Poet Dimitris Tsaloumas’s Unhoped-for Summer

“In notes by his translators in the books he then sent me, over the years, I learn: that he studied the violin on Rhodes early in life, and was a musician-poet from the very beginning; that his book-length poem, Six Improvisations on The River, was written in response to the Rwanda Massacre; and that he married and had four children in Australia. I also learn, from careful reading of the bilingual editions, that Tsaloumas was supremely ‘lucky in his translators.’ Slaloming around in the same two languages, English and Greek, since age ten, I have some grasp of what he was up against transitioning from writing poetry in Greek; then, Italian; and, finally, English. I also have some understanding of the perils faced by translators in rendering Modern or Demotic Greek poetry into other languages.”—Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

Hapax Legomenon

By Elizabeth Boleman-Herring, Publishing-Editor

“As all first-generation Greek-Australian writers have a home somewhere else, it is inevitable that memory characterizes their writings. In order for them to make sense of their present situation, they have to examine their past. It is often said that diasporic writers look forward by going backwards. In order to do that, they employ mneme, or memory, the opposite of lethe, which is to forget.”—Helen Nickas

“Yet to have held something in your hands/is worth the bitterness of losing it.”—Dimitris Tsaloumas, from “The Observatory”

PENDLETON South Carolina—(Hubris)—March/April 2026—Even the most vivid events in my past are becoming pixelated, further evidence that some of us sip from the Lethe long before (well, it is to be hoped long before) we press our coins into Charon’s welcoming hand.

Preparing to send off to poet Alicia Stallings some slim (usually slim, aren’t they?) volumes of poetry from my dwindling Greek library—which I am doing my level best to bequeath, as I live and breathe, to much younger and able readers—I came upon five books by Greek-Australian poet Dimitris Tsaloumas. 

The still familiar covers caught me up short and sent my fingers scurrying to Wikipedia: was Tsaloumas still among the living? He was not, alas. I had not thought of him in years, but the painting on the cover of The Observatory took me right back to the Dodecanese, without benefit of analog transport. (In my mind, always, Patrick Leigh Fermor’s writing comes accompanied by painter John Craxton’s covers; and Tsaloumas’s calls up, in the same instant, Australian painter Michael Williams’ images of Leros.)

Back in the summer of 1990, as Publishing Editor of The Southeastern Review: A Quarterly Journal of the Humanities in the Southeastern Mediterranean, I published five of Tsaloumas’s poems. That much I remembered well. What I had forgotten was revealed to me as I pulled all his books down from a high shelf: tucked into them were three letters from the poet, dated August 22, 1990, and November 5 and 27, 1995. Tsaloumas and I crossed paths in midair several times, never meeting, but I had completely forgotten our brief correspondence. 

Kevin Andrews and my mother’s untimely deaths, and my return to the US from Greece in 1992, ended The Southeastern Review, and severed my ties to my adopted homeland for a decade; Tsaloumas, born in 1921, died in 2016, I have just learned: for many of us, Wikipedia has replaced the back of the local newspaper as the bearer of bad news.

Faithful readers of my column may well accuse me of contributing, increasingly, to the minutes of a bespoke Dead Poets Society (see “James Dickey: The Toad in My Word Garden,” and “The Silences of Paula Goff”). Still, as I begin to forget, I hope that the now dead poets I have read, loved, and published continue to find new readers, and, as Tsaloumas’s books go off to Alicia Stallings, I will summon him back for a moment here.

For Southeastern, I asked contributors to write their own back-of-the-book biographical blurbs; in 1990, Tsaloumas wrote of himself: 

