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Collected here are the three poetry books with which one of Greece’s finest writers, Tasos Leivaditis, made his literary debut in 1952-53. Greece was at this time emerging out of the devastating destruction of World War II and the subsequent civil war (1946-49). Leivaditis, on the side of the defeated leftists in the civil conflict, paid for his political affiliation by being exiled to concentration camps on various islands for more than three years. Upon his release in 1951, he was to publish in quick succession three remarkable volumes of poetry which draw upon his experiences of violence and persecution, but which are framed by a broader commitment to justice and freedom, love and peace. The three books were immediate successes, and continue to be widely read and discussed in Greece today. Now, for the first time, they are made available to an English-reading audience, who are sure to find in the depth and intensity of Leivaditis’ verses a compelling witness not only to past terrors and tragedies but also to the irrepressible desire to vindicate life and love, because “this star is for all of us.”
‘Tasos Leivaditis poetically dwells in the indeterminate and interstitial space in which the cruel traumas of history are transformed into an imaginatively sublime meditation on human interiority and its existential destiny. More than the work of his compatriot Yannis Ritsos, or many other European poets of his postwar generation, Leivaditis’ poetry glorifies the marginal, the insignificant and the ordinary that have been crushed by injustice and abuse of power and restores them to their pristine completeness and formal harmony. His three early works which we read in the superb translation by Dr Nick Trakakis, a poet of great merit and distinction himself, delineate the great dilemmas of conscience that marked the postwar European experience. The Triptych poems pave the way for Leivaditis’ restorative catharsis that will be accomplished by his later poetry, some of which has already been translated by Dr Trakakis.’ —Vrasidas Karalis, Sir Nicholas Laurantus Professor of Modern Greek, University of Sydney, Australia
Translator’s Note; Introduction; Battle at the Edge of the Night; This Star Is For All of Us; The Wind at the Crossroads of the World; Appendix I: ‘Don’t Take Aim At My Heart’; Appendix II: ‘Literature On Trial’.