Before Lyricism

Before Lyricism includes six book-length poems: "The Forest" (1954), "Plant Upbringing" (1956), "Diary of Age" (1958), "Description of the Body" (1959), "The Meaning of the Blind" (1962), and "Our Way of Being in Danger" (1966). Each of these, apart from “Plant Upbringing,” was published as a separate book, which Vakalo herself designed. (“Plant Upbringing” was originally included in the volume Wall Painting, of which Vakalo later repudiated all but this single long poem.) For Vakalo, these poems formed a larger, accretive whole, which she titled Prin Apo Ton Lyrismo (Before Lyricism). By bringing these poems together under a single cover, Before Lyricism allows us to see the complex web of intertextual relations that bind these books together. Meanwhile, by bringing these poems into English, this volume will enrich not only our knowledge of this key period in Vakalo’s career, but English-language readers’ understanding of modern Greek poetry as a whole.

Eleni Vakalo (1921-2001) was a Greek poet, art critic, and art historian. She authored nine volumes of art history and art theory, and had regular columns of art criticism from 1955 to 1975 (with a two-year hiatus during the period of the junta’s strictest censorship); she also produced a radio broadcast of art criticism, and organized art-related teach-ins at factories. In 1958, she and her husband, the painter and stage designer Yiorgos Vakalo, founded the Vakalo School of Arts and Design, where she taught until 1990. Vakalo published fourteen books of poetry, and was intimately involved with the design and production of her early books. Indeed, Vakalo’s training as an art historian pushed her to initiate new poetic uses of the page, drawing on her knowledge of modern and contemporary art to rethink the role of the visual in the printed text. She received the State Poetry Prize in 1991, and the prestigious Academy of Athens Prize in 1997.