Nasos Vayenas (Greece)
Homage to Richard Berengarten
Allow me to warmly address the occasion of Richard's 80th birthday. I admire Richard for his oeuvre and have enjoyed a brotherly poetic bond with him for half a century now. We became friends immediately after I arrived in Cambridge in 1974 on a King's College scholarship to conduct doctoral research on the poetics and poetry of George Seferis, a poet that Richard, who had lived in Greece for a period of time, admired deeply. I would contend that it was our shared appreciation for Seferis’s poetry that deepened our friendship. This was during the time when Richard was organizing the first Cambridge Poetry Festivals. Among the invitations to important poets from Greece, he included me in the programme for two of these festivals, even though I had only published two collections at that time – the second of which Richard himself generously translated into English (Biography, Lobby Press, Cambridge, 1978). Since my return to Greece and until the present day, the warmth of our friendship has been undiminished, maintained through our meetings in person at various poetry festivals in Europe, and through our phone calls and correspondence.
The 2005 Greek translation of Richard's Black Light: Poems in Memory of George Seferis (1983), which I did together with Elias Lagios (together but not jointly: each one of us selected the poems from that sequence that better fitted our respective poetic voice) was not on my part an act of reciprocation for Richard’s translation of Biography. Rather, it was the expression of a deep-seated need to see conveyed into Modern Greek Richard’s perception of Seferis’s poetic sense of my country as a place where light, throughout the centuries, has been both 'angelic and black'.
My admiration for Richard’s art has grown as I have followed his poetic evolution over time: a course constantly developing, from his first published pamphlets and Avebury (1972) up to the ‘metaphysical sonnets’ of Notness (2015), and The Wine Cup (2022) – an output that confirms, with its masterly variety of prosodic forms, the artistry of his poetry. If I were asked which one of his works – besides Black Light – I appreciate most, I would point to The Manager and the above-mentioned metaphysical sonnets, so radically different in form, as his paramount achievements.
Translated by Paschalis Nikolaou
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