Katerina Anghelaki Rooke

Katerina Anghelaki Rooke in
“Talk of the Town: Alexia Amvrasi” 17.1.2007
FM 104,4 Municipal Radio Athens

Return to FM 104,4 with Alexia Amvrasi on 11.3.2009

to talk about "Printemps des Poetes" organised by Catherin Launay in Berlin.

During the conversation Katerina Anghelaki Rooke said "one should learn to use poetry like a tool in order to dig deeper into the self". To her poetry is a part of her life. Ever since she can remember, she has been writing poems. It is a way of life and often it starts by entering a dark room to see what inspirations one gets for what kind of poems. Then she read her poem "The Transcription of a Nightmare":

For a nightmare to become a poem

The silence must be undisturbed by creakings

Of the soul, the heart or other organs

Of the inorganic chemistry of existence.

The silence may be occupied by colors

But striking clashes are forbidden:

Black with rose

Or with the much-sung blue of eyes.

Perhaps a bit of earthy brown

The bronze of a whithered leaf

Or white with brownish spots from a dog's neck.

Once the night mare has reached its full height

It must undergo a series of operations.
With great dexterity every trace

Of reasonable doubt must be removed

And then without anesthesia

Something of inborn human kindness

Must be transplanted there.

The most difficult surgery

Is to cut it away from fear.

This you achieve by immersing

The bad dream unremittingly

In the holiness of nature.

And the poem springs up;

Leaf by tiny leaf

Blossom by blossom

Quite frail at first, trembling

It rises from the black earth that nourished it

And dares.

It dares to dream

The antidote of agony

The word.

(Taken from the book 'The scattered papers of Penelope', London: Anvil Press Poetry, 2008)

Poetry

The first poem published at the age of 16 and according to her god father Katzanzakis, he “recommended it so warmly that if I had internalized what he said about my poetry, I would never written thereafter any other poetry”.

While we are all in search of immortality she makes a distinction from those immortals like Elytis and “us mortals”. As always she is humble, short, to the point and if the other complies to her demand, then she gives a strong feed back: “now you are talking”.

She comes from a generation of promising young poets most of them have died in the meantime. She is herself in pain after the death of her husband Rodney.

Understanding of Katerina’s poetry: a natural philosophy speaking through poetry

As to her poem about tourists coming to Greece, this dialogue with the stranger can spark off another telling comment: “it is so difficult to be a Greek and not a Nationalist”.

The poem of a seventeen year old

The Solitary

United your tears with rain,
Your laughter with sun and wind,
Tornado and rising tide
Of indignation;
Cry for children, barefoot and open-handed
Whose approaching faces glow
In the late afternoon;
And you will find yourself
All alone.

Turn to your fellow men
And in their indifferent eyes
You will find yourself reflected
Desperate but complete
And all alone.

Point out the noblest way,
Implore them to believe
Only in themselves
And their misery will increase
As the task overwhelms them
And you will again
Find yourself alone

Cry out your love
And your hollow call will return empty,
Lacking courage to try the dirty streets,
Tired steps and shut doors.
The trembling voice that you sent out
Will return with words newly discovered
That reveal you are all alone.

O God, what will become of us?
How are we to continue,
To believe, to decide ourselves
When right beside us
Souls sharply expire?

One path only, one means, one victory
Result when we believe,
Become,
Proceed
…all alone.

