Island and exile in Dimitris Tsaloumas' The House with the Eucalypts

Abstract

The House with the Eucalypts, first published in 1975, constitutes a collection of beautiful poems in Greek by Greek-Australian poet Dimitris Tsaloumas. In a bid to transmit these poems to a wider, always appreciative English speaking readership of this writers' creative output, and as a means of extending the parameters of the Tsaloumas Canon, I decided to translate them into English. This was a daunting task, made particularly difficult by Tsaloumas' complex and particular tapestry of remembrance, metaphor, landscape, irony, myth, and island specific terminology. Elowever, the process also proved singularly fortuitous in that it afforded me a profound level of affinity with each word, nuance and silence within a framework of biculturalism and bilingualism.The first chapter, Topos, centres on both landscape and language. The word topos is at once a transliteration of the Greek word for landscape/place/homeland and a literary term used in critical appraisal. The island of Leros is the unifying image that binds the threads of the collection together. Sight, smell and touch all revolve around metaphors radiating the specificity of that particular spot that the poet perceived as his particular home (land) his topos: a place that belongs to him and that he belongs to in terms of primordial birthright.Although the atmosphere is that of journeying back through the mists of time, Tsaloumas' evocation is neither nostalgic nor romantic, but very lucid in its portrayal of island life in the 1940s as encompassing treachery and misery at every turn, with hunger and betrayal constant features of everyday life. Memory reaches an apotheosis of form in this collection, fortified by the desire to attain a mosaic of antithetical facets as encompassed within physical and metaphorical boundaries. The good and the bad, the hideous and the beauteous, the unspeakable and the joyous - all these are encompassed within this place, this topos, the exclusivity of which is generated through the poet's particular vision.The chapter entitled Light and Shadow explores the light as reflected in the Greek landscape and the presence of shadow that is both defined and obliterated by it. His spiritual exile from his topos while actually living on the island during a succession of barbarous regimes, together with his physical exile through he process of migration, have most certainly had the effect of acquainting Tsaloumas with the gothic shadow and all its ramifications. Further, it is interesting to note that much of the encasing perception takes place within the framework of the window: light and shadow interchange perpetually in image after image, alienation and silence forming their inevitable alliance within the physical and spiritual wasteland engendered through the processes of remembrance.The Wind; The Word focuses on aspects and processes of translation from Greek into English. The 'rhetoricity' of the text is highlighted at every turn when one undertakes to translate, and the dazzling array of possibilities both clears the vision and obstructs the view; haunts as much as it enthrals. Further to the actual process of translation, is the whole question of its importance on a national (and international) scale: namely, that it is absolutely central to the literature of this country given that so much of it has emanated from a different cultural and linguistic milieu to that of the Anglo-Irish tradition.Cries in the Wilderness: Female Personae and Women's Utterance delineates Tsaloumas' portrayal of women; a portrayal that is generally convincing in its many-layered intricacy, often memorable and, occasionally, haunting in its beauty.