The 'Poet of Peace and Love'  - article by Melanie Wicks

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Nikiforos Vrettakos, poet and Maniot, was born in 1912, on the Lakonian side of Mani, in the village of Krokees (between Gytheio and Sparta). He attended secondary school in Gytheio in the company of Yiannis Ritsos (of Monemvasia). The two men were destined to follow quite similar paths through war, resistance and civil war on their way to joining the ranks of Greece's great poets.

 

In an interview with George Pilichos (Charioteer magazine 1991), Vrettakos, talking about his homeland of the Mani said: 'Nature gave me my first lessons. I had the feeling that the mountain chain of Taïgetos, the trees, the flowers and the stars at night, had taught me the beauty and harmonious co-existence which I did not find in the world later'.

 

Indeed in the early part of his life, he lived and wrote through the worst of times. Moving to Athens in the late twenties to study Law, he had to abandon the idea of studying due to financial difficulties. In spite of a hard life of struggle, he pursued his art and his first book of poetry 'Under The Shadows and Lights' was published in 1929, followed by 'Into the Silence of the Centuries' in 1933. His early work has a melancholic tone, reflecting life's hardships and the horror of war and social injustice. During the same period his work 'The War' a response to Mussolini's attack on Ethiopia, was censured by the Metaxas dictatorship. Likewise the experience of many other leftist intellectuals, poets and writers, including his old schoolfriend Yiannis Ritsos, 250 copies of whose work 'Epitaphios' (inspired by the bloodshed during the suppression of a strike by tobacco workers) were burned in the Temple of Olympian Zeus at the foot of the Acropolis.

 

During the Second World War, Vrettakos was sent to the Albanian front as part of the forces that repelled Mussolini's invading army. Later he was a member of the resistance, the National Liberation Front (EAM), during the Axis occupation of Greece and the Civil War (1946-9). His diary notes from this period are the basis for his book 'Wild Beast'. In 1949, Vrettakos published a lyrical essay 'Two People Talk about Peace in the World'. His work at this period, while still reflecting struggle, reflects his humanism and his continuing belief in the 'two poles of the world' nature and man. He wrote 'I still insist that the world is beautiful'. He also, horrified by the atomic bombs dropped on Japan at the end of the war and the threat to the natural world, became an anti-nuclear and environmental campaigner.

 

In 1967, following the military coup and the advent once again of dictatorship in Greece, Vrettakos went in to self-imposed exile, spending time in Switzerland, travelling widely in Europe and participating in poetry festivals. He lived for several years on the island of Sicily, where although apparently delighted by the similarity of the landscape to that of the Peloponnese and grateful for the hospitality and refuge, his poetry reflects his feelings of loss, of alienation and exile from his homeland. He finally returned to Greece on the fall of the dictatorship in 1974, returning to the Mani in 1978, where he eventually built a house and lived in his home village until his death in 1991.

 

Returning to his first lessons, his love of the wild nature of the Mani, which it seems he had always carried with him. The great mountain seems always present somewhere in his work. It is no ordinary love that he had for it. He speaks of it as 'my gracious mountain', as a mother, a friend, a 'kind old man'. He writes of it falling silent, in grief for his own struggles. His later poems are characterised by light, the sun, nature and love. He has been called 'The Poet of Peace and Love', as well as the 'Saint of Greek Poetry' which seem greater accolades even than the many awards, honours and State Poetry prizes he won, and his four nominations for a Nobel Prize.

 

Here we reproduce his poem 'A Smaller World', with thanks to Manolis Aligizakis for his kind permission to use his translation.

 

A SMALLER WORLD

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I seek a shoreline where using canes
or trees I’ll fence one piece of the horizon
where, gathering infinity, I may get the sense
that machines don’t exist or only a few do
that soldiers don’t exist or only a few do
that weapons don’t exist or only a few do
that lead to the exit of the forest with the wolves
where there aren’t any merchants or only a few
in remote places of the earth where
paved roads haven’t yet been laid

God hopes that at least
paradise will never cease to exist in the poets’ sobs

 

© English translation: Manolis Aligizakis