(Deliriodendron Press, 354 Columbus Ave.#454, San Francisco, CA 94133, 1994)
INTRODUCTORY NOTE
In November 1973, resisting a fascist dictatorship already six years in place, Greek students took over the Athens Polytechnic, as well as university buildings in Salonika and Patras. When the Polytechnic students and their supporters, after holding the building for a time, began broadcasting resistance news, partisan songs and music from within the building to Athens and beyond, the government sent tanks and troops against them. Thirty-four students and others were killed, several hundred were wounded and almost 1,000 were arrested.
The resistance was not without repercussions. Within eight days, the CIA-backed fascist Papadopoulos was finished as leader; and within a year, the dictatorship of the Colonels was over. To many, the Polytechnix take-over marks the beginning of the end of that gang of thugs which desolated Greece since 1967.
Arriving in Athens from Sicily in April 1980,1 found this piece of hymnody in the old cellar bookshop in the Plaka which I used to frequent in 1965.1 translated it on Hydra, where I lived for the next few months and where I met Anastas Isaakidis, who’d suffered torture as a student at the hands of the Colonels’ junta, and who welcomed the opportunity to go over my translation. 1 offer my warmest thanks to him for his help.
I made a tentative draft upon my return to San Francisco in October 1980, but I never actually completed a satisfying copy until the Passover-Easter week of this year, 1994. What prompted me to complete the translation, however, was not traditional religion but rather the all-seasonal work of Liberation Radio stations which have been “seizing” the airwaves for the People — in San Francisco, Berkeley, Fresno, as well as in Springfield and Decatur, Illinois — and in whose broadcasts of police brutality and the resistance of the growing Poor Poeple’s Army in the U.S. there are resonances of the brave resistance fighters of the Polytechnic in Athens.
Of the author of the poem, neither Takis Isaakidis nor anyone else we asked
on Hydra was able to identify him. And there was the feeling as well, and it remains to this day, that the author’s name may in fact be a mask-for-mcaning (his name means “Gift of Liberty”). The work was privately printed in chapbook-fonn in 1974, without imprint or address.
In hymnodic style, the poem rises and falls in crests of great impact. It is a praise-song to the youthfully dead, in honor of the “school” of life for which Greece is eminently noted; and it is an attack against imperialism and its henchmen in tones that rank with Robert Rodzhdestvensky’s REQUIEM as one of the most singable eulogies of a generation that has witnessed the Paris student revolts of 1968; the murders of students in Jackson, Mississippi and at Kent Stale; the widespread demonstrations protesting the Viet Nam War, and uprisings such iis those in Liberty City, Florida, and Los Angeles.
May this poem of Greek resistance help students young and old to understand the need for organized struggle against the new fascisms of the electronic age, whether in the U.S., in Greece, or anywhere else.
Jack Hirschman San Francisco April 2, 1994
Show me a free street so I can climb to the s| mouth wide-open arms wide-spread
I want to go aloft run along the sky soaking the liberty of my country in tears
Make way, I’m comirj Wound my feet Sing thunderous song: thai drive the nightenj
Reason, how bcaulifu in the awful darkenin; the hard and unbearaH evenin.fi “viihout end
Play my raspy lyre with anguish in the hi Give me that blue-bail to forget hatred
God, give me power gigantic Thought so I can find the corndj to fit their coronation
Their blood’s bccomi lighting up creation and our Reason a rive| softening the grief
O great tribe and race of children born free the Blue flag is covering your clear mind
You upright men fell and built with our hearts an immortal monument inside the Polytechnic
Blood and tears fused in a granite spirit torrents of glory flowing in perpetual honor
Just listen to the shouts, the cries in the titanic battle Come on and be companions in magnanimity
The free don’ t give a damn about torture and the slaves are
buried secretly in cemeteries
Erect an altar, my Greece, to the dead youths Offer incense to God for liberty
Remove your hats, people and bow to the splendor and let your praises sound in front of the Polytechnic
November 1973 Athens
