Books > Eyed by a medusa

The poetry of Nikos Kavadias, inspired by a lifetime spent at sea, is nowavailable for the first time in English translation.

Bitterness, one of the last poems written by Nikos Kavadias (1913-1975), reaffirms the loyalty he feels towards his longterm mistress – a mistress chosen decades before when he got his first job at sea in 1929 as a sailor on the cargo ship Agios Nikolaos. Many of his late poems are obscure and difficult to follow, but Bitterness is not. Forgotten is the little girl from Amoi and “the mulatto who stank of wine in Tenerife” because a lifetime’s encounters in different ports around the world are made insignificant by what he feels for the “bitter lips” of the sea. And the sea, he warns not for the first time, “hates betrayal”.

In Kosmas of the Indian Ocean, a poem written eight years before, Kavadias rails against the sailor who becomes a monk, warning him that although God might forgive him, Poseidon will take revenge: “The divers say they’ve seen it down there: / the ray’s tail tickling the oyster’s lips.” This image is echoed at the end of Bitterness where the poet imagines himself fit for nothing but death at sea, pulled down to the bottom by weights on his feet. His imaginary end is typically unsentimental. A medusa, a jelly-fish, has seen his corpse. Presumably, it is planning to sting. “A medusa eyed you, it’s drawing near/and a sea-bed where rays and octopus graze.”

There is no ambiguity about the source of Kavadias’ inspiration. His mother hoped his passion would turn out to be just “a quirk of his youth”, but she was disappointed. Kavadias spent most of his adult life at sea, the last 30 of them as a radio officer. And his poetry stays at sea too, coloured by weather and compass, by maritime hardships and by the loneliness and longing that life on the ocean induces. He emerges from his verse with a Dutch pipe of black wood in his mouth, hands hardened by pulling on ropes, tar under his fingers and tattoos burned into his flesh in distant ports. He has made “skin of the filth of the ship”.

Kavadias published just three collections of poetry, together with one largely autobiographical narrative about his life at sea On Watch (1954). In a new bilingual edition, veteran translator Gail Holst-Warhaft has taken on the challenge of rendering his poetic output into English. She explains some of the specific difficulties she faced with Kavadias’ work. First, he wrote in formal, rhyming verse which she did not attempt to replicate though she “did try to maintain a regular metre for the poems”. But even this was not easy because of the fundamental differences between Greek and English (polysyllabic/inflected versus uninflected/monosyllabic) and the way in which line stresses do not fall in the same way. Further problems included Kavadias’ use of dated nautical slang (a Greek glossary had to be provided on publication of his final collection Traverso) and his transliterations from Italian, Greek and English. An impossible task, then, to translate Kavadias successfully?

Yes and no. Holst-Warhaft, in acknowledging the limitations of her craft, gives herself the freedom to convey spirit over form and this is the correct choice. What results is an evocative reflection of Kavadias’ poetry that works in the language to which it has been transferred. English speakers may miss much of the word-play and the innate music and rhythm of the original (Thanos Mikroutsikos and Mariza Koch successfully set some of the poems to music in the 1970s) but they will still be lured into the rough and unpredictable world of life aboard; a world which, as well as being Kavadias’ life, was also his unique and unsettling literary creation.

Marabou (1936) was published when he was just 23 years old. Mostly narrative and descriptive, these poems resonate with the loss of innocence, whether this comes from nights of gambling and telling dirty stories in the fo’c’sle, visiting a brothel in Marseilles or seeing a tough old salt moved to tears by the death of the ship’s cat. Best of all are the encounters with people like Willie, the boisterous and big-hearted black stoker from Djibouti, abandoned somewhere out in the East when wasting away from fever; or the tormented William George Allum who gave up trying to rub away the tattoo above his heart of a woman he had loved and lost, and stuck a knife into it instead.

Much had changed by the time Fog (1947) was published. Gone is the directness and confidence of youth and in their place comes a more reflective and explorative voice. These poems are charged with mystery and a deeper sense of yearning for what experience has taught him will always stay frustratingly out of reach. The character sketches disappear. Instead, there are snapshot memories – of the Chinese bazaar and the “strangled sobs of the girl in the rickshaw”, of cholera in Madras, of buying a knife in Nose Be – alternating with the present reality of a fickle sea and changing weather, the experience (for example) of being in the middle of the Kuro Siwa, a warm current off the coast of Japan, which has “squeezed us like a belt”.

He often addresses a woman but there are only hints as to her possible identity(-ies). She might appear in the wheelhouse or he may dream of her materialising on the rigging, prefiguring the Fata Morgana, who appears in his final collection, Traverso (1975). Fata Morgana is a mirage seen by sailors at sea, signifying danger. For Kavadias, she has evolved into a being both sensual and irresistible. “I’ll take communion with salty water/infused from your body drop by drop…”

Kavadias was, and remains, a popular poet. Holst-Warhaft points out that at the time of his death, Marabou and Fog had gone through ten editions and sold over 12,000 copies. So, although he lived and operated outside mainstream literary circles, his voice was evidently heard and appreciated. Kavadias, though, was modest about his achievements and never regarded himself as a major Greek poet despite influential critical opinion to the contrary. That is surely in keeping with the spirit of a man who could imagine his end as he did – a corpse on a seabed where rays and octopus feed, about to be stung by a medusa.

‘The Collected Poems of Nikos Kavadias’ (ISBN 1932455019), a bilingual edition translated by Gail Holst-Warhaft, is published by Cosmos Publishing. It is available in central Athens bookstores at 19 euros.