[Born on the Dodecanese island of Leros, I] grew up in the shadow of fascism. Fear and hatred coloured my experience of life up to the end of the war and for some time beyond. When in 1935 Rome decided to Italianize the population of the Dodecanese and all Greek schools were closed, I had no alternative but to finish my education in Italian schools. But I have no regrets about that. I owe whatever taste I developed for music and poetry to my Italian teachers—mostly intelligent, liberal-minded and sympathetic. Ironically, I wasn’t to experience fascism at its worst until our own [far-right, Greek] gendarmerie arrived to take over from the BMM [British Military Mission] in 1948. All those who held views in conflict with the gospel of the Royal House of Greece, sponsored by Churchill’s missionaries and later improved on by the Americans, were denounced as Reds, blacklisted and persecuted, while the most unsavoury characters in our midst, the Nazi collaborators, the informers, the black marketeers, etc., simply changed alliances and prospered. I left in 1951 in bitter disappointment and with great difficulty. I was denied exit from [Greece] on the grounds that people like me could only harm the country’s reputation abroad. I studied at the University of Melbourne and taught in State secondary schools from 1958 to 1982. Twenty years and more were to pass before I saw Greece again. I am still exploring this great gap. I feel that one must restore to one’s life its sense of wholeness and continuity if one is to find any meaning in the present.

The five poems published in the Summer 1990 issue of the Review were a grouping chosen by Tsaloumas, himself, and his experience of loss, dislocation, and reckoning colors them all. I share two here:

Evening Walk
By Dimitris Tsaloumas

A crow from the far hills heads straight
for home, unmindful of seabirds lingering

over the dark-pebbled shore. The afterglow
begins to melt into a light of stars.

Walking over those hills, I observed
the asphodels: bent stalks portend a harsh

winter. I think of all this night ahead
and long to be with you but can’t remember

where I’ve seen you or when. In my house
there is no record but of the seasons

in repetition; no sign of give and take,
or of my due, paid and long since spent.

Love Song
By Dimitris Tsaloumas

Bring me the papers, my dear,
and let us test the truth of dreams.

I no longer fear the new.
What of my foundering stocks?

I spent my bitterness in the years
of plenty, studying the hope

of fools. Let us be generous
and true beyond the promise

of politicians. This place
will never age, despite the failure

of spring. The noise you hear
under the moonflood wind

is sea sound, the spiral message
of the conch that has no meaning

but memory, before the word;
no fear of separation from rock

and thunder. Like friends arriving
for an unhoped-for summer,

new poems lean on the parapets
of a slant-hooting ship and wave

across the throbbing harbour,
above the din of churning wheels.

Turning the glossy pages of The Southeastern Review, some four decades on, I remember how proud I was of the publication back then, and what a coup it was, in late-1980s-Athens, to be told by the president of the (admittedly ersatz, trumped-up) college at which I taught Journalism, that I had carte blanche to publish whatever I wished in it, at whatever cost. 

I took the man at his word—the journal still looks beautiful—and there, in its pages, is writing by Yannis Ritsos, Kimon Friar, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Kevin Andrews, Peter Green, Edmund Keeley, and Philip Sherrard (the usual Hellenic and Philhellenic suspects), as well as younger and/or, lesser-known-then writers, or writers well known in only deeper pockets of the Greek diaspora: Kerin Hope, Jena Woodhouse, Gillian Bouras, Don Schofield, Adrienne Mayor, and Dimitris Tsaloumas. (Award-winning scholar-author Adrienne Mayor, of course, has gone on to fame and some fortune as an expert on the Amazons.)

A brief aside here: as I strove in Greece to publish work by women “writing in or about Greece in English” in the 1980s and early 1990s, I came up against the brute truth that Philhellenic women had not often been published, were not often able to publish; and/or were actively deterred from publishing. (The truth comes in many sly iterations.) There were, of course, blazing exceptions before my time (Edith Hamilton, Mary Renault, Dilys Powell, Charmian Clift, Anne Anthony), but I speak from experience when I say that to be a woman Philhellene, and to be published, in the 20th century, in general comprised a Sisyphean exercise: few of us reached the heights. For one brief calendar year at Southeastern, I strove to give women some space on the page.

Tsaloumas was up against other obstacles, but, despite his geographical and linguistic dislocations, he persevered, published books in both Greek and English; was anthologized; and won significant awards in his adopted homeland, Australia (the National Book Council Award, 1983, the Patrick White Award, 1994, and an Emeritus Award from the Literature Board of the Australia Council for outstanding and lifelong contribution to Australian literature, 2002).

