Things we might have expected to find, and did:
bread, olives, salt, islands, statues, ruins, references to dead poets (Borges, Pound, Hardy, Ritsos, Seferis)
Things we might have expected to find, and didn't:
references to Classical mythology (with the exception of Vlavianov's "Hotel Athena," which, interesting to note, is also the only poem written in English)
I was surprised to find that all of these poets have studied and/or lived in English speaking countries, and that the two who have translated have translated only American poets.
Are there any other ideas/observations?
We have been talking about varying levels of contemporaneity in the poets we've been reading, and I feel that these Greek poets have in common the intention of creating poetic spaces which somehow exist outside of the contemporary and/or time-bound . Sakelliou especially seems to rely on allegorical renderings of admittedly "timeless" themes.
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Without a doubt, I too was surprised to see that the Cypriot poets (Greek Cypriots, mind you) originally wrote their poems in English. Not to get too heavily, or at all (sorry), into the question of translation, but this might be an interesting stepping stone into Daniela's earlier point about how we might imagine this anthology if it was organized by language (or even dialect?) rather than purely by borders.
ReplyDeleteFor example, using my country for this week, coupling Turkish Cypriots with the poets of Turkey, or Greek Cypriots with the Greek poets.
The editors did consider dividing things by language in the initial stages of the anthology, but I think they discovered that would lead to all sorts of other messy problems (among them, do you feature only the "big" languages or do you begin to feel responsible to all the various and obscure dialects and other languages in between?). That said, it's often true that ethnicity is defined, above all, by language, not nation.
ReplyDeleteThe tension between what "one speaks" vs. where "one lives" is very important to a lot of poets. To offer one pertinent and famous example, think of the Greek poet Cavafy who spent most of his adult life living in Alexandria, Egypt--but we'd never think of him as an Egyptian poet.
I have a friend who is a German mathematician, with an interest in creative writing. His fiction is precise and witty. When I asked him if he wrote in English or German, he said, "English. Only English. In German, I'm not funny at all."
ReplyDeleteMaybe the poets who write in English feel similarly...
...or, of course, poets who choose to write in any acquired language rather than their first. I didn't mean to imply that English is the go-to option.
ReplyDeletePerhaps the "timeless" themes of some poets are more linked to the area's nepotistic literary culture than we would like to think.
ReplyDeleteCurtis,
ReplyDeleteThat might be a little too cynical (though I am the one who dropped the "nepotism bomb" in my post). Surely it sounds trite, but it's also entirely true: like few other places on earth, in Greece you feel--and I mean palpably, like an animal breath on the back of your neck--the presence of the past. This goes beyond just buying a souvlaki next to a Roman arch (which I did weekly in Thessaloniki). It's not just a matter of Greek poets, or Italian poets for that matter, not having other things to think and write about: history and myth are facts of the landscape as much as wildness (what is "unstoried, artless, unenhanced," as Frost would put it) is a fact of the American landscape. Read Yiannis Ritsos' poem, "A Hill" or "Perspective" to see what I mean.
Now the possibilities for stepping into the manure of cliche in a place like Greece is that much more difficult because of these 'facts' ...and there's a lot to think about there.