AUTOPSY REPORT 2.11.75

…the body lay face-down in a parallel
connecting to the Vatican.
One of his hands full of blood gestured in open palm as insult to CPI
and the other clutching his genitals
to the culture specialists.
Blood clotting on his hair as leeches
on the veiled homosexual syndromes
of all men of earth throughout the realm.
His face disfigured by the framework of the class he denied
a black and blue volunteer of the ragtag proletariat.
The fingers of the left hand
broken by social realism
thrown away to floodlit trash.
The jaw broken
by the uppercut of a union organizer
a hired thug.
The ears chewed by a sonofabitch who couldn’t get an erection.
The neck broken and severed from the body
on the basic principle of independent function.
The mother everywhere.

That was the death of the communist and homosexual PASOLINI,
who every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, riding a small 50cc
bike, ran to make sure the cinemas would play the movies in
Egaleo, in Liverpool and most importantly in Ostia, he ran holding
tightly against his body the cans of movie reels and of rundown
neighborhoods. Also the little striped flag of poetry.

Goodbye.

∗∗∗

My own friends are blackbirds
who play see-saw on roofs of crumbling houses
Exarchia, Patisia, Metaxurgio, Metz.
They do whatever comes along.
Peddlers of cookbooks and encyclopedias
they build roads and connect deserts
barkers for Zinonos Str. dives
professional rebels
cornered in the old days and forced to drop their pants
now they swallow pills and alcohol to sleep
but they have dreams so they don’t sleep.
My own women-friends are taut wires
on roof terraces of old houses
Exarchia, Victoria, Koukaki, Ghizi.
You’ve pinned on them a million steel clothes’ pins
your guilt, party-meeting decisions, borrowed dresses
cigarette burn-marks, strange headaches
threatening silences, vaginitis
they fall in love with gays
trichomonas, late-periods
the telephone the telephone the telephone
broken glasses and no one for an ambulance.
They do whatever comes along.
My friends are always on the move
because you haven’t given them an inch.
All my friends paint with black
because you’ve debased the red for them
they write in a symbolic tongue
because your own’s only for ass-licking.
My friends are blackbirds and wires
in your hands. At your throat.
My friends.

∗∗∗

Yannis told me
not to lean my head on the wall
when reading or when smoking.
In prison he said
that’s why they always had headaches.
In the evening an argument broke out about those who had signed a statement.
Chronis said
that if they had invented the statement
we had invented not signing.
I said endurance has its limits people are made of flesh and bone
I spoke about the Stalinists and the method
of executing the very best as traitors
who died screaming LONG LIVE THE PARTY.
Sifis said
the statement is only the beginning.
Then they will ask who are your friends.
Then where do they live.
I said shit a million people, why? For what party?
Yorgos said for the one we are going to make.
Around the table we were 3 laborers, 2 who had signed, Yiorgos unemployed
and I in privileged position I work this year. We smoked.
They were drinking. Yannis most of all
—how in hell’s he going to ride the motorbike—
They didn’t want me speaking like that.
Afterwards I left earlier I had a headache
again I’d been leaning on the wall. They didn’t know I knew.
That I was never going to sign.
Not for any party.
That I had only thrown a jacket—January ’79—
over the freezing cold carried by those who signed. . .

TRANSLATION BY ANGELOS SAKKIS

Katerina Gogou (1940-1993) was a Greek anarchist poetess who is a representative figure of the ‘80s radical political and cultural scene of Exarchia. The impact of her poems, lately rediscovered and taken into consideration by the mainstream media, has always been influential in the radical movement.
Katerina was born in Athens in 1940 and the first years of her life were marked by the famine and the Nazi occupation, the resistance and the civil war. The defeat of the communists was followed by a period of strict censorship, police terror and island camps for political prisoners. Gogou finished high school and she started her parcours artistique following some drama and dance courses. The only place she could make a living as an actress, was in the Greek comedy industry, a major factor in social reproduction of capitalist and patriarchal values at the time. The roles assigned to her were those of the naive domestic servant, the silly little sister or the undisciplined school pupil. Despite this, Katerina developed a critical view of society, diverging not only from its progressive conformism but also from its conformist progressivism.
At the end of the ‘70s, Greek society experienced substantial changes and radicalization with an autonomous factory workers movement as well as factory and university occupations. It was in this period that she was writing her early poems. Her writings are a mirror of the marginalized parts of the society of the time, taking the side of drug addicts, prostitutes, criminals, homosexuals, the homeless and immigrants.
In 1978 Gogou published her first collection of poems, Three Clicks Left. At the same time she reengaged in cinema, this time as a protagonist in critical and intellectual movies. The first two of them were directed by her husband, Pavlos Tassios, with whom she had her only daughter, Myrto, while the third movie was directed by Andreas Thomopoulos.