Considering his flight from fascism, and the realities of beginning again, and again, and again, to find his way, a poet in yet another strange land, speaking and writing in yet another alien language, his success, and his eloquence are remarkable.

I so wish we had met.

 

From his first letter to me, written when I was 39 to his 69, to my college address on Valaoritou Street:

Dear Elizabeth,

I was delighted with your note; perhaps the most interesting note I have ever received—I mean, the texture and color of the paper [keep in mind: my university president had sprung for pricey, heavy stationary for the Review], the envelope complete with its illustrated address! Well, thanks a lot, dear: the postman looked impressed and his greeting was a bit less casual than hitherto.

No, I don’t know what happened to the cheque [the payment for his submission] but I’m sure that the thing will sort itself out. Somehow. Please don’t worry about it, and let me congratulate you instead on your wonderful magazine. It arrived two days ago and I was thrilled at the quality of its contents and production. [He goes on to spot errata—“minor things”—in his poems, however and alas.]

Saddam Hussein (and a few others!) willing, I will leave here on Sept. 5 and would be catching a plane to Leros two hours after my arrival in Athens. I hope to see you sometime between then and Christmas on the return journey, unless you decide to take a trip down to our parts of the Greek archipelago. Autumn is the most beautiful and quiet season. Don’t let the adverse publicity the place has been getting lately influence you. It’s one of the most beautiful islands of Greece.

Two other brief letters, written in fountain pen in an antique hand (very much like Leigh Fermor and Kevin Andrews’ handwriting), followed on from this first and, in them, the poet laments the small size of his readership—his having been published only in Australia and Greece—though he expresses gratitude for the generosity and kindness of his publishers. He also notes with sadness that most of his books, even in 1995, were long out of print and only a Greek publication (in a presumably small run) of his collected poems would make his work accessible to a new audience in a new century.

In notes by his translators in the books he then sent me, over the years, I learn: that he studied the violin on Rhodes early in life, and was a musician-poet from the very beginning; that his book-length poem, Six Improvisations on The River, was written in response to the Rwanda Massacre; and that he married and had four children in Australia. I also learn, from careful reading of the bilingual editions, that Tsaloumas was supremely “lucky in his translators.” Slaloming around in the same two languages, English and Greek, since age ten, I have some grasp of what he was up against transitioning from writing in Greek; then, Italian; and, finally, English. I also have some understanding of the perils faced by translators in rendering Modern or Demotic Greek poetry into other languages.

Here is Philip Grundy, from the Translator’s Introduction to Tsaloumas’s The Observatory:

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.”

During World War Two, in the time of the Italian occupation of Greece, Tsaloumas, the poet-musician, worked in the Resistance. Displaced from Leros, where life was excruciatingly hard even before the war, he touched down in larger and larger and increasingly alien landscapes: Rhodes, then Italy, and then, finally, Australia. Very much like Odysseus before him, he was compelled by circumstance to live by his wits, and often hide his true convictions, in one foreign land after another, dreaming always of a return to a place where life had made sense to him; whose language was his mother tongue.

After the world war, though, and Greece’s subsequent civil war, when Left and Right divided the populace and a rift opened up among the Greeks that may never close, there was no returning to the Leros of his childhood: that had ceased to exist. As an adult, he, and his Australian-Greek family with him, would indeed come to Greece, but as bi-nationals. Tsaloumas was to die on Leros, but, after a momentous cleavage such he had experienced, no true homecoming was possible and every precious summer on the island would be “unhoped for,” but still a blessing.

Dimitris Tsaloumas and I never met, but the dilemma he embodied, suspended between worlds, multi-lingual, bi-national, expatriated, is something I understand; a condition that I, too, inhabit.

I am gratified that, in Australia, he found a loving and devoted readership; that the shipwrecked wanderer was embraced by Nausicaä.

But the loss of a homeland and of an idiom not in need of constant translation that is reflected so beautifully in his poetry is, increasingly, the defining experience of our age. 

