A Forward to New Moon: Day One
Il faut être voyant, se faire voyant—
One must be a prophet, make himself a prophet . . .
Arthur Rimbaud, Letter to Paul Demeny, May 15, 1871.
Thanassis Valtinos's book New Moon: Day One invites the reader to contemplate the emergent experience—via a remarkable notational style of hints alternating with bold allusions—of two young heroes' terminal maturation into young adulthood. The time setting for this drama is both specifically historical and intensely psychological. On the level of the suggestive force of Valtinos's writing the stream itself of implied language becomes apparent but also the script-like directions, in code, almost, of states and actions to come. The book consists of a sequence of eleven days marked by silly high-school grade fantasies as well as by the obsessive crushes on two mature women one of whom is an attractive teacher of French and the other an army officer's homebound mistress.
It's the Winter of 1948. Two graduating greenhorns in a provincial capital awaken to the blunt realities of an on-going armed insurrection around them. Their witnessing the off-loading of a truckful of Greek Civil War dead combatants in their town square comes with the shockingly unexpected mix of horror and arousal. Valtinos's signature minimalism does not stop with the comedic tumbling over of the two clumsy voyeurs standing on a chair set upon a table for better viewing of a neighboring rooftop laundry shed; it is capped, a few pages over, by the same youths' morbid curiosity surrounding the churchyard ministrations to the dead military by the village prostitutes.
The season of imaginary exploits being now ended, the transition into their new personalities is beginning to affect the contents of the two friends' confidential exchanges encapsulated in the last few lines of the book’s conclusion in the form of directorial how-to's: You go in . . . you exchange looks . . . you nod in agreement . . . you close the door behind you . . . you take off your pants . . . she takes over from there.
From a literary historical perspective, the select few realist writers who had devised photographic metaphors—e.g., John Dos Passos, the USA Trilogy, 1937, covering the first thirty years of the twentieth century under the recurrent use of the "Camera Eye" technique; and Christopher Isherwood, Berlin Stories, 1945; also subtitled I Am a Camera, for the Cabaret adaptation, 1951, covering pre-WWII Germany —did so for the sake of an increased sense of detachment and objectivity. Valtinos on the other hand forges an instrument of far greater subjective incisiveness and resolution which, as an important reviewer has recently pointed out—Lina Pantaleon, in Kathimerini, June 19, 2022—borders on the Greek tradition of prose poetry and the forms of mystical epiphanies.
Excellent reasons both for the translators to attempt, if possible, an equally vibrant rendering in English of a, literally, "streaming" piece of Greek writing that will sing forever.
—Stavros Deligiorgis