Zoe Karelli

Zoe Karelli, also spelled Zoi or Zoé Karelli, was the pen name of Chrysoula Argyriadou, born Chrysoula Pentziki in Thessaloniki in 1901. She chose the name herself. Her younger brother was the writer and painter Nikos Gavriil Pentzikis. She was educated at home, where she studied school subjects, foreign languages and music. She knew French, German, English and Italian very well, and later attended philology classes at the University of Thessaloniki as an auditor. In 1919 she married the agronomist Theodoros Argyriadis, and they had two sons.

She began to publish in her thirties. A short prose piece appeared in October 1935 in the first issue of the Thessaloniki magazine Το 3ο μάτι (The Third Eye), and her first poems followed in 1937. From 1945 to 1948 she worked closely with the magazine Κοχλίας (Snail), where she published poems, essays and translations. She lived in Athens from 1954 to 1961, but Thessaloniki remained her city.

Recognition came in her later years. She received the Second State Poetry Prize in 1956, the First State Poetry Prize in 1974 and a prize of the Academy of Athens in 1978. In 1982 she was elected a corresponding member of the Academy of Athens, and in 1988 Aristotle University of Thessaloniki made her an honorary doctor. From 1980 to 1986 she was vice-president of the Society of Thessaloniki Writers. She died on 16 July 1998.

Karelli published her first collection, Πορεία (Course), in 1940, and twelve books of poetry in all, among them Η εποχή του θανάτου (The Season of Death, 1948), Κασσάνδρα και άλλα ποιήματα (Cassandra and Other Poems, 1955) and Ο καθρέφτης του μεσονυκτίου (The Mirror of Midnight, 1958). In 1973 her poems were collected in two volumes covering 1940 to 1973. She also wrote verse plays: Σιμωνίς βασιλόπαις του Βυζαντίου (Simonis, Byzantine Princess, 1965) and Ορέστης (Orestes, 1971) were staged by the State Theatre of Northern Greece in 1966 and 1976. Her essays include a study of the French poet Paul Claudel and a reading of Waiting for Godot.

Her poetry is inward and questioning. Time, solitude, love, death and faith return again and again, and critics often describe it as a poetry of inner speech and existential anxiety. Figures from ancient myth, such as Cassandra, Orestes and Eurydice, help her speak about the present. Thessaloniki appears in poems such as Θεσσαλονίκη 904 μ.Χ. (Thessaloniki 904 AD), which recalls the attack on the city in that year.

She also looked closely at everyday life. In Λαϊκή αγορά (Street Market), women walk slowly back from the market with their shopping, and the poet notices green vegetables, red turnips, oranges and yellow lemons: small joys in a hard week.

Karelli is remembered as a central voice of literary life in Thessaloniki in the mid-twentieth century. Soon after her death, the magazine Νέα Πορεία devoted pages of its July–September 1998 issue to her memory, with a selection of her poems; the Centre for the Greek Language now offers this issue online. The Lilian Voudouri Music Library of Greece keeps a 1988 record, Ελληνικά ποιήματα: Η Ζωή Καρέλλη διαβάζει Καρέλλη (Greek Poems: Zoe Karelli Reads Karelli), with her own voice. Try a small task with her poem Λαϊκή αγορά (Street Market): find the colour words πράσινα (green) and κόκκινα (red) in the two lines quoted on this page. Then make your own sentence: Στη λαϊκή βλέπω πράσινα λαχανικά (At the street market I see green vegetables). This is our practice sentence, not a line from the poem.

• Karelli published her first poem in 1937, when she was already in her mid-thirties.
• For the magazine Κοχλίας she translated, alone or with others, texts by James Joyce, Plotinus, Longfellow, Robert Browning and T. S. Eliot.
• Her play Ορέστης (Orestes) retells an ancient myth in modern verse and was staged in Thessaloniki in 1976.
• Her pen name Ζωή means “life” in Greek.