Via: uk.ac.imperial.doc; Mon, 16 Nov 1992 20:10:58 +0000
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Date:         Mon, 16 Nov 1992 18:32:07 +0000
Reply-To:     Theoharis Mihailidis <tm@DOC.IMPERIAL.AC.UK>
From:         Theoharis Mihailidis <tm@DOC.IMPERIAL.AC.UK>
Subject:      Henry Miller- deutero apospasma
Comments: To: hellas@brownvm.brown.edu

Geia kai Xapa paidia,
namai pali me allo ena apospasma apo to yperoxo biblio tou Henry Miller
To sygekrimeno apospasma einai apo mia syzitisi tou Henry Miller me ton
Ellina oikodespoti tou (ton Katsimbali).

  "To tell a good story," he said, "you have to have a good  listener.
I can't tell a story to an automaton who writes shorthand. Besides the
best stories are those which you don't want to preserve. If you had any
arriere-pensee the story is ruined. It must be a sheer gift...you must
throw it to the dogs...I'm not a writer," he added, " I'm an extempraneous
fellow. I like to hear myself talk. I talk too much - it's a vice." And then
he added reflectively: " What would it do to be a writer, a Greek writer?
Nobody reads Greek. If a man can have a thousand readers here he's lucky.
The educated Greeks don't read their own writers; they prefer to read German,
English,French books. A writer hasn't a chance in Greece."
  "But your work could be translated into other languages," I suggested.
  "There is no language that can render the flavour and the beauty of modern
Greek," he replied. "French is wooden, inflexible, logic-ridden, too precise;
English is too flat, too prosaic, too business-like... you don't know how to
make verbs in Enlgish." He went on like that, flourishing his cane angrily.
He began to quote one of Seferiades' poems, in Greek. " Do you hear that? The
sound of it alone is wonderful, no? What can you give me in English to match
that for sheer beauty of resonance?"  And suddenly he began to intone a verse
from the Bible. "Now that's a little more like it," he said. "But you don't
use that language any more - that's a dead language now. The language hasn't
any guts today. You 're technicians. It sounds like wooden money dropping into
a sewer. WE'VE GOT A LANGUAGE...we're still making it. It is a language for
poets, not for shopkeepers. Listen to this-" and he began reciting another
 poem,
in Greek. "That's from Sikelianos. I suppose you never heard the name, what?
You never heard of Yannopoulos either? Yannopoulos was greater than your Walt
Whitman and all the American poets combined. He was a madman, yes, like all the
great Greek fellows. He fell in love with his own country - that's a funny
thing, eh? Yes, he became intoxicated with the Greek language, the Greek
philosophy, the Greek sky, the Greek mountains, the Greek sea, the Greek
 islands
the Greek vegetables, even, that he killed himself. Have you got any writers
who would kill themselves because they are too full to love?"

....kai to 'menos' tou Katsimbali synexizei me enan ymno ston Yannopoulo...
An katalaba kala apo to olo yfos autou tou kommatiou, o Henry Miller exei
meinei me anoixto to stoma....apo tin epidokimasia pros ta legomena tou
Katsimbali...Ee re Katsimbali pou eisai twra na deis pws exei katantisei i
glwssa twn poiitwn ....

O Katsimbalis teleiwnei tin koubenta me to e3is kommati:

"The human proportions which the Greek extolled were superhuman. They weren't
French proportions. They were divine, because the true Greek is a god, not a
cautious, precise, calculating being with the soul of an engineer..."

                        Gia tin antigrafi,
                                Theoharis Londinium