Kostas Karyotakis

Karyotakis was born on 30 October 1896 in Tripoli, in the Peloponnese. His father was a civil engineer whose job moved the family from town to town: Lefkada, Argostoli, Larissa, Kalamata, Athens, Chania. He studied law in Athens, took his degree in 1917, and tried briefly to work as a lawyer, but soon entered the civil service, where he would stay for the rest of his life, posted to prefectures in Thessaloniki, Syros, Arta, Athens and elsewhere. He hated the work and said so in his poems.

In 1922 he met the poet Maria Polydouri, who worked in the same office in Athens. Their relationship was short and painful; she went on to write some of the most passionate love poems in Greek, many of them for him, and died of tuberculosis in 1930. Karyotakis was also a union activist for civil servants, which did not help his career.

In early 1928 he was transferred, as a punishment, to Preveza, a small town in north-western Greece. He arrived in June and lasted barely a month. On 20 July he tried to drown himself and, by his own account, fought the waves for ten hours before giving up. The next day, 21 July 1928, he bought a revolver and shot himself under a eucalyptus tree near the shore. The note in his pocket, now famous, ends with mocking advice to anyone who can swim not to try drowning.

Karyotakis published only three collections: Ο πόνος του ανθρώπου και των πραγμάτων (The Pain of Man and of Things, 1919), Νηπενθή (Nepenthe, 1921) and Ελεγεία και Σάτιρες (Elegies and Satires, 1927). The early books are melancholy in the fashion of the time; the last is the one that counts. Its elegies speak of a life that has already failed, in a voice that is tender and ironic at once: «Είμαστε κάτι ξεχαρβαλωμένες κιθάρες» (We are a few broken-down guitars), begins the poem Είμαστε κάτι… (We Are Some…). In Ιδανικοί αυτόχειρες (Ideal Suicides) he describes people who plan their death carefully and then, in the last line, put it off.

The satires turn the same bitterness outwards. Δημόσιοι υπάλληλοι (Civil Servants) shows clerks slowly wearing away in their offices like columns; Μικρή ασυμφωνία εις Α μείζον (Little Discord in A Major) pokes fun at the fashionable poet Miltiadis Malakasis. His style is traditional in form, with rhyme and strict metre, but the language is everyday and the images come from modern life: trams, typewriters, cafés, the chemist's shop. Πρέβεζα, written in his last weeks, lists the jackdaws on the black walls, the policeman weighing a short portion, the band that plays on Sunday, a bank book with a first deposit of thirty drachmas, and ends with the thought that if only one of the townspeople died of disgust, everyone would enjoy themselves at the funeral. He also translated French poets such as Baudelaire and Verlaine, whose influence runs through his work.

Karyotakis is the one poet in the Greek school anthology whom teenagers tend to adopt as their own; Πρέβεζα, Ιδανικοί αυτόχειρες and Μικρή ασυμφωνία are read and memorised in Lyceum. His tone was imitated so widely after 1928 that critics coined the word καρυωτακισμός (Karyotakism) for gloomy verse in his manner, a term still used today. His poems have been set to music by many composers: start with Lena Platonos's album Καρυωτάκης (1982), and look for Mikis Theodorakis's opera about him. A television series Καρυωτάκης was broadcast by ERT in 2009. In Preveza a monument marks the spot where he died, and his name is on streets in Tripoli, Athens and Preveza. When Greeks sigh about their own civil service, someone usually quotes him.

• His suicide note ends with a postscript advising anyone who knows how to swim never to attempt suicide by sea: he had just spent ten hours failing to drown.
• Maria Polydouri's love poems addressed to him became, after both their deaths, a kind of national tragic romance; the two are often read together in school.
• He was punished with the transfer to Preveza partly because of his activity in the civil servants' union.
• One of his satires is addressed to the Statue of Liberty in New York, «που φωτίζει τον κόσμο» (which lights the world); he never set foot in America.