Early Greek and Mesoamerican Surrealists: A Comparison

The paper owes its basic idea to a research seminar on the poet and painter Nikos Engonopoulos that took place at the University of New South Wales, during which participants made the interesting objection that his art cannot be characterised as surrealistic because his painting perception of space is not related to that of his European colleagues. The paper examines the artist's unorthodox ethnocentric surrealism in general. Using his poem "Bolivar" as a guide and the relationship between surrealism and the subject of the nation as wider theoretical frame, it detects parallel tendencies in the way early surrealism of the period 1920-1950 "was translated" in western countries near and far, mainly in Mesoamerica and Mediterranean countries. The paper also comments on this extensive divergence, relating it to its socio-political and cultural context.