In a poem written in honor of Tsaloumas, Dutch-Australian writer, and fellow immigrant, Lolo Houbein writes:

Remembering a Wise Man
Dimitri Tasloumas of Leros—died 2015
By Lolo Houbein

We remember him talking passionately
while dining with minor literati
—German, Dutch, American—
in that Chinese restautrant
in Hindley Street
when the festival was on.
He hardly touched the food

His intellect and the burden of Greek history
flowed like a sauce over noodles and bok choy
cramped in an old country
longing to forge a new culture.

How fortunate he made it back
to the home island
to die at an age of completion
surrounded by relatives who’d never left.
Embraced by the choppy Icarian Sea.

There follow here three more of Tsaloumas’s poems. I encourage readers to consult the brief bibliography that follows this column and to seek out his books online.

Stoneland Harvest
By Dimitris Tsaloumas

Of my father’s vast estates I,
being the least promising of his sons,
inherited the land of the goat,
the cypress and the windy carob-tree.
The stone field yields anaemic barley,
Scarcely enough for the year’s soggy bread.
 
In my head I dream of transformation,
though I know the land’s stubbornness and
mine. Chameleon-like, my thought
puts on the pre-dawn greyness of stone,
its sundown glow, its starlit gloom.
 
Rockrose, purple thornbush bloom
and beady asphodel provide protection
against too much frugality. Also,
a poppy flush amid the barley stalks
and spike-leafed gorse in its pride,
the great bluffs seaward face
hung with pink-studded caper pelts.
 
I gather some in a basket
walk to the village to visit friends
and see my brothers. They’re polite enough,
sound grateful. But walking back
by the splendid symmetry of their plenty,
the lushness of orchard and field, I know
that my gift will never grace their table.
On my doorstep, between sunset and dark,
I sit and dream of transformation,
Living from Spring to Spring

The Comforter
By Dimitris Tsaloumas

So that’s how the land lies?
You’ve no idea how I hurried in this heat
with not a leaf stirring in the poplars
and my throat as dry as a bone.
It’s closed: I shut it.
Yes the window too. Don’t worry.
I’ve a good mind to put you out in the yard
so that he’ll find you there, next to the tin-can
with the jonquil, where you can see the shore
crowded with the sponge-boats back from Barbary.
All hell’s let loose at Rebelos’s place
with sponge-divers
chucking their money around by the fistful.
I can hear you. Your voice is a bit hoarse
but I can hear you. And don’t turn to the wall
and curl yourself up that way.
You’ve never been scared of war or woman
in your life. What’s got into you now?
It’s nothing—you’ll see.
He never comes with a taxman’s satchel in his hand
or in his gendarme’s uniform.
In fact, they say he’s rather gently-spoken
so perhaps he’ll just sigh a bit and say
come on, Nicholas old chap,
come on, we’re running late and ought
to cross the border before nightfall.
No matter how often you take this road
you never get used to it.
You know, he’s got his problems too.
I can see you, I can see you—
don’t imagine I’d take my eyes off you now
you poor bugger!
And where’s that no-good son of yours?
You can bet he’ll be coming home now,
as soon as he gets the message,
to rip open the mattress.
loo, I’ll get the woman next door
to light the icon-lamp. I’ll be back,
never fear. I’ll go for a stroll on the beach
and I’ll be back.

The Visit
By Dimitris Tsaloumas

After so much time
after such an age that, if it were a river,
it would flood through me
to leave me with no helmsman

after all those newspapers
books and tribulations
so money wars and such devastation
how was it, brother, that tonight
you came to remember me?

And how did you pass the trenches
the traps, the no-man’s land,
all that death
with your inept, inadequate years?

How to cope with you now, I don’t know.
I wasn’t expecting you
and I want to hide my embarrassment
and my possessions are not enough
to sweeten this bitterness.
Even speech is not much help
because our own words
are weighed down with so much difference
that they even piece the shadows
Like hot lead.

If you only knew, poor chap,
if you only knew how life rewarded us
for despising it
as though it were not our own
as though it were a house we were renting
and let it go to ruin.

