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Τέλλος Άγρας

1899–1944

In his poems, Τέλλος Άγρας writes about harbours, wet streets and small, ordinary things with an ear that never stops listening — the music is charted, warm and quietly heartbroken. Start with «Ποιήματα», which gathers those short lyrics from the 1920s and opens a window onto interwar Greece and its poor neighbourhoods. If you come to him through other poets, «Μεταφράσεις» shows the same sensibility at work on Verlaine, Laforgue and Samain, where dusk and rain are carried into a Greek that aches.

Feels like nature, tenderness and love.

Start with Ποιήματα.

Agras was the pen name of Evangelos Ioannou, a schoolteacher and librarian in Thessaloniki. He translated Laforgue and wrote some of the first Greek poems of urban alienation, and died of tuberculosis at forty-four.

All the ways we arrange forgetting, told in a voice that keeps catching itself.

Ήθελες κάτι να μου πειςκαι δεν σου το ρωτούσα,(Το καλοκαίρι είχε σωθείκαι τ’ άνθη που αγαπούσα).Ήθελες κάτι να μου πείςκαι τόχα λησμονήσει.(Τη ρίζα που καθόμαστε-θυμάσαι;- έχουν γκρεμίσει).(Είχε από τότε εντός μουσε φθινόπωρο γυρίσει).Μου είπες, α, ναι!- πως μ’ αγαπάς- μα τόχω λησμονήσει.
— Ποιήματα, Τέλλος Άγρας (1940)

Books by Τέλλος Άγρας

Ποιήματα

Τέλλος Άγρας, 1940

Poems of harbours, rainy neighbourhoods and unwalkable streets, written in the 1920s by a schoolteacher who loved other people's joy more than his own. Read them for their music: charted, warm, and quietly heartbroken. The poems stay close to small things — a bird on a broken branch, wet earth, a moon over a lane — and to an ear that never stops listening. Short, lyric, made for the afternoon. A fine doorway into a poet who is still not read as widely as he deserves. A window onto interwar Greece, with its poor neighbourhoods and songs. Poems of harbours and rainy neighbourhoods from a Greek poet who loved other people's joy more than his own. Read them aloud, and the rhyme does the work: charted, warm, and quietly heartbroken.

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