Kiki Dimoula

Vasiliki Radou was born in Athens on 6 June 1931 and lived in the city all her life. After finishing school she joined the Bank of Greece in 1949, as a clerk, and stayed for a quarter of a century. Her first small collection, Ποιήματα (Poems), appeared in 1952, when she was twenty-one; she later disowned it as juvenile work. In 1954 she married the poet Athos Dimoulas, fifteen years older, who encouraged her and whose surname she kept as her pen name. They had two children.

Her early books, Έρεβος (Erebus, 1956), Ερήμην (In Absentia, 1958) and Επί τα ίχνη (On the Trail, 1963), attracted little notice. The breakthrough was Το λίγο του κόσμου (The Little of the World, 1971), followed ten years later by Το τελευταίο σώμα μου (My Last Body, 1981). The death of her husband in 1985 lies behind Χαίρε ποτέ (Hail Never, 1988), which won the State Poetry Prize and made her famous far beyond literary circles.

From then on each new book was an event: Η εφηβεία της λήθης (The Adolescence of Oblivion, 1994), Ενός λεπτού μαζί (One Minute Together, 1998), Χλόη θερμοκηπίου (Greenhouse Grass, 2005) and more. In 2002 she was elected to the Academy of Athens, in 2009 she received the European Prize for Literature in Strasbourg, and in 2010 the Grand State Prize for her life's work. She died in Athens on 22 February 2020, aged eighty-eight.

Dimoula's poems look like short, conversational notes and turn out to be full of traps. Her favourite device is to take the language of grammar and bureaucracy literally. In Πληθυντικός αριθμός (Plural Number), from Το λίγο του κόσμου, she declines love and fear like words in a school exercise: love is a noun, singular, «of defenceless gender». In Σημείο αναγνωρίσεως (Identification Mark) she addresses a statue of a woman with bound hands and insists on calling her a woman, not a statue. Abstract nouns, absence, oblivion, chance, memory, walk through her poems as if they were people with jobs and moods.

Her other great subject is the photograph. Old snapshots, with their frozen smiles and lost backgrounds, let her write about time without ever saying anything solemn: the people in the picture have gone, the picture has stayed. Grief, after 1985, becomes a constant companion that she teases rather than mourns; Χαίρε ποτέ (Hail Never) plays on the greeting «χαίρε» and the word «ποτέ» (never).

The language is everyday Athenian Greek twisted at the joints: a verb put in the wrong tense, an adjective attached to the wrong noun, a cliché taken apart to show its hidden meaning. Readers who do not normally read poetry quote her; linguists study her. Her collected poems were published as Ποιήματα in 1998, and the later books kept the same voice to the end, drier and sadder but never pompous.

Dimoula was that rare thing, a difficult poet who sold tens of thousands of copies; her books from the publisher Ίκαρος are in every Greek bookshop. Poems such as Σημείο αναγνωρίσεως and Πληθυντικός αριθμός are in the school anthology for the Lyceum, and teachers use them to show that grammar can be alive. Recordings of her reading her own poems, in a low, ironic voice, are easy to find online: listen to Πληθυντικός αριθμός in her voice and then read it again. Several poems have been set to music, and lines like «Ο έρωτας, όνομα ουσιαστικόν» are quoted on cards and walls. When she died in 2020, newspapers across Europe ran obituaries, and for days Greeks shared her lines on social media.

• She worked at the Bank of Greece from 1949 to 1974, twenty-five years of counting other people's money by day while writing about absence by night.
• She published her first book at twenty-one and later refused to count it among her works.
• In 2002 she became the third woman ever elected to the Academy of Athens, and the first woman poet.
• Her poem Πληθυντικός αριθμός is a grammar lesson: it declines love, fear and memory by number and gender.