Presentation of book by Titos Patrikios
FOUGARO and Kichli Publishing invite you to a meeting with poet Titos Patrikios on Sunday 14 May 2023 at 7 pm at FOUGARO’s Anthos Library on the occasion of his book "The Road Again".
He will be joined by journalist Yiannis Baskozos, director of the Anagnostis magazine. Titos Patrikios will talk with the audience and sign copies of his books.
About the book:
"The road again" consists of eleven new poems written during the COVID lockdown. Reflective, highly epigrammatic and with a tone of reckoning, and reflecting the poet’s familiar predilection for dialectic thinking and a rhythm that employs the naturalness of everyday language, the poems in the collection leave readers with a strong imprint.
THE ROAD AND LIFE
Whatever we say, whatever we do,
whatever we revisit silently or aloud,
some others, young children still,
will live through the same hackneyed troubles,
the same unexpected joys, will try
to carve new roads, yet setting off from one
that differs little from our own,
sometimes changing, sometimes harassing
sometimes enhancing life,
a life of a thousand faces, a life unique,
a life of ours and of the others
Titos Patrikios
Titos Patrikios was born in Athens in 1928 to actors Spyros and Lela Patrrikios. In 1946 he graduated from the Varvakion School and enrolled in ther Law School of the University of Athens; he worked as a lawyer for some years. During the German occupation he joined the National Resistance, first with EPON and later with ELAS. In 1944 he was sentenced to death by collaborators of the Germans, and his execution was only called off at the last moment. He spent his military service in exile on Makronissos (1951-1952) and Ai-Stratis (1952-1953), returning to Athens on an exiled person’s permit. Between 1959 and 1964 he studied sociology at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris and took part in research projects of France’s Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. He returned to Greece, but upon the advent of the Colonels’ dictatorship he went back to Paris where he joined actions against the regime and worked for UNESCO in Paris and FAO in Rome. He resettled in Greece in 1975, working as a lawyer, sociologist and literary translator. In 1982 he resumed the post he had at the National Center of Social Research up to 1967. In Athens he worked also for the Centre for Marxist Studies. His first appearance in literature was with a poem published in Xekinima tis Niotis magazine in 1943; his first poetry collection, Dirt Track, was published in 1954. A founding member of Epitheorissi Technis magazine, he contributed numerous articles and reviews while many of his papers were included in collective tomes. He was also active in translation (of Stendhal, Aragon, Maïakovski, Neruda, Gogol, Garaudy, Lukács, etc.) and prose, while most of his sociological papers are in French. His works have been translated into French, Flemish, German and Dutch. In 1994 he received a special state award for his entire oeuvre. In February 2020 he was made an Officier de l'Ordre des Lettres et des Arts by the French ambassador in Greece, Patrick Maisonnave.