What I fear most
is becoming “a poet”…
Locking myself in the room
gazing at the sea
and forgetting…
I fear that the stitches over my veins might heal
and, instead of having blur memories about TV news,
I take to scribbling papers and selling “my views”…
I fear that those who stepped over us might accept me
so that they can use me.
I fear that my screams might become a murmur
so that to serve putting my people to sleep.
I fear that I might learn to use meter and rhythm
and thus I will be trapped within them
longing for my verses to become popular songs.
I fear that I might buy binoculars in order to bring closer
the sabotage actions in which I won’t be participating.
I fear getting tired – an easy prey for priests and academics –
and so turn into a “sissy”…
They have their ways …
They can utilize the routine in which you get used to,
they have turned us into dogs:
they see to us being ashamed for not working…
they see to us being proud for being unemployed…
That’s how it is.
Keen psychiatrists and lousy policemen
are waiting for us in the corner.
Marx…
I am afraid of him…
My mind walks past him as well…
Those bastards…they are to blame…
I cannot -fuck it- even finish this writing…
Maybe…eh?…maybe some other day…

TRANSLATION by G.Chalkiadakis

∗∗∗

Gang-war
Aaaaaaaaa! This is the gang-war.
Grrrrreeks with big hats, I know, they called them republicas.
Square, biiiig, with long coats and gabardines, they had guns in their pockets, maybe
more guns inside. With their hands in their pockets they shot other Greeks and they walked fast as if in a great hurry or as if someone was chasing them.
I wanted -they did not let me, they said- to go out. Out I wanted. There I wanted. To the “It Is Forbidden”.
In our corner, Lambrou Katsoni and Boukouvalla, piles of eaten cats and famine corpses -they called them trash- parents and children.
I saw through the glass a bullet hitting my left hand palm, blood and the trash breathing. My mother was in the kitchen and my father I don’t even know where, I open the door and I go to the trash.
And there I saw, and I don’t give a dime if you don’t believe me, the most beautiful boy I had seen in my life. He was covered there, holding a machine gun, he had a short blond beard and long blond hair. His eyes…I don’t know to tell their colour. He looked like or was the Christ. “Go little girl, go”, he told me, “away from here. They will kill me”.
I took a deep breath to run fast.
“Bend so I can kiss you”, he told me.
I was already home.
The first man and the last I ever loved was an urban guerrilla

In 1980 her second poetic collection, Sui generis was published. The title of the collection referred to the Greek law no.410/1976 which fortified the regime against protesters, strikes and political dissents. In 1982 Katerina wrote The Wooden Coat and four years later she published the collection Absentees.
Her poetry started getting more and more personal, reflecting the early period of her drug addiction and personal anguish. At that time the social democratic government was absorbing the radicalization of the previous years with people exchanging their militant past for positions in the new state of affairs. In the meanwhile heroin began to circulate among the people that could not find their place in that society. The Return Journey was Katerina’s last book in life, published in 1990.
Katerina Gogou committed suicide in 1993 by taking an overdose of pills and alcohol.

Oily food in a plastic bowl in Acominatou street
outside the door, August
white like sheets the whores
40 degrees in shadow 4 o’clock p.m.
The legs open by themselves
Like dead oysters
The street is filled with coloured underwear
Pakistanis, anti-mosquito chemicals, limping women, snitches
And faggots injecting their breasts
Filled with carcinomas.
The street is filled
With destroyed fallopian tubes and discarded uteri
The belly is swollen
By useless sperm
– no child is conceived here
nothing is caught out of nothing
Magdalene and Vanou did the job
The money lenders and the saint of the neighbourhood are foul
First they get bribed and then they snitch on you
That’s the way it is
You have spread whores all across Metaxourgeio
Under the scorching sun with not a tree around – for shadow
Not even a stone wall – to lie against.
Enraged citizens
and religious groups have made a pact. They got organised.
They brought bottles
And petrol.
They will soak you. They will burn you, they say.
Like rats, they say.
Armoured vans filled with policemen
Impotent voyeurs, the doctors of the Vice Department
Crabs are taking a stroll all day on your brain
The whistle boys are the syphilis of your sleep
– whose side are they on.
Here we burn the witches. We fuck the whores.
A poster of Karamanlis
Your eyes a picture
Threads of handiwork
Bold wig, bruised nipples
And evictions are closing in around your hair and throat
They tie you hands and feet on the bed
You and us as well
The way and the tariff changes
The place and the name changes
In Larissa 40 degrees
Here at the cross, the sun

