Toothpaste with Chlorophyll / Maritime Hot Baths: Stories

By Elias Papadimitrakopoulos, John Taylor and Alekos Fassianos

His first two collections of short stories, Toothpaste with Chlorophyll (1973) and Maritime Hot Baths (1980), published here for the first time in English, have long established Papadimitrakopoulos as one of the leading Greek writers, one whose work recalls such painters of the triste and ephemeral as Peter

• Language: English
• Publisher: Coyote Arts LLC
• Release date: Sep 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781878580023

Elias Papadimitrakopoulos

Elias Papadimitrakopoulos was born in Pyrgos, in 1930, the son of a well-known lawyer in the city. His father's death in 1943, during the German occupation, caused the family's financial ruin-and this period is often evoked in his stories, notably in Toothpaste with Chlorophyll and Maritime Hot Baths. Papadimitrakopoulos subsequently studied medicine at the Military Medical School of the University of Thessaloniki (1949-1955), specializing in pathology. He thereafter worked as a military doctor, serving in the Greek Army until his retirement in 1983. His first contributions to literary reviews began in the 1960s, notably with the appearance in 1962 of his first short story in the magazine Argo. During the same years, he began to publish-as a short-story writer, film critic, and literary critic-in other important magazines such as Tachidromos, Dialogos, Anti, Khartis, Kroniko, and To Tetarto. One of the most beloved and admired Greek short-story writers, Papadimitrakopoulos received the Petros Haris Foundation Prize from the Academy of Athens in 2010 and the National Literary Award in 2015. His collected short stories are now gathered in a six-volume set published by Gavriilidis. He lives in Athens and, during the summer, on the island of Paros.

Book preview

Cover: Toothpaste with Chlorophyll / Maritime Hot Baths by Elias Papadimitrakopoulos Translated from the Greek by John Taylor Illustrations by Alekos FassianosTitle page

Toothpaste with Chlorophyll / Maritime Hot Baths by Elias

Papadimitrakopoulos. Greek titles: Odonotokrema me chlorofylli, Therma thalassia loutra.

© 1973, 1979, 1980, 1984, 1985, 1995, 2012, 2020 by Elias Papadimitrakopoulos.

Translation and introduction © 1992, 2020 by John Taylor.

Cover and interior illustrations © 1992, 2020 by Alekos Fassianos.The first edition of this translation was published by Asylum Arts in 1992.

All rights reserved. Second edition.

ISBN: 978-1-878580-01-6 (paper)

ISBN: 978-1-878580-02-3 (e-book)

LCCN: 2020938119

Coyote Arts LLC

PO Box 6690, Albuquerque, New Mexico USA 87197-6690

coyote-arts.com

Contents

Introduction

Toothpaste with Chlorophyll

Ripe Figs

Nikos the Seretis

The Execution

The Party

Glykeria

Dancing Lessons

The Last Survivor

A Love Story

Easter Sunday

Toothpaste with Chlorophyll

In Memoriam

Maritime Hot Baths

The Nightingale

The Obus

Cushions

The Spanish Guitar

Eleonora

Maritime Hot Baths

A Dream in the Waves

The Red Flag

A Summer Afternoon

Did it Agree with You?

The Money Order

Greek Summer

Notes

To Niobe

Introduction

Though hardly a prolific author or one whose name is constantly on the lips of the average Greek reader, Elias Papadimitrakopoulos enjoys the greater merit of being esteemed by his peers, by his fellow Greek writers and critics, as a stylistic virtuoso, a sensitive, perspicacious craftsman of the emotions who has given voice to a community neglected by modern Greek letters, the small provincial town, in the present case the town of Pyrgos in the Peloponnesian province of Eleia. In a national literature crowded with mountain villages, island villages, Thessaloniki and of course Athens, Papadimitrakopoulos reveals the human richness hidden in this seemingly nondescript bourg, dominated commercially by Patras and touristically by the nearby site of Olympia.

His first two collections of short stories, Toothpaste with Chlorophyll (1973) and Maritime Hot Baths (1980), published here for the first time in English, have long established Papadimitrakopoulos as one of the leading Greek writers, one whose work recalls such painters of the triste and ephemeral as Peter Altenberg, Sait Faik and Dezsö Kosztolányi, with here and there a maudlin, funny-sad brushstroke of James Thurber. Born in Pyrgos in 1930, a military doctor by profession (he retired from the Greek Army in 1983), Papadimitrakopoulos otherwise writes film and literary criticism for several Greek magazines and newspapers. His books include two collections of book reviews, articles and essays; several studies devoted to the writer Nikos Kachtitsis; and a third collection of stories, The General Archivist (1989).

