By Judith Rodriguez and Helen Nickas
February 26, 2016
In 1983 a handsome bilingual poetry book – with the original Greek facing Philip Grundy’s translations – won the Australia Book Council Award for best book of the year. Titled The Observatory, the book marked a new phase, as Dimitris Tsaloumas’ voice from “outside” was embraced by Australia’s still predominantly Anglo-Celtic literature.
Dimitris’ path to this award was long and anguished. Born on the Aegean island of Leros in 1921, he completed his high school education at the Lyceum in Rhodes. As with many other Greeks who lived through World War II and the ensuing catastrophic civil war, he left home for political reasons, migrating to Melbourne in 1952, aged 31.
Already a published poet in Greece, but with limited English, Tsaloumas had to begin life afresh. He battled not only for survival, but also against a cultural death. His determination proved fruitful. He soon found work, got married, had four children and studied for an arts degree at Melbourne University. Poetry had to wait a while but finally the inspiration returned. While he was earning a living teaching English and French to Australian high school children, he was writing poetry at night at a frenetic pace. The sixties and seventies were the most productive years in his life as a poet. Tsaloumas’ favourite form then was the epigram because of his need for discipline, economy and simplicity, as he often explained during interviews.
Six books of poetry, all in Greek, were published between 1974 and 1981. His accumulated collection of epigrams was published in Greece in 1981. Their diverse themes included a critical and ironic look at the political and social reality of the times, without naming specific time and place. His themes were universal. His poem Prodigal could have been written about the current crisis in Greece:
It’s time for parsimony and circumspection.
I told you before. We’re going through
inhuman times. Even the banks will feel the pinch
and already many merchants scour
their dusty books for long-forgotten debts.
…….
Take your children and head for the bush.
The years of squandering are over. By the early 1980s Tsaloumas was fully aware of the implications of a divided life. Melbourne was his city now – a welcoming city too, as poets and critics in Australia were beginning to discover his “new” voice. Judith Rodriguez remembers realising, as he read at the Carringbush Library in 1979, that here was a poet of stature. His collaboration with translator Philip Grundy made a way forward, while the eighties initiated Australian literature consisting of names other than the Anglo-Celtic.
Having seen his poems published bilingually, Tsaloumas knew he had to try writing directly in English. Being multilingual (Greek, Italian, French and English), he saw writing in English as a big challenge, albeit tinged with a sense of betrayal towards his mother tongue, as he often stated. In 1988, his first book titled Falcon Drinking – all in English – was published. Many publications in English followed, and awards including the Patrick White Award for major contribution to Australian literature; the Wesley M. Wright Prize for Poetry, for The Barge; the John Bray Award for The Harbour; and the Writers’ Emeritus Award, from the Australia Council.
Experimenting with language was part of his craft, not unlike Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov who wrote in their adopted English language, and Samuel Beckett who wrote in both English and his adopted French.
Tsaloumas always asserted that the English language gave him the distance he needed to write with more clarity and simplicity: “All my life long/ I’ve hankered after simplicity.” While the form of his poems changed his themes did not, because Tsaloumas never wrote specifically about immigrant displacement, exile and nostalgia. Instead, his themes encompassed a sense of universal loss. As he aged, his poems revealed his reflections as an elder, or a sage, on time passing and the fragility of human existence.
His recent publications included: Helen of Troy (UQP, 2007); Un chant du soir (Orphée, La Difference 2014) and an English/Greek edition of The Winter Journey (Owl Publishing 2014). In the past two decades, he wrote again in Greek, also translating many of his English poems into his native tongue. Over the past three decades he had divided his time between Melbourne and Leros but deteriorating health recently brought him to declare – with sadness – that he would not come back to Australia.
Finally, in Athens and then Leros, living with his daughter Matina’s family, he could no longer read or write. In one of Helen Nickas’ last telephone conversations, he seemed utterly frustrated: “All is in vain.” But when told that his work would live on, he declared: “Well, let’s say that I have tried to write in order to justify my existence in this world”. He has indeed.
After a short illness, he passed away quietly, lucid to the end. He leaves behind sons Chris and Mark, daughters Matina and Anna, and five grandchildren.
*Judith Rodriguez is a poet. Helen Nickas is a writer and publisher
**This was published at The Age http://www.theage.com.au/comment/obituaries/when-the-poetry-voice-from-outside-came-indoors-20160226-gn4amo.html
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