∗∗∗

Our life is pen knives
in dirty blind alleys
rotten teeth faded out slogans
bass clothes cabinet
smell of piss antiseptics
and moulded sperm. Torn down posters.
Up and down. Up and down Patission
Our life is Patission.
Washing powder which does not pollute the sea
And Mitropanos have entered our lives
Dexameni has taken him from us too
Like those high ass ladies.
But we are still there.
All our lives hungry we travel
The same course.
Ridicule-loneliness-despair. And backwards.
OK. We don’t cry. We grew up.
Only when it rains
We suck secretly on our thumb. And we smoke.
Our life is
Pointless panting
In set-up strikes
Snitches and patrol cars.
That’s why I tell you.
The next time they shoot us
Don’t run away. Count our strength.
Lets not sell our skin so cheeply, damn it!
Don’t. Its raining. Give me a fag

Loneliness
does not have the saddened colour
in the eyes of the cloudy bimbo.
She does not stroll abstractly and self-content
Shaking her hips in concert halls
And in frozen museums.
She is not the yellow cadres of “good” old times
And naphthalene in granny’s chests
Rosy ribbons and straw hats.
She does not open her legs with fake small laughters
A cow’s gaze rhythmic sighs
And assorted underwear.
Loneliness
Has the colour of Pakistanis, this loneliness
And she is counted inch by inch
Along with their pieces
In the bottom of the light-shaft.
She stands patiently queuing
Bournazi – Santa Barbara – Kokkinia
Touba –Stavroupoli – Kalamaria
Under all weathers
With a sweaty head.
She ejaculates screaming and smashes the front windows with chains
She occupies the means of production
She blows up private property
She is a Sunday visit in prison
Same step in the yard revolutionaries and penal prisoners
She is sold and bought minute by minute, breath by breath
In the slave markets of the earth – Kotzia is near here
Wake up early.
Wake up to see it.
She is a whore in the rotten-houses
The german drill for conscripts
And the last
Endless miles of the national highway towards the centre
In the suspended meats from Bulgaria.
And when her blood clots and she can take no more
Of her kind being sold so cheaply
She dances barefoot on the tables a zeibekiko
Holding in her bruised blue hands
A well sharpened axe.
Loneliness,
Our loneliness I say. Its our loneliness I am speaking about,
Is an axe in our hands
That over your heads is revolving revolving revolving revolving

∗∗∗

Rotten. / Rotten themes / moldy volumes                                                                                                                                                        devious libraries
bootlicking words slave words / frame-up jobs
fraudulent words
our life here is a bull
a thousand little fascist knives stuck in him
he vomits black our own blood
and you go on painting still-lifes
and past-prime book editions making money for                                                                                                                                        the tourist office.
Political parties—punctuation marks
ecology—ancient forerunners show us the way
only on the reverse
the good ones are thrown in deep holes
the public works and illustrious signatures
pave with asphalt over them
a big round crate is the earth like a ballot-box
so we can throw our ballots in
whatever color the salamander takes
it’s always rightwing.
Some drab acacias have undertaken Spring
roots aren’t so that we may go back
roots are for generating branches
and if they don’t
they’re dead sticks firewood
roadblocks Forward Forward ever more!
That’s what is needed
from submission to an uprising
from either all or nobody
from either everything or nothing
and us / they let us in through the service door
we eat their left-overs standing
wearing on our neck as an old-fashion scarf
the dead cat of civilization
but now I’m no longer alone
I’ve made I have connections
I’m not afraid of anyone
I pretend I’m living this life while I’m preparing                                                                                                                                          the other one
in daytime high noon I’ll grab bucket and brushes
we’re going to tear the flagstones
I’ll make a great downpour of leaflets
incitement slogans
bullet-words on paper
letters out of skin and blood
our poetry’s psychosomatic—
no one of you is ever going to seperate us
even my very life
and anyone who dares let him come this way                                                                                                                                               hand grenade
with safety pin off.

∗∗∗

The 4 point of the horizon
Above. Below. Right. Left.
Above, the sky and the things we aimed for.
— They come at night and mock us                                                                                                                                                                  in our dreams.
Below, the earth and things aiming at us
— they shovel dirt over us even before we’re done.
Right, tourist islands banks and rock
— offering us electroshock in the arms of                                                                                                                                                      Raquel Welch.
Left, the ghost of Russia driving a Mig-25
is chasing us with a big rubber stamp
— and we collect tiny bits of our perseverance
for the party verdicts at the Moscow Trials.
…………………………………………………………………………
The neighborhood dime-store
to catch a breath
but even here I’ve got to pay
for the shopkeeper’s tolerance
an ex-cop selling the “People’s Struggle”
I don’t know what to buy so as not to be                                                                                                                                                         an accomplice. Understand?
The 4 points of the horizon
Dressed as banks pilots Marxists nurses
are chasing us. I have to make a call.
What’s the number?
Where can I stop and take a single breath?
They’ve set us up everywhere.
The corps trapped by the gun
women by their sex
Justice by the laws
organizations by their dissidents
doctors by electroshock.
Yes. Let’s go to the Ilion movie theater tonight.
There the heroes have red cheeks
and always win in the end.

