Katerina Gogou

Katerina Gogou was born in Athens on 1 June 1940. She was on stage from the age of five, a «child wonder» in children's shows, and studied acting with Takis Mouzenidis and dance at the school of Koula Pratsika. In 1952 she made her film debut in Ο άλλος (The Other One), and through the 1960s she played lively supporting roles in the comedies of Finos Film, among them Το ξύλο βγήκε από τον παράδεισο (The Cane Came from Paradise, 1959) and Δράκουλας και Σία (Dracula and Co., 1960). Many Greeks still know her face from these films without knowing her name.

After the fall of the dictatorship in 1974 she turned her back on commercial cinema and moved close to the extra-parliamentary left and the anarchist milieu. She acted in the new, serious Greek cinema: in Το βαρύ πεπόνι (The Heavy Melon, 1977), directed by Pavlos Tasios, then her husband, which won her the best actress award at the Thessaloniki Film Festival; in Nikos Koundouros' 1922 (1978); in Παραγγελιά! (1980) and in Όστρια (1984). She had a daughter, Myrto, to whom she addressed poems. From 1978 she published poetry and read it in public, in a hoarse, unforgettable voice. Her last years were hard, marked by addiction and illness. She died in Exarchia on 3 October 1993, at fifty-three.

Τρία κλικ αριστερά (Three Clicks Left, 1978) was a shock. There was nothing elegant about it: these were short, angry, prose-like poems written in the language of the street, with slang and swear words, about poverty, prisons, drugs, police violence, women's bodies and the solitude of the big city. The book was widely read and was translated into English by the American poet Jack Hirschman as Three Clicks Left, published in the United States in 1983.

She went on with Ιδιώνυμο (1980), whose title recalls the notorious 1929 law against «subversive» ideas, Το ξύλινο παλτό (The Wooden Overcoat, 1982), an image of the coffin, Απόντες (The Absent, 1986), Ο μήνας των παγωμένων σταφυλιών (The Month of the Frozen Grapes, 1988) and Νόστος (Nostos, 1990); Με λένε Οδύσσεια (My Name Is Odyssey) appeared posthumously in 2002. Her Athens is not the city of the Acropolis but of the neighbourhoods, the cheap flats, the riot police and the night. Critics long treated her as a marginal figure; today she is read as one of the most original voices of the poetry of the 1970s and 1980s, a witness of the generation that came after the Polytechnic uprising.

Gogou is a cult poet. Her books are constantly reprinted, her lines are written on the walls of Exarchia and quoted on placards at demonstrations, and her poems have been set to music and used in films, which has brought her to new generations. Her old Finos comedies still play on Greek television, so many viewers meet the actress before the poet. For a learner, reading one short poem from Τρία κλικ αριστερά next to a walk through the streets of Exarchia is a lesson in a Greek that no textbook teaches.

• She appeared on stage as a child of five and in films from the age of twelve.
• Τρία κλικ αριστερά was translated into English by Jack Hirschman and published in the United States in 1983.
• Her collection Ιδιώνυμο shares its name with the 1929 law used to persecute communists and dissidents.
• She won the best actress award at the Thessaloniki Film Festival for Το βαρύ πεπόνι (1977), the year before her first book of poems.