Reillumination III: Kostas Ouranis
by Steven Fowler
[ poetry - october 10 ]
"I shall die one day on a mournful autumn twilight"
The modern history of Greece is one of upheaval, of occupation and of exile. Kostas Ouranis, living through the early 20th century - a time of war and exclusion - like Cavafy, is a poet of flight and of escape. His mode is one of submission to despair, an injunction against the progressiveness of poetry; poetry is the act of describing one's death, not the salvation from it. He is a poet of his age, a languid, mannered romantic in nature, a sorrowful, regretful, alienated presence on the page.
The tumult of the closing of the 19th century, the philosophical death of God, the rise of fascism in Europe, the vehemence of modernism and the avant gardes has a Janus face. It is the man left behind, of noble blood, well educated, passive and defeated by the noise of war and aggression. For every D'Annunzio, Mallarmé or Dario, there is the romantic figure of the poet seeing his time die away, feeling himself a remnant, a trace of something forgotten. Cavafy labelled Ouranis, together with the other 'Athenian poets' (Lapathiotis, Karyotakis, Agras) a hopeless romantic. This a pronouncement of horror coming from Cavafy's strict and measured poetic tone. Though he, too, has come to represent in some manner the growing pains of the new age of modernism, his accusation is only partially right. A poet is defined not just by their tonality and manner, but the context in which they write and are read. Ouranis is a neo-romantic, a mellow, morbid poet, ever aware of his own displacement. His poetry suggests he is born of the wrong time, and that the age of romanticism is done and this is inherent in his position. Not a romantic of indulgence, of glib phraseology and emotional flight, his poetry, by its very nature, is the embodiment of a death knell. Ouranis states romanticism is dying as he writes romantically. Without the flourishes that characterise European romantic poets, especially the British romantics, Ouranis is lyrical but macabre, playful but resigned.
The Greek poetry of the neo-symbolists, of Seferis, Elytis, and the poetry written in the demotic tongue of immediate expressiveness, of Ritsos, Kazantzakis lies directly opposed to the work of Ouranis. Alongside the short and curt phrasings, the restrained emotion that still maintains today in Greek poetry, Ouranis appeared indulgent and listless. Even from his peers he was exiled. But he was a poet of the city, a cosmopolitan soul and in the environment of Istanbul, where he grew up, Athens, Paris (where he studied), Geneva (where he recovered from tuberculosis) and Lisbon (where he was appointed Greek consular general), he saw the decline of the individual soul amidst the rise of technology and urbanisation. He felt this alienation could not produce a poetry of rejection, of overturning - a modernism, a dadaism. He was true to the feeling of failure, and looked to the past to write the poetry of closure, of mourning.
A poet of defeatism is perhaps appropriate for his age, and his poetry is filled with vain fantasy, an oil-black humour that verges on self-dislike and self-parody. It leaves a bittersweet feeling of loss, a frustration at the passage of time contradicted by an utter acceptance of death. His poetry is filled with quiet, private suffering and in its delicacy, its electicism is utterly unlike the civil war and Second World War poetry Greece produced, as intense and dramatic as anything in the European tradition.
Ouranis appears to me as the poet closest to what I imagine Nietzsche would have sounded like had he become old. He is confessional, regretful, reflexive, agonisingly self revealing. Ouranis is a vital link to an assumed convention, that poetry does not require objectivity. This is a bigger and more necessary overturning that the dispensation of verse and form, and a revolution in poetry which is discussed far less often. Ouranis is a Greek Baudelaire, without the energy for the bile. He has too much breeding, too much cosmopolitanism. But he is imploring, the city around him ever present, forcing out the declarations of a misplaced and vanishing man.
It is imperative to recognise the demand for truth at the centre of Ouranis's work. He was one of the first poets to turn away from the idea of the 'Greek nation', the shining, mawkish historicity of nationalism, to look at society for its ills, though never suggesting a solution. The key to this intervention was that he was highly active in the relatively peaceful interwar period and had no battle, no urgent cause to arm his poetry against. There was only the mass death before him, and soon to be after him, both of which would lead into defeat and offer only a legacy of despair. He was a prisoner of the social decay of his age, a neo-romantic captive of a hiatus period between great destruction. Internalised and paralysed, some 'Athenian' poets took their lives - Kariotakis, Lapathiotis. Instead, Ouranis fled.
Ouranis is always calling back to those he has left behind. Those who might as well be dead. The dead then are not spirits or friends to be summoned, they are with Ouranis only as a memory, and this is the very purpose of their invocation in poetry. It is a given, a necessity in fact, that the dead are dead when they are reawakened. Ouranis gives posthumous life to those who no longer have it only to solidify the limits of those who are not yet dead. Death is a physical presence, not a metaphysical consideration or juncture, it is a walling in of thought and only poetry can feel around in the dark for the wall. But in so doing it is realised that nothing can scale it, and here Ouranis invokes the mythology of Greece - Charon; death is able to touch one's shoulder, it is our own body and when it becomes, it will find nothing to take but itself.
The legacy of Ouranis may not be direct in the incantation of his name, but his poetry is one of intermediary despair, of an age confused. No time since the interwar period has been more aimably astray than our own. Greece, like most of the Western world, can be said to be in an age of half measures and indirect oppression. It is no surprise then that much of the poetry of contemporary Greece, while never as melodramatic as Ouranis, seems whisper in his tones, bitter and irresolute.
