Kostas Karyotakis

The majority of Karyotakis' contemporaries viewed him in a dim light throughout his lifetime without a pragmatic accountability for their contemptuous views; for after his suicide, the majority began to revert to the view that he was indeed a great poet. He had a significant, almost disproportionately progressive influence on later Greek poets.

Karyotakis gave existential depth as well as a tragic dimension to the emotional nuances and melancholic tones of the neo-Symbolist and neo-Romantic poetry of the time. He captures and conveys with poetic daring the climate of dissolution and the impasses of his generation, as well as the traumas of his own inner spiritual world.

• Illustration — The poet's birthplace in Tripoli Karyotakis was born in Tripoli, Greece, his father's occupation as a county engineer resulted in his early childhood and teenage years being spent in various places, following his family's successive moves around the Greek cities, including Argostoli, Lefkada, Larisa, Kalamata, Athens and Chania. He started publishing poetry in various magazines for children in 1912. It is solely rife speculation that he had felt deeply betrayed that a girl he had cared for in Hania in 1913 had married and sent him into melancholy. After receiving his degree from the Athens School of Law and Political Sciences, in 1917, he did not pursue a career as a lawyer. Karyotakis became a clerk in the Prefecture of Thessaloniki. However, he greatly disliked his work and could not tolerate the bureaucracy of the state, which he wrote about often in his poems. His prose piece Catharsis ('purification') is characteristic of this. For this reason, he would often be removed from his posts and transferred to other locations in Greece. During these removals, he became familiar with the boredom and misery of the country during World War I. • Illustration — Kostas Karyotakis in Sykia village of Corinth, with his sister, nephew, and his brother's sister-in-law, year 1927

In February 1919, he published his first collection of poetry: The Pain of People and of Things, which was largely ignored or badly reviewed by the critics. In the same year, he published, with his friend Agis Levendis, a satirical review, called The Leg, which, despite its success, was banned by the police after the sixth issue. In 1921 he published his second collection called Nepenthe and also wrote a musical revue, Pell-Mell. In 1922, he began having an affair with the poet Maria Polydouri who was a colleague of his at the Prefecture of Attica. In 1923 he wrote a poem called "Treponema pallidum", which was published under the title "Song of Madness" and gave rise to speculation that he may have been suffering from syphilis, which before 1945 was considered a chronic illness with no proven cure for it. George Skouras, a physician of the poet, wrote: "He was sick, he was syphilitic" and George Savidis (1929–1999), professor of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, who possessed the largest archive about Greek poets, revealed that Karyotakis was syphilitic, and that his brother, Thanasis Karyotakis, thought the disease to be a disgrace to the family. In 1924 he traveled abroad, visiting Italy and Germany. In December 1927, he published his last collection of poetry: Elegy and Satires. In February 1928, Karyotakis was transferred to Patras, although soon afterwards he spent a month on leave in Paris and, in June 1928, he was sent yet again to Preveza by ship. • Illustration — Optimism, hand written manuscript by Kostas Karyotakis

Karyotakis lived in Preveza only for 33 days, until his suicide there on 21 July 1928 at age 31. His work was in the Prefecture of Preveza, in the Palios mansion, 10 Speliadou Street, as a lawyer for control of land donations from the State to refugees from the Asia Minor War of 1922. From Preveza, he sent desperate letters to friends and relatives describing the misery he felt in the town. His family offered to support him for an indefinite stay in Paris, but he refused, knowing what a monetary sacrifice like this would entail for them. His angst is felt in the poem "Preveza", which he wrote shortly before his suicide. The poem displays an insistent, lilting anaphora on the word Death, which stands at the beginning of several lines and sentences. An intense preoccupation with mortality permeates the poem. Against the backdrop of the stifling mediocrity Karyotakis perceived, death is measured through trivial details, such as black pecking birds or a town policeman inspecting a disputed weight, futile street names commemorating past battles, a Sunday brass band, a modest bank balance, balcony flowers, a newspaper-reading teacher, or a perfect arriving by ferry. As the final of the six symmetrical quatrains laments: 'If only one of those men would fall dead out of disgust.' On 19 July 1928, Karyotakis went to Monolithi beach and kept trying to drown in the sea for ten hours, but failed in his attempt, because he was an avid swimmer, as he himself wrote in his suicide note. In the subsequent morning, he returned home and left again to purchase a revolver and went to a little café in the place Vryssoula (near today's Hotel Zikas). After smoking for a few hours, and drinking cherry juice, he left 75 drachmas as a gratuity, while the cost of the drink was 5 drachmas, he went to Agios Spyridon, where, under a eucalyptus tree, he shot himself through the heart. His suicide letter was found in his pocket: One of his most famous poems is "Preveza", about the place where he committed suicide. • Death is the bullies bashing • against the black walls and roof tiling, • death is the women being loved • as if onion peeling. • Death the squalid, unimportant streets • with their glamorous and pompous names, • the olive-grove, the surrounding sea, and even • the sun, death among all other deaths.... • If at least, among these people, • one would die of sheer disgust • silent, bereaved, with humble manners, • at the funeral we'd all have fun.

• Elegias e Sátiras/Ελεγεία και Σάτιρες, Théo de Borba Mossburger (Trans.), (n.t.) Revista Literária em Tradução, nº 1 (set/2010), Fpolis/Brasil, ISSN 2177-5141

Kostas Karyotakis is recorded as translator, writer, civil servant and poet.