Andreas Emberikos

Andreas Embirikos is often noted as the first Greek surrealist poet; he was also a novelist, a photographer, a literary critic, and a psychoanalyst. He is considered a contemporary with poets such as Giorgos Seferis, Odysseus Elytis, and Yannis Ritsos. Embirikos was born in Brăila, southeastern Romania, to a wealthy family. His father owned a well-established international shipping business. He lived in Paris between 1926 and 1931, where he became acquainted with André Breton and other surrealists. During the same period, he received an education in psychoanalysis from René Laforgue. 

In 1935, Embirikos gave a lecture in Athens on surrealism and published his first collection of surrealist poetry. In modern Greek, the collection is titled Υψικάμινος (approximately translated “Blast-Furnace”). It was around this time that he began to practice psychoanalysis in Greece, which he continued to do until 1951. 

In Greece: Books and Writers (National Book Centre of Greece, 2001), writer Yoryis Yatromanolakis notes:

“Blast-Furnace” holds a unique place in modern Greek poetry. No poet prior to “Blast-Furnace”—in spite of indications that surrealism was known in Greece before 1935—and no poet since, has put together a book so heretical, so cryptic and so “difficult”—one which nevertheless sold out in no time, “not because it was of interest, but because it was considered so scandalous, written by someone deranged,” as the poet himself reminisces … Every poem, he [Embirikos] says, is a “poem-event,” dynamic and self-contained, and its elements remain “free of any compromised or standardised aesthetic, moral or logical construction.” The recipe was never to be repeated, in spite of the fact that the experiment succeeded in bringing to the forefront the most authentic Greek surrealist writing. (Translation by Jane Assimakopoulos)

Much of Embirikos’s work was published after World War II. For more than two decades, he worked on Ο Μέγας Ανατολικός (approximately translated “The Great Eastern”), which is considered one of the boldest and longest prose works written in modern Greek. He died in Athens in 1975. “The Great Eastern”was published in eight volumes beginning in 1990.

Little of Embirikos’s work has been translated into English. A collection of his stories, Amour Amour (Green Integer, 2003) was translated by Nikos Stangos and Alan Ross. This collection was originally published in Greece as Γραπτά ή Προσωπική Μυθολογία (“Writings or Personal Mythology”)in 1960. Translations of Embirikos’s writing have also appeared in several anthologies, includingSurrealism in Greece: An Anthology (University of Texas Press, 2008) and Short: An International Anthology of Five Centuries of Short-Short Stories, Prose Poems, Brief Essays, and Other Short Prose Forms (Persea Books, 2014).