Like Kachtitsis and like Nikos Gabriel Pentzikis, another writer whose work has interested him as a critic, Papadimitrakopoulos has forged as his mode of expression a language immediately recognizable as his own. Ever concise, melodious, with much attention given to the overall rhythm of the story—the very music of the prose in Eleonora imitates the huffing and puffing of sexual intercourse, thus paralleling plot on the prosodic level, creating what the author himself has described as a metaphysical calembour—the language in Toothpaste with Chlorophyll and Maritime Hot Baths reveals a delicate juxtaposition of purist (katharevousa) and demotic Greek. Not least among Papadimitrakopoulos’ gifts is that of parody. In The Spanish Guitar and The Money Order, for example, the author parodies the infelicitous katharevousa of the local newspaper and of the well-meaning provincial townsman, a stylistic tour de force which attains unprecedented heights in ‘The General Archivist," the title story of his third collection. In that tale of twenty-four printed pages, by far the longest he has ever written, Papadimitrakopoulos lampoons small-town journalism by providing hilarious examples of the showy foreign phrases and the grammatically dubious katharevousa which are employed by half-literate reporters vainly seeking clever effects. Similarly, in the dialogue Did It Agree with You?, included here, Papadimitrakopoulos mimics the Greek of nouveaux riches. The dialogue, set in a train compartment, could be transformed into a lively one-act play. Papadimitrakopoulos’ humor is usually to be savored, not devoured, and can sometimes be missed; one of the characters in the same dialogue indeed remarks that she suffers from something like interior varicose veins on [her] left leg.

Papadimitrakopoulos’ writing is also distinctive in ways that become clear when these polished prose texts are placed within the context of the contemporary Greek short story. Excellent practitioners such as Kostas Taktsis, Yiorgos Ioannou or Menis Koumandareas derive their first-person confessional modes from the classic European or American models. For his generally much shorter texts, Papadimitrakopoulos’ literary paradigm seems closer to the prose poem, a genre perhaps brought into Greek literature for the first time by the Surrealist Andreas Embirikos. This affiliation becomes even more visible in his very short prose texts (especially those collected in The General Archivist), in which he sometimes suggests a dreamlike atmosphere. At the same time, Papadimitrakopoulos’ shortest texts also resemble billets d’humeur, those brief, funny or sarcastic pieces formerly so common in newspapers.

A further influence is surely the great (and internationally still underestimated) short-story writer Alexandros Papadiamantis (1851–1911), who wrote so poignantly and perceptively about Athens and his native island of Skiathos. Papadimitrakopoulos, long a studious reader of Papadiamantis, has devoted articles to his work, notably to his humor, a quality not widely recognized in that author’s tales. In both writers, one senses an extraordinary intimacy with the folkways, the various levels of language, the most minute sociological and topographical details of their hometowns and of the cities in which they came to live. In A Love Story, for example, we are taken through the back streets of Athens, where Papadimitrakopoulos now resides when not at his summer home on the island of Paros. Very little of the setting is described, other than that the streets are full of watery potholes; the narrator and his lonely girlfriend talk, while walking to the train station; yet we feel immersed in that typical ambience at dusk in Athens, when only a few lights have come on; enveloped in that unexpected peace and quiet once the crowds and traffic of the busy avenue[s] have been left behind.

Indeed, Papadimitrakopoulos usually achieves his astonishing stylistic economy by evoking key details from an insider’s or a participant’s viewpoint, an ancient rhetorical technique which not only renders prolonged description superfluous but also transforms the reader into an insider or a participant as well. Once, she consented to meet me early one Sunday evening behind the soccer field, he writes in Dancing Lessons. Nothing else about the soccer field needs to be said; only a native of the town would use the definite article the; in consequence, not for an instant do we doubt that we, too, are intimates of Pyrgos.

More generally, when appraising the carefully conceived narrative structure of Papadimitrakopoulos’ stories, one must keep in mind the extremely long history of short narrative forms in world literature—and not just the modern short story. Papadimitrakopoulos’ great talent is indeed that of compression, abbreviation as Greek, Roman and medieval rhetoricians termed it; one