The book is a selection from the work of Giorgos Sarantaris. It comprises one hundred and seventy-five poems written between 1932 and 1940, when the poet returned from Italy, where he had been studying, and settled in Athens, to devote himself to poetry and philosophy, to enlist in the army and to die a year later, in February 1941.
- Pages: 224
- ISBN: 978-960-7721-28-0
- Publication: 1997
- Dimensions: 20,5 x 13,5
- Categories: Literature, Books, Poetry
George Sarantaris
Giorgos Sarantaris was born in Constantinople, the son of Dimitris Sarantaris and Malthina (née Sotiriou), who hailed from Leonidi in Kynouria. From 1912 to 1931 he lived in Italy, where his family had settled. From a young age he turned to literature and the study of philosophy, whilst also studying foreign languages. He studied law at the universities of Bologna and Macerata, and obtained a doctorate. In Italy, he wrote his first verses, in Italian and Greek, and published poems in Italian and French.
In 1931 he returned to Greece and entered literary circles. During the war of 1940 he was conscripted in Albania and fell ill with typhoid fever. He was transferred to Athens, where he died in 1941.
He made his first appearance on the Greek literary scene in 1933 in the pages of the magazine Nea Zoi with the short story Martha’s Life, through which he introduced the genre of the French anti-novel (antiroman) to Greece. In the same year, he also published his first collection of poetry, *The Loves of Time*. This was followed by *The Heavens* (1934) and *The Stars* (1935), as well as many more poems published in the magazines *Nea Grammata*, *Nea Estia*, Kyklos, and Macedonian Days (Thessaloniki).
His final collection of poetry was ‘To the Friends of Another Joy’, published in early 1940, which was received with enthusiasm by Mitsos Papanikolaou. Giorgos Sarantaris was one of the first innovative Greek poets of the interwar period and one of the first proponents of existentialism in our country. His philosophical reflection centred on the search for the absolute in the face of the transience of human existence, expressed through the abolition of traditional poetic form and linguistic expression. He was influenced, among others, by the thought of Ungaretti, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Sestov and Berdiaev. He also engaged in philosophical essays and poetic translations.
