Wireless operator: Selected poems of Nikos Kavvadias

by Nikos Kavvadias

Nikos Kavvadías was a Greek poet and sailor, who wrote about the incidents and adventures of life at sea. His poems blend nautical terms and sailors’ slang with romantic imagery. He was born in 1910 in Manchuria and as a teenager in Piraeus joined the merchant navy. He spent almost his whole life at sea, dying in Athens in 1975. He travelled widely as a wireless operator in the merchant marine and while some of his poems relate to exotic ports of call the language remains sober and simple. He is one of those rare poets who succeeds equally on a serious and popular level. Simon Darragh’s translations, the first to be published in England, do justice to his various gifts, both as poet and story-teller.

Genres: Poetry

92 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1998

Reviews

[Attila · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kavvadias was a Greek sailor and poet considered by many to be the embodiment of the Greek soul for his romantic affiliation with the sea and for his genuinely humane outlook. These poems have a spellbinding atmosphere and a heavy degree of nostalgia, and each of them captured me from start to finish. A couple of short stories are also included.

The translation is unfortunately poor, mostly a word-by-word rendering that makes no attempt to recreate the rhythm or the rhyme of the poems. The main reason, of course, is the radical difference between Hellenic and English languages; still, I think it could have been done better. I hope that one day I could read (and understand) these in original.

There are some translator's notes attached, but these explain only trivialities. If a poem is deeper and more abstract, the translator's notes will go like "oh, this poem makes no sense, I guess Kavvadias was high on hashish when writing this."

Read this for the first time in April 2012, re-read it in May 2014.