The Burning Light

Costas Varnalis is a product of the multicultural, multicommunal and borderless geography of the Balkans, which will turn into a place of wildfire. Born in Burgas in 1884, he carries the surname Varna all his life, on his way to Athens, Paris, Limnos as a soldier, Lesbos with exiles, and Crete and Moscow as an award-winning poet… No matter how long was the path – paved with oppression and exiles – he took and how difficult was his life as a teacher, soldier, translator, journalist, EAM resistance fighter and writer, he lived and wrote with a revolutionary attitude and class consciousness that his satirical poems reflected.

Burning Light is Varnalis’s third poetry book. It was completed in 1921 and published in Alexandria in 1922. In the atmosphere of nationalistic delirium and frustration caused by the Asia Minor Campaign and the disaster that followed, Varnalis, through a seemingly philosophical discussion, opened a new front with The Burning Light, which is an epic narrative based on satirical expression of hope, love of life, coping with worldly suffering, trust in people, and a radical social transformation that would be experienced through courage, anger and laughter.

Winner of the 1959 Lenin Peace Prize, Varnalis is one of the founding figures of Contemporary Greek Poetry, with his style devoted to the vernacular, Ancient Greek and Christian Mythology, Greek history, and of course references to and inferences from Marxism.