Nikos Gatsos

Gatsos was born on 8 December 1911 in Asea, a village in Arcadia in the central Peloponnese, and the mountain villages of that region stayed in his imagination all his life. He went to Athens as a teenager, studied philology at the University of Athens, and in the 1930s became part of the circle of young writers around the magazine Τα Νέα Γράμματα, where he met Odysseas Elytis, who remained his closest friend.

In 1943, in the middle of the German occupation, he published Αμοργός, a poem of about twenty pages that stunned his friends and that he reportedly wrote in a single night. He never published another collection. Instead, from the late 1940s on, he wrote for the theatre and above all for music, beginning with the songs he and Manos Hadjidakis made for Karolos Koun's 1949 staging of A Streetcar Named Desire, including «Χάρτινο το φεγγαράκι».

For decades he was a fixture of the Athens cafés, a large, quiet man who held court at a café table in the centre of town, talked to everyone and wrote little down. He worked for Greek radio, translated Federico García Lorca, and kept producing lyrics into his last years. He died in Athens on 12 May 1992 and was buried, as he had wished, in Asea.

Αμοργός is named after an island in the Cyclades that Gatsos reportedly never visited. It is a surrealist poem in free verse, prose and folk-song metres, in which images of the Greek countryside, the sea, the war and death follow each other with the logic of a dream; its opening line, «Με την πατρίδα τους δεμένη στα πανιά και τα κουπιά στον άνεμο κρεμασμένα» (With their homeland tied to the sails and the oars hung on the wind), is one of the most quoted in modern Greek poetry. It influenced a whole generation of poets.

His lyrics are the other half of his work and reached far more people. With Hadjidakis he wrote «Χάρτινο το φεγγαράκι» (1949), «Μίλησέ μου» (Speak to Me), «Τ' αστέρι του βοριά» (The North Star) and the album Αθανασία (Immortality, 1976), as well as «Ο εφιάλτης της Περσεφόνης» (Persephone's Nightmare), an early ecological song about the ruined landscape of Eleusis. With Theodorakis he wrote «Μυρτιά» (Myrtle) and other songs of the 1960s. With Stavros Xarchakos he wrote the entire soundtrack of Kostas Ferris's film Ρεμπέτικο (1983), including «Καίγομαι, καίγομαι» (I'm Burning) and «Μάνα μου Ελλάς» (Greece, My Mother), songs that sound like old rebetika but are entirely his. His lyrics use the plainest words, the rhythm of folk song and a sudden, unexpected image; they are poetry disguised as popular music, and generations of singers from Nana Mouskouri to Maria Farantouri have recorded them.

Start with «Χάρτινο το φεγγαράκι», sung by Nana Mouskouri and by Melina Mercouri: four short lines of chorus that any beginner can follow. Then listen to Xarchakos's Ρεμπέτικο soundtrack, which is played in every Greek taverna, and to Hadjidakis's Αθανασία. Many of these songs are sung at school celebrations, at parties and in the street, and most Greeks could sing a dozen Gatsos lyrics without being able to name a single line of Amorgos. Nana Mouskouri, whose career began with Hadjidakis, recorded dozens of his songs, so his words have travelled further than those of almost any other Greek poet. Among lyricists, Greeks tend to put him first: the poet who proved that a popular song could be literature.

• He published only one book of poems in his life, Amorgos (1943), and is said to have written it in a single night.
• He gave his poem the name of an island, Amorgos, that he reportedly never set foot on.
• «Χάρτινο το φεγγαράκι» was written for a 1949 Athens production of Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire, with music by the 24-year-old Manos Hadjidakis.
• His translation of Lorca's Blood Wedding (Ματωμένος γάμος) is still the standard Greek version used on stage.