Oktana

"Empeirikos was the member of a very rich family of ship owners. The Greek ship owners are internationalists. He was born in Romania and moved soon after to a small island in the Aegean Sea. He didn’t want to become just a ship owner. He followed Trotsky’s ideas and so he couldn’t allow himself to be the boss—he wrote a letter to his family telling them all this and that he was quitting the family business. So he went to Paris where he met Marie Bonaparte, who was a very prominent (and the first woman) psychoanalyst. “In 1974 the dictatorship ended and democracy was back, and we returned to myth-making” She was married to a Greek prince, and so was in fact princess of Greece. She was very close to Freud. Empeirikos was attracted by Freudian theory and was analysed himself—by Bonaparte, I imagine—and he became an analyst himself. And at the same time he started writing surrealist poems. When he came back to Greece in the late 1930s, he gave a lecture about surrealism, and it caused a big scandal in Athenian society. Imagine: he was a member of the famous Empeirikos family, and many people went expecting to hear a ship-owner’s boy talking about the economy, or developments in the shipping industry, or something. They heard him reading these poems! They were shocked. They mocked him. He became in their eyes an anecdote, a funny character. He was a prominent figure in many ways. He was not just a poet; he was an analyst and a great photographer, too. But, to make you understand the bias of Greek society, in order to prevent him for practicing as an analyst, they voted through a law that said that to work as an analyst, you had to be a doctor. He was not a doctor, and so he was forbidden from practicing. Yes, the Greek establishment in general is not progressive. He started as a pure surrealist, like Andre Breton, but, as the years passed, he found his own voice. When you read these late poems, you understand that there is a unique style that only Empeirikos has. In Oktana you find something that is somewhere between poems, short stories and prophesies. If my English were much better I would translate them myself because I think, even today, they would be understood by English readers as something special. He talks like a prophet. But what I really want to emphasize with this book choice is that Empeirikos has nothing to do with archetypes; he doesn’t talk about ancient Greek traditions or political dramas in Greece. He talks about everything, globally. He has an extremely good poem/short-story where the main character is an American Mormon; another, takes place in South America, another in Africa. He has even written a novel, 3,000 pages long, about a steamboat that goes from Liverpool to New York and during the trip there are sexual orgies of all kinds between men and women, men and men, women and women. In some ways, he’s similar to the Marquis de Sade but there is also a vast difference: de Sade is a sadist, of course, while Empeirikos believed that love and sex was happiness. Yes, and this is universal. Not just for Greece. He is writing about the human condition."