Katherina Anghelaki-Rooke, Fall 1956
Translated by Karen Van Dyck and Martin Turner

Poetry in my life

Poetry, one of the oldest flowers of this world, was already object of countless definitions and analysis by people who wanted to understand its essence or rather the reason of existence as well as also the reason of life. How it is similar to life itself, that resulted in many determinations; in numerous interpretations one gives poetry a secretive role. One connected poetry with deity, with the sky, one saw in it the enemation of the cosmos, even as poet creator of the world.
The biographies of poets fall to my feet like heavy drops of a sad rain, for grey is the rain and only rarely do the drops glitter. Always I have been impressed by the contrast between the messianic image of the poet, as it is attached to some people, and the often poor and curtailing real existence of poets.
Personally these definitions and theories of poetry do not touch me, except as writing exercises in emptiness. However what I know is that poetry has helped me to live, a half a century devoted to it almost exclusively. But I do not mean with that I emerged myself completely in poetry, in order to forget the poisoned reality. Rather I mean that poetry lies over a path which leads directly to the source of things. To that place where passion develops before it can become love for a single person; the entire notion of the unknown, which life clothes until it becomes fear of own death; and the despise for pettiness, indeed at times for the treacherousness of people before it becomes hostility and to personal distaste. The terrible anticipation of a catostrophe which you feel approaching transforms itself into a ‚holy touch, which captures body and mind’. Or else“ the world reveals itself to you while at the same time it retains the various meanings to itself.…As a matter of fact poetry has given me many magic moments. Thus I see suddenly very clear, for example, how few objective unchanging things there exist finally. That life and death alone, perhaps…That same object or happening takes on in a different light, at a different moment a new value, and has other consequences, mostly upon different facts. This relativity runs throughout poetry, ruling in an almost natural way, then that is the call which to express is what poetry is called to do.
Poetry helps me and helps me to live, not because I believe, since things become what I make out of things in order to exist – “…upon such pretentious hope I do not rely upon…”- nor equally because I belong to an order which serves holy goals. It is because that I know, when poetry is there and close to me, even if it abandons me and I feel myself on my side the air despite being naked and shaking out of cold. Moreover I have learned and poetry has taught me, to present the sense of life as love for life.

Katerina Angelaki-Rooke Athen den 24.Maerz 2002

From: further stone – large heart – modern Greek poetry,
selected by Kostas Giannakakos & Christian Greiff, Babel Verlag, 2002
translated from German text into English: Hatto Fischer

********
Aegina

Katerina loves her island: Aegina, and lives there in an enchanted house designated to become a centre for translation (and for dreamers). She would always welcome anyone with her strong voice and ask immediately: “How are you!”

Aegina

Katerina

There is sadness
In the curve of blue
Along side the horizon

Murmuring stones
Of waves
Washing boats ashore

Come along to ride
The ripples of laughter
To the house over there: Aegina

Trees witnessing dogs strolling the ground
A purpose the house has
As if painted by Cezanne.

Summer days filled with discussions
Raising voices to the moon
While raisin pickers cover the table

“How are you?”, resounds her question
Out of the heart longing for times
Truly lived: no doubt about

As to the immortal soul, she knows
No one is a fool and only one knows
When poems come close to nature

All that is to say open ended books belong
To the infinitive equation
Of her asking questions

About

What is happening to life!

HF Athens 22.2.2004

Silence and Silences

Silence is a herd, a swarm of birds that you see from afar, rising slowly and covering the sky. It is the troupe of actors that bows to the public. But within a herd every sheep has only one heart that beats. Within a swarm every bird has only one pair of wings. And the actor is alone each time he risks to be rejected.
So a silence includes endless amount of silences. There is the silence of sweet expectation. It unfolds within you like a piece of paper all around the bunch of flowers that you are waiting to receive. It is a seductive silence because you impose it; you don’t want anything to be heard besides the announcement of a resurrection, of an arrival, of the end of loneliness.
There is the silence of the babbling everydayness, when you are deafened by the buzzing of all the stupidities that man has invented so that he won’t hear the silence.
There is the silence of creation. A crowd of wounds and the one struggles to close the mouth of the other. Which is the deepest? She is the one that will talk. Rivalry in depth.
There is the silence of emptiness. You look into the eyes of the other human beings and you know that whatever he was able to understand in you he has already said it. The rest is silence.
But you’ll keep approaching the great silence the herd, the swarm and you’ll be more and more certain that this silence you’ll never experience because you contain it entirely. It is you that will be the great silence of the end.

Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke
Athens 22/01/06

Translated from the Greek original by the author

Brief comment about the difference between silence and silences.

Very often when attention is turned to the relationship between philosophy and poetry, one thinks about the denial of poetry by a line of thinkers ranging from Plato to Hegel insofar as they deny poetry to be a source of truth. Then, in the twentieth century and despite Paul Celan whose poetry the German philosopher Gadamer identified as messages bottled up as if from someone stranded on a lonely island in a big wide ocean, Adorno of the Frankfurt School stated that after Auschwitz no more poetry was possible. A lot of people, poets included, have rebelled against that but then Adorno’s point of passing on messages to the future only to the ‘imaginary witness’ since he did not trust people to do that, has yet to be understood. But there is a third dimension to this relationship. It was Michel Foucault who said in his book analyzing the relationship between insanity and society that ‘we have to discover the places of silence before the lyrical protest covers them up.’
The fear of silence to be experienced in the imagination once man finds himself completely alone in the universe dominates the motives that make man flee into the noise of the street as this is taken to be a sign of life, of being alive. No one knew that better than the Ancient Greeks who would argue, bargain, shout and play in the street theatre if only to trick his fellow men to thinking this drama is real. Still today any visitor to Greece can easily mistake such shouting match as a serious fight and draw the wrong conclusions. Others modify their perception and ask simply do they have to speak that loud. Certainly it makes Athens one of the loudest cities with everything from loud motor scooters to people talking lively in their favorite place, the street cafes as loudly as they can to demonstrate to each other that they are indeed alive.

*************

Translating Into Love Life’s End

New Publication by Katerina Anghelaki Rooke:
“Translating Into Love Life’s End”
In: Shortstring Press, 2004

I have lost my faith in silence

I have lost my faith in silence;
It is not pure, it is not romantic, it doesn’t hide
Love’s whispers
Or the next musical phrase of a pastoral symphony.
Ferociously it stifles the sobs of impotence
It feeds an eternal threat.
I was well disposed
So was the day in the morning
We didn’t notice
The mute stubbornness that muzzles
The awareness of tomorrow
And prevents you from hearing
The noisy ectoplasms of fear…
Oh! Yes I am afraid as well!
But I still struggle not to go deaf
I want to hear all the sobbing
And carry on the monologue
With the voice of my soul.

Katerina Anghelaki Rooke, from: Translating Into Life’s End

Obsessions

When you die, I don’t be there
To keep your feet warm
Between my antiquated breast
To recite poems dedicated
To the living air and say:
“Your legs, your lies
The tufts of your hair, all so well made!”
But when you die you’ll find me
Having carpeted long ago
The corridor leading to the next room – life
With my ancient flesh.
My whisper will welcome you saying:
Look what a magic thing
The body is even one beaten by darkness
How sacred tears are
When shed for what you never experienced…
“Make room” you’ll say to me when you die.
“Make room for me to sit,
I like this flowerbed
You chose to wait for me
I like the green chaos.
How did we use to call this back on earth?
Unfulfilled something?
Love?”

Katerina Anghelaki Rooke, from:
Translating into Love Life’s End

A Frightful Oligarchy

Fear is an absolute monarch;
Nothing overshadows
His omnipotence.
Next to him Queen Despair
Has fewer competences
Since it is as if everything has been lost by now.
When she doesn’t feel young and strong enough
To plunge into mourning
Sailing-souls, she asks the assistance
Of her exclusive nurse, sadness
Who doesn’t charge much, is no trouble
Does not shout, seeks no ties.
If you don’t send her away, she remains
Faithful next to you, with you
Contemplating with empty eyes
The emptiness within you.

