Century Dead Center.
Nash, Susan Smith
George Economou. Barrytown, N.Y. Left Hand. 1997. 124 pages, ill.
$15. ISBN 1-880516-23-3.
The poems, prose poems, translations, and visual art collected in
Century Dead Center demonstrate the range, complexity, and intelligence
of a writer and scholar whose groundbreaking work in medieval literature
sustains and energizes poetry well aware of twentieth-century
antecedents. The resulting verse is subtle, witty, highly allusory, and
always provides the reader with numerous opportunities to uncover the
many levels of signification embodied in a single phrase or even a
single juxtaposition of words.
Multiplicities of interpretive possibilities are abundant in George
Economou's work, and perhaps that is where the convergence of
medieval and twentieth-century poetry occurs. From Dante's notion
of a polysemous text to Wittgenstein's language games, the poem
itself becomes a highly refractory surface, breaking apart the gaze made
rigid by a reductive synthetic a priori, inapplicable to a world that
knows itself as a construct under construction. The title itself,
Century Dead Center, possesses a number of interpretive possibilities,
one being a reference to the Holocaust which occurred at midcentury, and
another suggesting that the poems themselves examine, dead center, the
point at which values, ethics, and history begin to unravel, leaving an
epistemology that relies as much on the deconstruction of perception and
reality as on the construction of it.
In "Century Dead Center," a series of thirty prose poems,
the presence of the Holocaust permeates all the scenes, whether they be
of a "Proud Papa in Brown Shirt holding the Infant Christa" or
of the bibliophile whose seemingly clean fingers stain his keyboard red
after he peruses Century of Dishonor in a local bookstore. Elements of
the individual poems weave in and out of the whole, making the work
cohere with a formal structure that is not immediately apparent, given
that they are prose poems, and the prosodic elements are more cloaked
than in a sonnet or a villanelle. Justitia, the bibliophile, Hans
Rudelsheim, and other characters reappear throughout the poems, as do
certain themes, such as escape, capture, justice and its miscarriages,
and, of course, death. The poems are always witty, often sad:
"Justitia keeps a column in her account book under the heading
MISCARRIAGES. Those against the public she writes in red. Against the
person in black. Giving the illusion there may be an actual counterpoise between them. Or that the red may one day be repaid, the black deducted
from the liabilities assumed at birth."
Economou enjoys toying with poetic form and generic expectation, and
the results are delightful. In "Nashvillanelle" one can almost
hear the twang of a Southern accent, and Economou plays with the fact
that country and western music's seeming transparency and
spontaneity are illusions masking a rigid, highly stylized formal
structure. To refer to trailers and broken hearts within the structure
of a villanelle is to forcibly collide two mutually unrecognizable
worlds together: "My left brain says you've split this time
for real, / The pick-up's gone, the mobile home's no more, /
My right brain cries this ache will never heal." The courtier pulls
on his cowboy boots, but it is not the domesticating reduction of a
Disney production where Robin Hood is a fox and Roger Miller provides
the singing voice for the troubadour bear. Instead, Economou's
"Nashvillanelle" is dark and claustrophobic, with an
underpinning of despair: the limits of the form are the limits of the
person's world, and transcendence, if achievable at all, may only
be another set of constraints.
Knowing that Economou is a scholar specializing in medieval
literature whose translation of the C Version of William Langland's
Piers Plowman has received critical acclaim facilitates the reading of
his poetry. In addition, the fact that he is an admirer of the work of
Paul Blackburn is also a key element. Blackburn's translations of
Provencal lyric poetry surprised and disconcerted traditionalists with
their informal diction, almost Beat-inspired rhythms, and
defamiliarizing tactics that reminded the reader of the
"foreignness" of the original text rather than masking its
difference in a "fluent" translation. Economou's
translation of Hedylos contains diction shifts and a playfulness which
gives the work a vitality that a more stodgy, formally constrained, and
consistent translation would not. Similarly, Economou's
translations of C. P. Cafavy and George Seferis are intense in their
humanity, and the deliberate shifts in rhythm and diction add to the
beauty and the poignancy of the thoughts expressed.
The tone of Century Dead Center is poignant, and there is an
overwhelming sense of one bravely searching for new strategies to
construct a meaning whose center will hold. If the book had contained
only "Century Dead Center" and the other poems dealing with
the Holocaust, it might have left an impression of hopelessness and
betrayal, that the colors available to the poet and artist are only
those that represent flesh in its weakest and most ephemeral form -
pallid, charred, or bleeding. However, with the reproductions of
Economou's paintings - notable for their sensitive use of color,
their fluid and graceful lines, and their balanced yet energetic
composition - the collection itself becomes even more multifaceted, with
an infinitude of interpretive possibilities.
Susan Smith Nash St. Gregory's College
