THE WOMB OF ALL LANGUAGES: Remembering Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke

Everything In Greece, said Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke, is difficult, uncertain, unplanned or badly planned. 

“I’m leaving,” says my cosmopolitan self, “I can’t take it anymore,” she wrote in 2016. “And suddenly the day breaks, another door opens. Light, light everywhere from all around, in the mind and in the soul. Broad-leafed light. Greece. “I’ll stay,” I say, “I’ll stay a little longer.” (LARB)

Goddaughter of Nikos Kazantzakis, Fulbright Scholar, Ford Fellow, winner of the Greek National Prize for Poetry and the Greek Academy’s Poetry Prize, Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke was a Greek poet til the end, passing away yesterday in Athens at the age of 81.

RIP, Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke (1939-Jan 21 2020). 

After studying foreign languages and literature at the Universities of Nice, Athens and Geneva, poetry at University of Iowa; after translating works of Beckett, Shakespeare, Mayakovsky and Dylan Thomas into Greek; after teaching at SFSU and Harvard; she returning to her homeland and the island of Aegina, outside Athens, where she lived the last years of her life weaving and unweaving the threads of her complicated life in poetry and prose.

The poet was praised by critic Stephanos Papadopoulos in the Los Angeles Review of Books for her “uncanny knack for getting to the heart of every matter or crisis at hand — with incredible humor and dangerous wit. Whenever I’m back in Athens, the first person I call is Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke.”

For American readers, the best introduction to her work is ‘The Scattered Papers of Penelope’ (Graywolf 2009). It is the first full retrospective collection available in English, and translated from the Greek by an array of noted scholars, including the editor Karen Van Dyck.

Of wide ranging interests and subject matter, there are many threads to follow in the selected works.

The influence of Kazantzakis is worth searching. In many of her poems, such as 'In The Sky of Nothingness With Nothing' (translated here by James N Stone in poeticanet), the strains of her godfather's philosophical inquiry are profoundly present.

I peer at life through a keyhole.
If I look closely enough, maybe I’ll understand
how life always wins
while all of us lose.
How values are born
and branded onto the body
which is the first to melt.
I am dying inside my mind without any hint of sickness.
I live without the slightest need of encouragement.
At least I’m breathing. Who cares
if I can almost touch warm things
about to go up in flames.
I wonder what other connections
life will invent between the trauma
of absolute disappearance and the miracle
of every day immortality.
I owe my wisdom to fear;
I dispense with petals, sighs, subtleties.
I clutch earth, air, roots.
The useless things can go, I say.
Let me in to the sky of nothingness,
with next to nothing.

Her sensibilities as a woman poet reveal themselves, and are of particular interest, in poems that re-examine Greek history and myth through the female body — the bodies of Penelope and Helen in particular -- and her own body, scarred by illness.

I wasn't weaving, I wasn't knitting I was writing something erasing and being erased under the weight of the word

Anghelaki-Rooke maintained a delicate engagement/disengagement with politics. Some of her poems take the form of a journal kept during the first Gulf War, and there are a number of prose poems about modern violence and dictatorship in her new and selected collection.

This subject -- Anghelaki-Rooke's refusal to cooperate with the junta during the military takeover of Greece in the late 60s -- was of particular interest to researcher Myrnah Kostash (Univ Alberta), who quoted her as saying this:

"For me it wasn’t politics, it was a disease, a disaster. When your house catches fire, that isn’t politics. You have to find some water and put it out.” 

If someone with pro-junta sympathies argued that the junta was doing some good (the trains ran on time), Anghelaki-Rooke told Kostash, she was unmoved. “If an angel with big white wings had come down, smashed open my door, entered my house, taken me by the hands, and told me he was going to save me, I would kick him in the balls...’ (Some Greek Writers, Their Memory, Their Politics, Their Art in the 1980s, Brick Magazine 2006)

For a full view of Angehlaki-Rooke’s writing, one must turn to her lyric descriptions of the domestic world on the island of Aegina. These poems, of great and profound beauty, help us to to comprehend her humanity and human understanding.

In the taverna garden
it is spring and the blossoming
chestnut trees lean attentively
over the pensioners.
Beards, mustaches, all white,
a little laughter in their faded
blue eyes peeking out behind the beer froth
the slender waitress
like a doll just out of her box
with the divine department store tag
still around her neck.
The brown spots on the old men's hands
- maps of an unknown geography -
the flowers scattered by the wind
on the wooden table
and suddenly I understood silence:
it is the womb of all languages.

fr Lipu Revisited

To read the work of Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke is to experience THAT Greece, with all its complexities. 

On a visit to the poet in Aegina, Kostash noted how the poet invited her in and offere her 'a jug of water, and a bottle of ouzo, a bowl of pistachios cultivated on the family farm... she has just returned from a reading and lecture tour of the United States, and she told me that undeniably, the international exposure is “exciting , but not crucial. Being a writer in and of Greece is."

Despite many years in America and international profile, poems like these illustrate that the poet remained at heart and to the end, a truly Greek poet.

Readers of Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke in America and worldwide are the richer for it.