Dionysis Savvopoulos is one of the most recognized and acclaimed singer-songwriters of Greece. This alone would account for his inclusion in a literary anthology and a volume of his songs translated into English—the latter has been a long time coming. But to understand his key role in Modern Greek culture, one needs to take note of a feeling of proximity, the strong affective ties that a very large part of the Greek audience possess towards him, or, rather, his singing persona. ‘National troubadour, old friend, father, guru and soulmate’: this is how journalist and cultural commentator Nikos Xydakis once introduced Savvopoulos. It is a description with which most Greeks, who often refer to him by the diminutive, Nionios, would no doubt agree.*
If there is a European model of the twentieth century singer-songwriter as national figure, Savvopoulos is its most prominent Greek representative. He brings to mind songwriters like Georges Brassens and Léo Ferré from France, Paco Ibanez from Spain, Lucio Dalla and Fabrizio De André from Italy, Wolf Bierman from Germany and Zülfü Livaneli from Turkey. Their major differences notwithstanding, these artists occupy a common cultural space, addressing their audiences in similar ways and enjoying a comparable recognition. One could think of them as working within a common genre. As poetic figures with a very strong affinity for their respective literary, oral poetry and popular song traditions, they became points of reference for their national cultures after the 1950s. Their work mediated the challenges of post-war reconstruction, new recording technologies, local youth and counterculture movements of the 1960s and the political upheavals and late capitalist crises of the 1970s. It was, finally, canonized as a version of ‘high-popular’ culture already seen as classic in the 1980s and as dated in the 1990s. They were our troubadours at a time of ever-transforming late capitalism; old friends and gurus in a period of defeat for major social ideals; national voices in a deconstructed yet ever-resurgent nationalism; soulmates in a long period of a vibrant and expansive popular media landscape.
This collection brings together selected song lyrics from ten different albums, released at different moments of Savvopoulos’ career and spanning a long trajectory. It features love songs, protest anthems, political folk rock and lyrical ballads. The book opens with two of Savvopoulos’ earliest songs, from his first LP, the iconic Truck, released as a full album in 1966. Savvopoulos is sketched on the cover of the disc in a way that recalls similar sketches of Brassens, and in the album he sings, as a person in his 20s, that love is all around, that it gnaws the lips as it does the mind, that it goes away and comes back again, in an endless cycle. The same, clueless, ever-the-optimist lover will, on the same disc, mourn the ‘old friends who have gone forever’. An innocuous reference, perhaps, to early teenage friendships, but also, much more pointedly, to young activists detained (or even killed) by a state that had already started showing, after a brief moment of liberalization, its most oppressive face. What is less obvious in Truck is much more overtly pronounced in the 1969 The Loony’s Garden, the first of Savvopoulos’ works published during the 1967–74 military dictatorship. The album’s cover is a direct reference to late sixties psychedelic culture (and specifically to the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine). The ‘old friends’ have now become ‘the kids who vanished’; the young woman who perhaps was once the love interest is now evoked through subterranean imagery. We are in the songwriter’s world, allegorized as a fool’s garden, a mystical world, ‘a rich and strange landscape of the deep’. Bob Dylan, the Beats, the Beatles—there are countless references, even though the songs became so closely connected to their 1960s Greek context that such comparisons can now feel superfluous.
One of the major aspects of Savvopoulos’ work until 1974 was his direct conversation with the global youth culture of the sixties and, at the same time, the use of references to youth culture in order to articulate an antidictatorship discourse. His magnum opus, the 17- minute song ‘Ballos’, is a case in point. Once again, a number of intertextual and intermusical references could help contextualize this song (my own favourites being Caetano Veloso’s song ‘Tropicalia’ and the Brazilian Tropicalia movement more generally). But the song is also, undeniably, the long search for a new language: ritual, allegory, revised folk material, surreal elements and the carnivalesque add up to a complex response to the dictatorship’s totalitarian aesthetics. The singer-wanderer starts from a village festival, then takes a painful look in the mirror, whereupon he is relocated to a stadium with crowds shouting, before returning to a surrealist ode to the Balkans and back (but now much more self-consciously) to a communal festivity, a carnival. Having over-appropriated the dictator’s pose, fanfare and reliance on mass culture and huge public events, the song finishes with the songwriter asserting that (in the manner of Veloso’s ‘Eu organizo o movimento / Eu oriento o caranaval’) ‘I’m in charge of all / I’m the leader in this here festival’.
In the late sixties Savvopoulos was not only the most acclaimed cultural voice of a younger generation, but he also became the precursor of a larger cultural dynamic. Signature aspects of his later albums Ballos (1971), Stale Crusts (1972) and Pieces from 10 Years (1975) include a merging of the personal and the collective, the intersection of a youth counterculture and a national mythology distinct from that promoted by the dictators and, last but not least, a performative employment of the absurd in order to deflect and evade censorship. A younger generation of Greek songwriters, poets and novelists who appear after 1969 adopt very similar poetic strategies, often acknowledging Savvopoulos as a major, unquestionable influence.
Unlike the big popular national composers of the previous generation, Manos Hadjidakis and Mikis Theodorakis, Savvopoulos was not interested in producing orchestral or musical theatre works, in setting published poetry to popular music, or, even, in writing music for the cinema—though he had considerable success the few times he did so. He was more focused on constructing a singer-songwriter persona and in adopting the voice of an autobiographical (or, rather, autofictional) oral minstrel whose main frame of reference remained the (Greek and global) 1960s, their political struggles, challenges, frustrations and the sense of immense potential being felt, as he put it in one song, ‘in the corners, in the square, in the corridors, in the lecture hall, in the streets’.
Savvopoulos is, therefore, the Greek artist who has come closest to singing the long Greek sixties as a specific experience, and this experience as giving rise to a certain type of identity. He would repeatedly reflect on this in later work. ‘We, the travellers of the 60s: from the outset aloof, outsiders, always unsettled, in abeyance’ he sings in his controversial album The Haircut (1989). His later songs rehearse a similar sense of aloofness and nostalgia for lost youth, paired with a disenchantment with politics, a somewhat inconsequential adoption of nationalist references and a mellow reflection on life’s beauty.
Book cover, Dionysis Savvopoulos, The Rock Song of Our Tomorrow.
Unsettled and unsettling, always somehow in abeyance yet at the centre of Greek cultural life, always nostalgic yet topical, Savvopoulos’ songs, alongside his inimitable performance, remain one of the hidden treasures a contemporary Greek would share with foreign friends in order to create cultural intimacy. I know this impulse so well; I speak from experience. I have so many times tried translating his songs while playing them loud on friends’ record players (then CD players, then MP3s, then computers, then platforms). Introducing this first printed translation of Savvopoulos’ songs, my mind goes to the uncountable ‘translations for friends’ that people around the world must have made over the years of these same texts. It is to this polyphony of affect, this genuine and often failed effort to convey what it means to me, that such a book could, I think, be dedicated.
* See further discussion and references in Dimitris Papanikolaou, Singing Poets: Literature and Popular Music in France and Greece (London: Routledge, 2007). Quotations from Savvopoulos in this introduction follow the translation by David Connolly offered here.