Childhood lost in Greek sauce

Memory is Marcel Proust’s madeleine, Nobody’s field by Daniel Picouly and the sea that «swelled darkly like a sigh, like a beating of the heart» by Kosmàs Politis. The Greek writer (Athens 1888-1974) dives into his memory when in 1938 he wrote his third volume, Heroictranslated by Crocetti, with the usual, unmatched sensitivity for Hellenic literature.

«The idea of Heroic – Politis said in an interview in 1947 – it was born in me from a flower thrown to me for fun by a girl in Patras». And in these pages of her there are boys and girls, an uncontaminated and powerful nature, outlined with a Homeric passage, the dream, the first loves, and death.

It is not a Bildungsroman, but rather a novel about lost childhood, about the last glimmers of innocence: «In those years for us only the present existed which built our History – hour by hour we launched ourselves into the sea of ​​life full of enthusiasm. We were only looking straight ahead.” For these heartbeats, Heroictranslated in 1960 into the film Our last springwas the favorite novel of the generation that grew up after 1940, with a view on the Second World War, the civil war and the struggles that led to the Colonels’ Dictatorship in 1967.

Loìzos, Monica, Alekos have traits of Homeric heroes, but above all of boys who, carefree and cradled by their dreams, will be overwhelmed by tragedies. It is the period between Carnival and Lent and Politis imagines a group of teenagers, Greek and Italian, in golden helmets and with a fire hose, having fun in a nameless country, in a garden that seems like Eden, where the wind makes the doors slam and «from the stars hung trembling rays of light that every now and then slipped like drops, spreading in the immensity.” Loìzos is Achilles, Monica Elena, Andreas is Patroclus and they dance in the naivety of their first happy age, also thanks to a profound musicality that Politis manages to shape between the lines: «we desired beauty not as a foundation for happiness, but rather to achieve a most absolute fullness, up to the blue and milky immensity in which the stars are suspended.”

Between poetry and irony

The translator Gilda Tentorio, in the afterword, underlines how «the narrative line, which seems chronological, is based on a psychological time, filled with reveries, dreams, desires, memories, with anticipations, ellipses, sudden gaps». Like death that arrives and breaks the dreamlike magic of adolescence: «a dark cloud slowly passed over our childhood years – perhaps this marked the end». But, once again, what seems clear is less so than it seems and the translator always explains that this is «an important novel for its lyrical inspiration and innovative narrative techniques, in which the surface dialogues with the depth, the symbol with irony, and the antithesis becomes the measure of the world.” Also of today’s world: «A world too busy with futile things mixes ideas and principles with false values, eliminating somatic or other defects. He resembles a hairy, bubonic, sickly cactus, towering like a hearth god rooted on his pedestal. Passionate bodies tense, indolently reducing a kingdom of silence and insensibility.” This time of ours is not a sickly cactus either…