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It is raining.
Good, the rain will take away the rest of the teargas in the atmosphere and hopefully there won't be any more fires and new riots this afternoon.
Greece is in uproar, and while I play it intellectual by pondering about the "one", a few feet away from me, outside these walls, reality is present with a very unknown future.
My refuge in these dark days is my bookshelf, my poetry.
And Bertolt Brecht. Brecht' s poetry.
The odd thing is that Brecht only published a single book of poems in German in his lifetime: the Hauspostille or 'Devotions for the Home'. Many of his poems were circulated privately or stayed in the drawer; others were performed, printed in ones and twos, or appeared with his other work in a regular series of offprints called Versuche – 'Essays' or 'Experiments'. The ordering, collecting and publishing of his poems seemed not at all to interest him. Rather, he held the "professional" lyric poet to be a figure of horror and ridicule.
Greek translations of Brecht's works appeared during a specific period of Greek history, the military dictatorship of 1967-1974.
The dictatorship sought to safeguard what they perceived as the Helleno-Christian character of the nation by suppressing dissident voices through physical and symbolic violence. Censorship played a dual role: it resulted in a decrease in artistic production but simultaneously ushered in a period of change in the publishing field, which soon became the main arena of resistance to censorship. New, politically engaged players responded to the call for publications with a social mission, books that could bring readers closer to modern thought, awaken Greek society and kindle the desire for democracy. The relaxation of official censorship in 1969 led to a massive production of books with broad political content, countering a trend of non-threatening thematics that characterised the previous decade.
There is an interesting text analysis and the study of paratextual elements that reveal how Brecht's works are framed in a way that promotes a critical attitude towards the regime. There is a distinct tendency to enhance aspects of the text that encourage Greek readers to view themselves as an in-group, a community set in opposition to an outgroup formed by the junta and the current political leaders. This is achieved in part by the choice of pronouns, the change of clause structure, the activation of culturally loaded and local references, including historical events, social practices etc, as well as framing strategies in paratextual material, including the manipulation of colour and images. As such, the books constitute euphemisations of political discourse in a context where the political field was undergoing a crisis. In this sense, Greek translations of Brecht's works can be seen as instantiations of contemporaneous or already established trends of defiance against the regime.
But this is not the answer I am looking for in these dark days, and poltical messages don't come over as any consolation.
Back to Brecht. And there it is, a short poem, only four lines, but the words once again sink down very deep and touch a thousand thoughts and emotions:
In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will be singing
About the dark times.
Poetry was for Brecht something he did on the side. He didn't want it to be his living, but it remained his primary expression. It was his mode of thought, of scrutiny, of play, and his best argument against his drama: the one deliberate, stylized, engineered and engineering – he endlessly revised his plays to bring them ideologically into conformity with what was expected of them – the other anarchic, intelligent and trustworthy.
His poetry is beautiful.
And some of his most powerful and personal poetry was written when he lived in exile in Denmark, after the rise of the Nazis
I believe he is one of the consummate writers of exile literature in the Twentieth Century. His writings maintain an intriguing balance between a sentimentality and longing, mixed with ideological backbone and resolve, a determination to engage and fight, a will to vanquish any oppression.
And this very short poem may be the consummate work of exile poetry.
There will be singing!
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