TRANSLATION BY ANGELOS SAKKIS

∗∗∗

MAY 25

One morning I’ll open the door
and go out into the street
like yesterday
And I won’t think of anything but
a bit of my father
and a bit of the sea — all that has left me —
and the city. The city they wasted.
And our lost friends.
I’ll open the door one morning
like yesterday and go straight
into the fire
shouting “fascists!!”
raising barricades and throwing stones
with a red flag
lofty and shining in the sun.
I’ll open the door — not that I’m scared
but I want to tell you I didn’t make it
and you have to learn
you shouldn’t go into the street
without arms, like me
— because I didn’t make it —
otherwise you’ll be lost like me
a “who cares” a “has been”
broken into pieces
by the sea, childhood
and red flags.
One morning
I’ll open the door
and lose myself
in the dream of revolution
with the vast loneliness
of streets that’ll be burning
with the immense loneliness
of paper barricades
with the label — don’t believe them —
Provocateur.

TRANSLATION BY JACK HIRSCHMAN

***

My head in smithereens
from the vise of your flea markets

at rush hour and against the
current
I will light a huge fire
and in there I’ll throw all Marxist
books
so that Myrto never finds out
the causes of my death
You can tell her
that I could not bear Spring or that I went through a red light.
Yes. That is more believable.
Red. That you tell her.

The “idiomynon” was a Greek law that prohibited “insurrectional” speech. The poem’s title references the public sphere, but the speaker’s concern for Myrto drives home the personal stakes for the speaker. From your perspective as a translator, how important is it to you that an English-language reader understand the politics of Gogou’s poems?

In my opinion, political concepts within Katerina Gogou’s poetry can be understood and enjoyed even by readers who are not well informed of Greece’s political history. The “Idionymon” Act of Law, which sentenced to the penalty of six months imprisonment anyone who attempted to apply ideas that manifested subversion or to overthrow the social system through violent means, or to cause partial detachment of the Greek State, or implementing through actions proselytism, was brought down in a superficial way, in 1974, after the fall of the Greek Military Junta. However,  up until 1980, the secret service of the Greek State kept and renewed its secret records and files that contained the political acts and profiles of every Greek citizen. These files were actually burned and destroyed after 1981.

Nevertheless, Gogou’s use of the word “Idionymon” in the title is totally her personal idiosyncracy and choice. It actually retains its polysemous meanings  in the framework  of the anticommunist campaign until the Junta, but Gogou gives it meaning from an anarchist’s point of view.  After the removal of the original “Act of Idionymon crime,” the New Democracy party’s government passed a new law in 1976, which shielded and protected the security forces, the Military Peacemaking Groups, and the Riot Police from individual protesters and strikers.

Katerina Gogou refers to this new law in the same way that the anarchist circles of the time did, as “Idionymon,” the hidden offspring of the old statutory law, while at the same time she was preserving her own, private meaning for the word. Gogou’s poetry is full of ecclesiastical, urban  and surreal images. We would not call this iconography a delirium (even though she does mention delirium tremens), for she achieves a cinematic record of reality, which is beyond time and political connotations. An iconography that retains its disgusting appeal. Protesters and anarchists will always fight with riot police, as Gogou describes. Be they at the Puerta Del Sol in Madrid, and the anti-austerity movement, or during the Occupy Wall Street movement, or the riots at Brooklyn Bridge. The political and economic impasse will be the same, and the hyper-real images caused by abuse of drugs in combination with alcohol, in any language, will remain enigmatic as in the poetry of Gogou.

Transom

THREE CLICKS LEFT / TRANSLATION BY JACK HIRSCHMAN
Black Birds / An illustrated collection of poems by Katerina Gogou / Forlaget Nemo 2016

© Translation Eva Johanos, G. Chalkiadakis, Ilias Kolokouris

POETIC COLLECTIONS
Three clicks left, 1978
Sui generis, 1980
The wooden coat, 1982
Absentees,1986
The month of the frozen grapes, 1988
Nostos, 1990
My name is Odyssey, 2002