interview by Peter Sragher
with a poem in Greek by Liana Sakelliou and translation into English
1. Please tell me input your personal rapport with the island, and what it means to you as an inhabitant and as a poet.
As an inhabitant it is a place of memories of parents, my brother, cousins, aunts, uncles, friends, swimming, eating seafood, and fun. I spent every summer on the island as a girl growing up. As a poet, it presents beauty, legends, and opportunities to imagine.
My fourth poetry collection is titled Wherever the Sweet Breeze Blows (2017). The poems focus on place, as well as personal and family history, and show how island life and the sea shape people’s lives, send them into exile in faraway places such as Chattanooga, Tennessee, and how they inevitably call them and their progeny back. The poems also emphasize the lives of women residents of the island, how they learn from their fathers how to fish, and plant trees and harvest fruit, and thus gain a certain kind of independence. By focusing on geography, I excavate memory.
Every poem is a type of knowledge that concerns life and the understanding of death. Poetry functions as a mechanism of creating, preserving and restructuring memory.
2. How would you describe Póros overall?
It is a closely knit, small community of 4,000 people. The residents do not need a newspaper because everyone discusses the activities of everyone else. At the height of the tourist season, there may be an additional 8,000 people or more. Unlike many Greek islands, there are many pine trees and there is still fresh water. It has several beaches, making it easy to find a great place to swim. The seafood and grilled food are great.
3. Why do you believe it is not as recognized and known about as a destination and as a force in Greece’s War of Independence as its neighbors, Spetses and Hydra?
On March 17, 1821, the Poriot ship DIMITRA, owned by Hatzis Anastasis Manesis, captained by his son Giorgis and directed by the chieftain of Póros Christodoulos Mexis, arrived at Almyros in Messinian Mani, and handed over to the Maniates and the other chieftains of Moria the precious cargo of gunpowder to start the rebellion. So, the great contribution of Poros was its decisive participation in the transport of gunpowder at the start of the Great War.
4. What would you say are the most fascinating cultural aspects of the island? Eg. Can you tell us about Villa Galini and some of its guests?
The Easter celebration and the celebration on August 15 are magnificent especially at the Monastery. Villa Galini is a neoclassical, Italian-style villa; Pompeii-red walls with ochre-colored trimmings; and reddish Póros stone for the foundations of the house: these constitute the ground on which George Seferis stood solidly to step out of his Athenian urban shell and transform himself once more to a poetic tabula rasa, receptive to new and invigorating poetic stimuli. The rooms, the corridors and the staircases of the villa are found again in the poetic architecture of Seferis’ «Thrush» as the dwelling-places of «she who climbs the stairs without seeing/ those who’ve fallen asleep under the stairs». Marc Chagall visited Galini in the 1950s and did a series of paintings from its windows’ view and a self-portrait.
Galini has also been the focus of many films, and many politicians have visited it over the years.
The Temple of Poseidon, which, apart from the shrine to the god, includes a whole complex of auxiliary buildings from ancient times. Originally constructed in 520 BCE, the site was a prestigious place of worship in the Hellenic world, so much so that the surrounding city-states founded a powerful federation to defend the temple as a religious center.
5. What are your absolute favorite places to see, walk to, swim in, eat at, or drink at on Póros?
I like to swim at the beach just below the Monastery. I also like to drink fresh orange juice at a small café across from the Monastery because there are trees all around, and you can hear the water of a small stream in a gorge below. I also love my favorite rock, the Lion, because of its location, its historical importance, and its emblematic nature. My father and my brother own a boat, so as a child I used to visit the remote shores of Póros, and dive among the rocks. The sea bottom is extraordinary there, and it became the subject of many poems of mine. The sea is always with you, with its hypnotizing beauty, its power, wildness, myth, constant change, its femaleness. I love to walk along the sea through the village because I watch many boats of different kinds, smells of grilled octopus, and sounds of people having fun. I like the cinema on a rooftop in the summer. There is a cool breeze in the evening, and quite often the moon is shining on the sea and on the terraces. Pure magic!
What triggered me to write the poems in Breeze, was the sea in which I learned to swim, the neighbors that held me so that I wouldn’t sink (I was two-years-old), and the breeze that made them laugh and be tender. For that and for the island named Kalavria (sweet breeze). Breeze is a book about place: the entire collection revolves around one, 12 square-mile island in the southern Saronic Gulf—Poros—with a population of only 3800 residents.
As Solomos, the Greek national poet, makes clear, “from one small place, the greatest essentials can be viewed.” Wherever the Sweet Breeze Blows can be read, in part, as a compendium of people, stories and events associated with Póros, its myths and legends, the well-known figures, Greek and foreign, historical and modern, who have come and gone and left their mark, and, most importantly, the everyday people of the island, their lives, their stories, the nexus of their beliefs, dreams, disappointments, loves and losses, the living as well as the dead.
