The Lonely and Heroic Path of Tasos Livaditis
He tries to look calm. To look like the others.
There are moments he succeeds.
But at night, he can’t sleep. His gigantic
wings don’t fit in his sleep.
A person’s life events aren’t much different from the events of the collective. Even the utmost isolation is the result of a social stir identified with the person, his agony, his vision.
Livaditis belongs to the poets whose fate walks side by side with the fate of the world. The war, occupation years, civil war, the fight for justice, fought with uneven armoury, graced us with poetry of unequivocal depth and significance. We discover this especially in Livaditis’s last books, in which, with the help of memory, he relives and summarizes his whole life. Yet the poet of his last years isn’t much different from the poet in his early creative days. The same symbols, same images, allegory and imagination are the same for whoever has the clear eye to recognize the similarities.
Back in 1950, he wrote:
This is a strange place.
For those who live quietly
protected behind walls
for those who control the world
from a map.
This place has a name.
Libros Libertad 