Tasos Leivaditis’ collection of prose-poems, “Handbook for a Good Death”, was recently released in the first full English translation by bespoke Texas-based publisher, Human Side Press, in a hand-bound limited edition. Taking its cues from the title, which in Greek is “Εγχειρίδιο ευθανασίας”, the publisher has presented the book as an εγχειρίδιο, a small handbook, a pocket-sized manual like those composed by ancient Greek philosophers such as the Stoic Epictetus. But where the Stoics provided moral advice on how to live a good life, Leivaditis offers poetic insights on how to die well (ευ-θανασία). And the power of these insights earned Leivaditis Greece’s highest honour for a work of poetry, the State Poetry Prize, when the book was originally published in 1979.

By this time Leivaditis had experienced all the trauma and bloodshed that Greece had suffered in the middle of the last century. Born in Athens in 1922 into a relatively affluent and cultured family, Leivaditis enjoyed a happy and carefree childhood, and took a keen interest in music, poetry and politics from a young age. But the onset of World War II changed everything: his father’s textile business went bankrupt and plunged the family into poverty, and the German occupation compelled Leivaditis to abandon his university studies and join the communist-led Resistance. The German troops had barely left Greek soil when the country was beginning to sink into a full-scale civil war. As the political crisis between Left and Right erupted in December 1944 into a violent confrontation (the Dekemvriana), Leivaditis was arrested and imprisoned, the first of many times he would come into conflict with the right-dominated state apparatus. With the escalation of the civil war in 1948, Leivaditis, along with countless other leftist writers and artists, was again arrested and, without ever being brought to trial, imprisoned for more than three years in various island prison camps, including the barbarous Makronisos. Soon after his release in 1951, he published his first three poetry books in quick succession, a remarkable triptych marked by the horrors of war and the yearning for justice and peace.

READ MORE: Poetry night in memory of Christella Demetriou

These early and politicized works were to give way to a more meditative and skeptical approach, as Leivaditis’ commitment to communism began to wane, especially after the revelations of the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956. During this time Leivaditis was working as a literary critic for the leftist newspaper, Avghe (‘Dawn’), but in April 1967 he would again find himself on the wrong side of history: a group of colonels seized power in a coup, the leftist press was duly shut down and Leivaditis was out of a job. In response to the dictators’ regime of censorship, the most established writers in the country refused to publish any of their own work, and Leivaditis followed suit, restricting himself to translating or adapting literary classics. As the dictatorship relaxed its grip Leivaditis began to publish his own work again, and after the reinstatement of democracy in 1974 he produced a series of captivating works in his now inimitable style and sensibility (which can be described as aphoristic and concentrated, lyrical and erotic, magical if not metaphysical, tinged with the wistfulness and melancholia of an autumn twilight), culminating in Enchiridion Euthanasiæ in 1979.

Below is a sample from my translation of Leivaditis’ “Enchiridion”:

MRS OLGA AND I

There is a certain queer time in the evening when something needs to happen, otherwise you’re done for — it’s that time when Mrs Olga, an impoverished seamstress, would place her fingers in warm water and I would knock on doors, one by one, I mean to say that our shameful actions always save us from an even more difficult situation, some people would even laugh at me for wearing mother’s hat, they forget that one gets dressed in the morning
solely in order to suffer.

TIMETABLE

Often, I remember, the grown ups, when I was a child, would talk about my future. That would usually happen at the dinner table. But I paid no attention to them, because I’d be listening to a bird on a tree outside.

Perhaps that’s why my future was so greatly delayed: the birds and the trees were innumerable.

THE LAMP

Every time I start to talk I know that I’ll say nothing: words will betray me, time will pass me by, others will stand outside the house unconcerned. Until, finally, I’ll be nothing more than someone who, holding a lamp, goes from room to room

lighting up the oblivion.

GESTURES

A great but vague pledge, as always happens in old rooms

or a tender gesture, as when you pin a lapel rose on a woman

who never existed.

Tasos Leivaditis, Enchiridion Euthanasiæ (Handbook for a Good Death), translated by N.N. Trakakis, is now available from www.humansidepress.com.

N.N. Trakakis teaches philosophy at the Australian Catholic University, and writes and translates poetry.