Katerina Anghelaki Rooke, from:
Translating into Love Life’s End

Katerina undertakes for the first time in her long career as poetess the task of translating her own poems into English. She does so after realizing that a great deal of her life she has been spend with her British husband. This gives her a more natural way of entering the English language compared to what most people experience in their daily life. Still, she hesitates since expressions in one’s own language, Greek in her case, are really untranslatable.
In this book she observes many puzzles and therefore tries to reflect in words what the sky defines and does not, or what hope grandmothers carry within them for children still to be born.
Just back from readings in Paris, Oxford and Sofia, Katerina Anghelaki Rooke expresses a natural attitude towards life. In her poems she lifts up samples of observations of life to become equally powerful, indeed philosophical reflections of life. That she conveys through her voice capable of booming across the entire room when reading them aloud.
One of her most loved words is “really”, and often she would use it with some sly smile in her eyes. For instance, she would ask the other reaffirm what he or she has just said: “do you really mean it what you said?” Then, as if not really waiting for an answer, she flings without hesitation her great love at the person and trusts her wit by encircling the arguments of the other as putting the arms around the other. She would conclude: “I take you for what you said”.
Believing and not believing is her case not about being hurt by what others say or not about others. She does not care so much about that. Rather she pays literal attention to what is being said that has a ring of truth to it and by giving it a poetic reason, she transform this expression into another form of diction. Poetry is taking serious the stuff reality and human beings are made of but like overcoming gravity poetry is there to uplift the human spirit in order to let it be heard in association with other contents. This is her resistance of life against death.
Poetry is all about that resistance, but mind you, she would caution, provided all that is said in a very short form. She would add, you know that I am not a believer of long, but of a short poem.

Lunch and Dinner

by Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke

It was a beautiful sky-blue day: there was a kind of madness in the air. Men’s cheek-bones shone like applies just picked and the way youth-flowers were walking made you feel as if you had just been invited to the funfair of life.
Birds were flying in the air like kisses and the sky was all around you, hugging you like a hairy chest. I was trying to remember certain names that once upon a time used to sound like pastoral symphonies and the birthdays of the stars.
Which was my favorite animal? Zodiac? Which fate did I believe would suit me best? Which period of my life would I like to relive again and again?

Ideas, ideas and impulses: go, write this down or why did you forget those two lines, they were inspired….
But worries made eruption again like a crude landlord asking for the rent, long overdue….And I had to go there and there, I had to call the doctor, ask the chemist, find the lawyer. I had to take care of my everydayness and that of my companion as well. “So, I said to my soul, leave aside the after-life of the imagination and concentrate on things of this life. What is born and destined to die requires a lot more care, attention and sacrifice than what is not yet born on paper and its genes contain immortality…But…oh! The milk over boiled…I left the food burn…I forgot to buy bread and now it is too late, the baker is closed.

And then there are all these kind and caring friends, polite acquaintances, who stop me in the streets and ask very concerned: “How are you? What are you preparing these days?” And they have in mind something like “Les Miserables” or “Crime and Punishment”…My standard answer is: lunch and dinner. That’s what I prepare and serve daily. Luckily breakfast is prepared by him, the rabbit.

Athens 8.3.2005
Woman’s day

Present Eternity

From my window I observe the traffic –
Cars parked in the void
Or speed up in order
To catch themselves returning.
The world seems indefinable, dim
As if I were blinded by the steam
From some distant cauldron
Where the evil of creation
Is stewing in its own juice.
The infatuation bodies used to provoke –
Where has the infatuation gone?
How can a wounded memory
Count absences?
Has the content of life changed
Or does my person no longer offer
Sufficient future
For life to contain me?

Never before have so many questions
Weighed down my poems
Never before has imagination
Omitted to give me
So many answers.
From now on you’ll find
Hardly any descriptions of nature
In my lines;
This is because
I’m concentrating totally
On trying to imagine the face
Of the one who will promise me
Present eternity
For just one moment.

^ Top

« Lichtungen | Getting up - In honor of Elytis »

Ποιειν Και Πραττειν - to create and to do

Navigation