Mediterranean Modernism by Adam J. Goldwyn & Renée M. Silverman

Author:Adam J. Goldwyn & Renée M. Silverman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan US, New York

In the line “Ever since my childhood I have known the mirror of flowers,” the other is established as the object of lost love, to which the flower often alludes in Engonopoulos. 45 As for the mirror, its familiar blindness discourages any figuration of the relation with this lost object at the level of the imaginary. 46

Poetry’s “funnel” brings the “I” and “Polyxena” together again in one of Engonopoulos’s most famous poems “Νυχτερινή Μαρία” [“Night Maria”], which opens with the posthumous voice of the murdered poet, in a time which is that of the eternal present of the “event” 47 : “On the very next day after my death, or rather my being put to death, I got all the newspapers to read, that I might learn every possible detail concerning my execution. […] / And the one thing of note that I happened to read during those days was a most lengthy letter from the Italian, Guillaume Tsitzes, my one close friend, whom actually I never met and whose existence I even doubt. In short, the entire content of that letter of his was as follows: ‘You,’ he said, meaning Polyxena of course, ‘are an old gramophone with a bronze horn [“funnel”: χουνί] beneath a black cloth.’” The poem problematizes communication and exchange in dialogue in the figure of the black cloth which covers the gramophone up. 48 The latter’s oral connotations are further mitigated by the fact that it alludes to the inscription of the voice, 49 as well as by the insistence on the vocabulary on writing rather than speech: “note,” “read,” “letter.” More than that, it is not only spoken language but language in general that dries up in the immediacy of this “of course,” which names the poet/gramophone Polyxena, leaving no place for any symbolically negotiable relation between the two. Resisting translation in language, Polyxena emerges, rather, as an intensely charged, material signifier for what was lost under the “black cloth,” which is as irrecoverable as it is dear.

Now, this brings us back to our observations on the name as an enigma in Lautréamont, and on the connection between the name and the unknown in “Osiris.” “Polyxena” names what is proper to the poetic subject (“‘You’, he said, meaning Polyxena of course”) and calls attention to its inner difference, without explaining it away in language but preserving it veiled under the “black cloth.” This characteristic of the proper name emerges more clearly in the poem “Hydra” (The Clavichords of Silence, 1939), which also describes the crime suffered by the poet, who is deemed dangerous for “law-abiding citizens.” In the poem’s last stanzas, in first-person narrative, the poet refers explicitly to the process of naming:κι ωνόμαζα θλιμμένα

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