Dimoula Naming Surreally: Lautréamont’s Chants de Maldoror and Nikos Engonopoulos’s worship of the “Greek” Vasiliki Dimoula Abstact This essay considers “naming” in the Greek surrealist poet Nikos Engonopoulos and the Compte de Lautréamont. The discussion is in both cases informed by conceptualizations of the “proper name” formulated by Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze and Pierre Klossowski among others. In the case of Engonopoulos, however, naming has implications also for the vexed issue of nationhood in Mediterranean modernism. Tracing the problematic of proper names’ “(un)translatability” into language and, by extension, culture, the essay resists a reading of Engonopoulos’s “worship of the Greek” as either “surrealist humor” or an ethnocentric statement and suggests instead to read “Greek” itself as a proper name: a sign charged with desire, singular and unchangeable, which cannot be exhausted by any cultural logic. The work of the poet and painter Nikos Engonopoulos (1907–1985) is among the most prominent instances of Greek surrealism. Engonopoulos’s corpus is marked both by the influence of Western European surrealist poetics and an intense preoccupation with ancient, Byzantine and modern Greek literary traditions. This, together with a distinctive interest in Eastern Mediterranean traditions, such as those in Turkey and the Balkans, has placed his work at the centre of the debate on the national character of Greek modernism in general. 1 In this paper, and by means of a comparative reading with Lautréamont, I will consider “Greekness” in Engonopoulos in light of the usage of the proper name in his poetry. Through an approach to the 1 The ideologeme of “Greekness” has often been considered as the distinctive characteristic of Greek modernism. For a sharp criticism of this assumption and the ethnocentric character of Greek modernism, see Vayenas, “Hellenocentrism,” 43–48.