NIKOS KAVVADIAS, (1910-1975), became well-known in Greece at a young age with his first poetry collection, "Marambo," published in 1933, which many sailors knew by heart for a long time. Throughout his life, he maintained the nickname "Marambo" - the name of the ill-fated and cursed bird he had chosen in his twenties to symbolize himself.

There is no doubt that the reason he published "Vardia" in 1954, before falling silent for twenty years, was to explore a new expressive mode. He subsequently dreamed - or pretended to dream - of writing memoirs. "But they will kill me if I tell everything," he used to say. In reality, "Vardia" itself was a novel, a poem, and memories all at once.

Within the book, there is primarily the story of a journey. In the seas of China, an ancient cargo ship, dilapidated - one of those rotten vessels that had already been sold for scrap metal and that Greek shipowners sent for repairs to Rotterdam and then put back to sail for years more - is heading for Sandun.

But the essence lies in the conversations. It is precisely on these that the work is founded. In the endless hours of the watch, the sailors - the stoker, the captain, or the radio operator, like the author himself - jointly reflect on their situation. They perceive their life as a curse, but a curse they accept and seek: there is no worse misery for them than life on land, the forced idleness, the departure that buries them alive.

There is a paradoxical dialectic of love and hate, distrust and complicity between these sailors and their ship: captives and uprooted together, they loathe anything that could liberate them, that could halt their journey. Through their discussions, unpublished anecdotes and memories are introduced into the narrative - a whole series of stories, extensive or brief, comedic or horrifying, always captivating, that constitute a second layer of the work.

The longest narratives are told by the radio operator, who clearly represents the author and is also named Nikolaos, like him. When the narration shifts to the first person, roughly in the middle of the book, the novel reaches its completion. With this device, it first acquires a lyrical dimension: a multitude of daydreams or fantasies are expressed, through genuine poems, in prose.

But primarily, the novel now definitively takes on a character of confession. Moreover, all the sailors’ narratives are also confessions, drawn from lips that seem unwilling to make them.

The confessions of the radio operator, which either drag on or, quite conversely, are fragmented and completed discreetly, with excerpts in the midst of other narratives, dominate the work. A huge, nauseating, unbearable feeling of guilt emanates from them: "Whatever I touch rots. It does not die; it rots." Within a climate of the world's end, the homeland - East offers the traveler nothing but the spectacle of desolation, of prostitution, of syphilis and of death - a truthful mirror of the decay of the past that has just surfaced, following the thread of memories.

In this homeland, they cannot even dock. The eternal wanderer has no right to return. A unique adventure, exotic, a spectacle with a thousand colors, sometimes poetic, sometimes obscene, sometimes delirious. But surely, and even more, a possible image, a very plausible image of our dull fate.

[Excerpt from the text on the back cover of the edition]