM (National
Liberation Front) was its political arm. Both ELAS and EAM
were largely controlled by the left.
14. See pp. 507-513 of this issue.
15. The reference is to the popular coffee house board game, backgammon.
16. Tsirkas is alluding to "The Great Idea" (Megali Idhea), the Greek
dream of recovering the geographic space of the Byzantine Empire, which came to a definitive end in 1922 with the utter defeat
of the Greek army by the Turks in Asia Minor.
17. Fotos Politis (1890-1934) wrote most of his criticism for the daily
press, but it is characterized by an austere commitment to value

and is always dedicated to the elevation of the intellectual life of
modern Greece.
18. George Seferis (1900-1971), who won the Nobel Prize for Poetry
in 1963, was influenced by T.S. Eliot. His Greek translations of
The Waste Land and other poems were published with his commentary in Athens in 1936.
312
19. At the end of the German occupation, virtually all of Greece was
in the hands of EAM, ELAS. To guarantee British domination
there in the post-war period, Winston Churchill sent British troops
to Athens to support "The Royal Hellenic Government" at the

end of 1944. By December a full-scale war between the British
troops and ELAS had broken out. Churchill's instructions to the
British military commander in Athens were not to "hesitate to
act as if [he] were in a conquered city where a local rebellion is
in progress." See Winston Churchill, Triumph and Tragedy

(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1953), p. 289. After a month of
street fighting the 60,000 British troops finally crushed the E LASEAM forces to set the stage for the emergence of a repressive right
wing government--and the Greek Civil War.
20. This demotic song, I pr6ti nfhta meis stf gih, is a Moirologhi, a
dirge, sung to lament the dead. A. Passow, Traghoudhia romeika,
No. 353. The translation is by W.V. Spanos.
21. This phase began with the publication of Dekaochto Keimena
(Eighteen Texts) published in Athens by Kedros in 1970. See

Peter Bien, "Arrogance and Intoxication: A Review of Eighteen
Texts: Writings by Contemporary Greek Authors," in this issue
of boundary 2.
313
I (
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Germanakos - An Internview With Three Greek Prose Writers

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An Interview with Three Contemporary Greek Writers: Stratis Tsirkas, Thanassis

Valtinos, George Ioannou

THREE CONTEMPORARY GREEK WRITERS:

STRATIS TSI RKAS, THANASSIS VALTINOS,

The following interview was taped by N.C. Germanacos in May

translations (Erasmus, Stendhal, Saint-Exup6ry, Malcolm Lowry, Cesare

Collectively entitled-Ungoverned Cities (and including The Club, 1961;

of collections of folk literature with commentaries (Demotic Songs of

Though he has written two volumes of poetry (Heliotropes, 1954 and

The interview was taped in two sessions covering a seven hour

talking, of the lack of "sophistication." Most Greek

serve this--and observe that contemporary Greek writers

and again to, LIFE, HISTORY, NOW, HERE. As Tsirkas

accountant of souls." That's how they see their role.

They ask why did it happen as it did, why is it happening

now. At least their generation. And it's to their credit.

As for that repetition you refer to in the latter part of

assis' village that after a certain point we were talking

Is there no reading public, Stratis?

We can't say that, no. There is a reading public today, but it

Let's be concrete. How many copies can a good novel, by a reco

Once it was regarded as a best seller if it sold three thousand copies.

leaves a pittance to the publisher and author. Of course, things

Unfortunately the inter-war or post-war flowering of the magazine

There is no such thing as "editorial policy" in our publishing

There are no professional writers in Greece. Writing in G

lines on paper. There's another solution too, of course--yo

Yes, that's what I call "paraliterature." I know some people

In the West, too, you have a large measure of freedom to write

Remember, we write in a language that may have a long history

Yes, it's more than just an economic problem. It's a problem

of social acceptance. From the moment you tell people yo

I don't think people regard you as disreputable. I think they se

you more as a dangerous person, since if you're a writer it's almo

The opposite holds true in England and America. There they

But in Greece the atrocious quality of the new paperbacks has

pushed the good paperback out of the market. As on radio and

to turn the public into morons. It's possible, of course, that

Don't expect big things, Stratis. Take the cinema as an exam

What's the extent of censorship in Greece?

From 1967 to 1970 we had stringent pre-emptive censors

Let's move on, shall we? . . It will come as a surprise to

American reader to learn that we have a serious "language p

we have many different forms of it. In ancient times--when writer

wrote in the language of the people--the spoken form of the lan

tongue, common to a multitude of conquered people, came into

Thucydides or Zenophon.2 There was a reaction during the Otto

by the people. It keeps the structure of the ancient tongue--though

Fully. As I was saying, much good prose was written in demotic

then, best of all the Memoirs of General Makriyannis.5 How

from previous forms of our language--language, remember, is not

It seems to me that the imposition of katharevousa has had chie

So language has been used as a means of propaganda and obfu

Of course, of course. According to George Steiner, the Germ

George Orwell had it all there in 1984, Stratis....

Let me say that from my professional experience the State is

evousa. Children have to learn to use it in order to get into school

I'm afraid that we do have a language problem, and I think

writers have won their victory, but I think they're fooling t

It's a matter of language. Language is not a form, it's not a sh

Homer's Odyssey into demotic.

This enrichment that George spoke about before is done in the

Makriyannis and Kolokotronis in their memoirs. Look at

Precisely what I was saying before. It is not only a cultural prob