Come in if you will.
sit by the window
and let us not say a word.
Nothing.
that’s where I sometimes sit
when I’ve finished my work
and brood

and the wasps come down in waterspouts
the locusts storm in clouds
and the sun flickers, brother,
like a lantern in the rising dust
as my neighbours, dim shadows
come out to beg.

Sources

“Translingualism, Home, Ambivalence: The Poet Dimitris Tsaloumas,” by Vrasidas Karalis, “Cordite Poetry Review,” August 2016. 

“The turbulent journey of Greek-Australian poet Dimitris Tsaloumas,” SBS Greek. 

“Dimitris Tsaloumas and the music of the unseen,” By Vrasidas Karalis, “To Koskino,” February 15, 2016. 

“A Passionate, Lyrical, Desperate Voice: Antigone Kefala Remembers Dimitris Tsaloumas 1921-2015,” by Antigone Kefala, “Rochford Street Review,” July 22, 2016.

“Vale Dimitris Tsaloumas: The community loses a celebrated poet,” “Neos Kosmos,” February 10, 2016.

“A Diasporic Journey: Greek-Australian Poetry in Bilingual and English Publications,” by Helen Nickas, “Cordite Poetry Review,” August 2012. 

“When the poetry ‘voice from outside’ came indoors,” by Judith Rodriguez and Helen Nickas, “The Sidney Morning Herald,” February 26, 2016. 

“A fond farewell for Australian Greek poet Dimitris Tsaloumas,” by Jason Steger, “The Sidney Morning Herald,” February 9, 2016. 

Dimitris Tsaloumas, A Partial Bibliography

In English

Falcon Drinking (University of Queensland Press, 1988).

Portrait of a Dog (University of Queensland Press, 1991).

The Barge (University of Queensland Press, 1993).

The Harbour (University of Queensland Press, 1998).

Six Improvisations On The River (Nottingham: Shoestring Press, 1996).

Stoneland Harvest: New & Selected Poems (Nottingham: Shoestring Press, 1999, 2004).

Dimitris Tsaloumas: New & Selected Poems (University of Queensland Press, 2000).

Helen of Troy and Other Poems (University of Queensland Press, 2007).

In Greek

Επιστολή στον ταξιδεμένο φίλο (Ρόδος, 1949).

Τρόποι γαλήνης (Ίκαρος, Αθήνα, 1950).

Ανάσταση 1967 (Αρίων, Μελβούρνη, Αυστραλία, 1974).

Παρατηρήσεις υποχονδριακού (Αθήνα, 1974).

Το σπίτι με τους ευκάλυπτους (ΑΚΕ, 1975).

Ο άρρωστος μπαρμπέρης και άλλα πρόσωπα (Ίκαρος, Αθήνα, 1979).

Το σπίτι με τους ευκάλυπτους, 2nd edition (Θεσσαλονίκη: Νέα Πορεία, 1980).

Ο γιος του κυρ-Σακή (Αθήνα, 1979).

Το βιβλίο των επιγραμμάτων (Θεσσαλονίκη: Νέα Πορεία, 1981; 2nd ed. 1982).

Το ταξίδι (2 volumes, Αθήνα: Εκδόσεις Σοκόλη & Melbourne: Owl Publishing, 1995).

Δίφορος καρπός (Melbourne: Owl Publishing, 2001).

Δίψα (Πλανόδιον, Αθήνα, 2010).

Bilingual Collections

The Observatory, translated by Philip Grundy (University of Queensland Press, 1983, 1984, 1991).

The Book of Epigrams, translated by Philip Grundy (University of Queensland Press, 1985).

A Winter Journey, translated by D. Tsaloumas (Owl Publishing, 2014).

Un chant du soir, translations by P. Laurent (Orphee Publishing, 2014).

Anthologies

Σύγχρονη αυστραλιανή ποίηση, ed. & trans. by Dimitris Tsaloumas (Thessaloniki: Νέα Πορεία, 1986).

Contemporary Australian Verse, selected & trans. by Dimitris Tsaloumas (University of Queensland Press, 1986).