The sea is always there, its hypnotizing beauty, its power, its myth, its constant change, its femaleness. The speaker is often a child playing in the water or along the shore, spending many hours there, alone, with a father or with friends. Other speakers connected to the sea are fishermen and sailors, or visitors to the island. The sea as a central point of reference in these poems stretches well beyond Póros’ shores, to other nearby islands (e.g., Hydra and Tselevinia), to the mainland (Piraeus and Athens), and as far as Constantinople and the Black Sea to the east and America to the west, to which my paternal grandfather twice sailed on a steamship.
In his Introduction to the translation of the book into English, the American translator Don Schofield makes the following remarks: ”The island’s residents play a major role in Breeze. They are comprised not only of family members and friends Liana Sakelliou has lived among, but also of those relatives and other islanders she grew up hearing stories about, stretching back for generations. Most of those narrating their stories in these poems seem to be telling them to other, often younger, islanders. The narrators are not literary people, but islanders trying to come to terms with what is happening to them in the moment they are sharing their experiences.
While the grandfather’s life represents an essential bond between the author’s history and the island, it also serves as metonymy for the life and twentieth century history of the island itself. All the stages that her grandfather goes through in his personal life—émigré, soldier, restaurant owner in a foreign country, Poriotis finding his way back into the life of the island, landowner, father, husband, farmer, victim of Nazi occupation—all are also indicative of life for most Poriotes in the early- and mid-twentieth century. The same applies to others involved in his story—his wife, son (the author’s father), business partner, commerce associates, other relatives, and friends. His story, combined with those of the others he interacts with, is, in some ways, the island’s story.
Seen as a whole, the collection is a set of overlapping dialogues between the poet, various other individuals, an omnipotent narrator and a Chorus of sorts, bringing together various ways of story-telling while constantly historicizing and mythologizing the evolving particulars of individual lives, and in the process transforming the personal into the transpersonal and vice versa.
The poems in Breeze carry the reader through cycles of life and death as they spiral though history and prehistory, into and out of the present.
Breeze was shortlisted for the 2017 national poetry prize.
Ἡ Γκρέτα Γκάρμπο στὰ Κυβέλεια
Τοῦ Γιώργου καὶ τῆς Κατερίνας Ἀντωνίου
Ἡ οἰκογένειά μου ἦταν φτωχή.
Ἄρχισα νὰ ἐργάζομαι ἀπὸ 14 χρόνων σὲ κομμωτήριο.
Ὥσπου ἦρθε ἡ μοίρα στὸ πρόσωπο τοῦ σκηνοθέτη Μωρὶς Στίλερ.
(Συνέντευξη τῆς Γκρέτα Γκάρμπο στὸν Βασίλη Π. Κουτουζῆ)
Ἐμεῖς δὲν τήνε ξέραμε,
οἱ Ἀθηναῖοι παραθεριστὲς ὅμως
γυρίζανε καὶ τὴν κοιτάζανε.
Στὸ ζαχαροπλαστεῖο τῆς προκυμαίας
ἦταν ἡ μόνη ξανθιά.
Μοῦ ἄρεσε ἡ βραχνάδα στὴ φωνή της·
γελοῦσε μὲ τὸν ἴδιο πνιχτὸ τρόπο
βάζοντας τὸ χέρι στὰ χείλη.
Ἅπλωνε τὶς γάμπες, ἴσιωνε τὶς φοῦστες
καὶ ἀπολάμβανε τὸ γλυκό.
Ἀγόρια στὴν ἐφηβεία ἤμασταν,
στὴν ἐπαρχία ἤμασταν.
Ρουφούσαμε τὸ σιρόπι
καὶ τὴν κοιτάζαμε.
Τὸ ἀποφάσισα τότε.
Θὰ παντρευόμουν ξανθιὰ
μὲ φρύδια τοξωτὰ καὶ νὰ καπνίζει.
Θὰ γινόμουν κομμωτὴς καὶ
πάνω ἀπ’ τὸν καθρέφτη τοῦ μαγαζιοῦ μου
θὰ κρεμοῦσα τὸ σκίτσο της.
Liana Sakelliou
Wherever the Sweet Breeze Blows (2017)
(Translator: Don Schofield)
Greta Garbo at Kyveleia
My family was poor. I started working at 14, in a beauty parlor. Then fate came along in the guise of director Mauritz Stiller.
(From an interview with Vasilis Koutouzis)
For Georgos and Katerina Antoniou
We didn’t know her,
but the Athenian holiday-makers
kept turning to look at her.
In a pastry-shop on the waterfront
she was the only blonde.
I liked the huskiness of her voice,
how she tittered when she laughed,
putting a hand over her lips,
and the way, while enjoying her sweet,
she stretched her calves and straightened her skirt.
We were teenage boys in the boondocks,
savoring a sweet and watching her.
I decided, then and there:
I’d marry a blonde who smokes
and has arched eyebrows,
and become a hairstylist.
In my own salon,
above the mirror,
I’d hang a portrait of her.