In the noise of everyday life, between tragic events and pre-election gambling, a new book, among dozens of others, steals impressions. How does it win in the world of images? Leafing through the philological publication “Mitsos Papanikolaou. Reply Found.

Poetic Works and Treasurer Pez”, another world in the shadow of the Greek society of the interwar period emerges through the dramatic story of the “damned” poet, who was not lucky enough to be recognized in his only 43 years of life. Addictions and forbidden, it means that passions led him to poverty.

Eighty years after the death of Mitsos Papanikolaou in Dromokaiteo from an overdose, Ogdoo releases a 304-page edition about his work and life a few days later. There were some editions in the 1960s-1990s, but, by today’s standards, incomplete. This particular book, edited by Michalis X. Rempas with diligence and years of research, is complete. Philologist, teacher of secondary education, publications of philological works M. Rembas illuminates new, unknown, poems, excellent translations of foreign contemporaries of the poet and for the first time 11 cherished prose works.

Many do not know either the poems of Mitsos Papanikolaou or his name. However, they may have sung “Mesa sti voui tou doroso”, written in 2002 by Domenica, a rock band that excelled in the 90s and performed musical lyrics by Papanikolaos and Lapatiotis.

Here is how Foma Korovinis presents the poet in the preface to the publication: “Snippets of the cheerfulness of his youth have come down to us: he devastates the library of Lapatiotis and sells it to consignment shops, giving him little profit, so that the indignant other he continues, crawls with a dirty rag in Hautii, the breadwinner in Omonia’s parasokak, begging the publishers for a few pennies, with other poets and scholars who did not like his image and did not approve of his contempt, and led him away. And the author continues on what Mitsos experienced in his ecstatic journeys to utopia, in visions and drips, in brief encounters with violent drug dealers and extortionists, in fights and hematipias of Trumba, in wild drunken company with Napoleon, in such and other experiences, except “street noise”, where his “form of poetry” was formed, that is, a handful of poems that he wrote, published in magazines, but did not have time to see printed in a collection under his own name.

“The poetry of Papanikolaou is a bird that crashed into our window, and we did not open it,” emphasizes the poet Giorgos Markopoulos, and M. Rembas helps the reader to trace the path of the poet, the details of his work, translations and prose. As for the beloved ballad from Domenica, their choice to set to music the speech of one of the so-called “minor” Greek lyricists of the interwar period shows, in the words of the editor, “how the so-called” traditional “Poetry can remain alive …”.