On Editing Greece and Cyprus

Greetings, readers of the anthology!

I’m Christopher Bakken, regional editor for Greece and Cyprus, and co-editor of the section dedicated to Turkey. Joel just alerted me to the site earlier today, so I haven’t had a chance to scroll through everything—so if I’m redundant about certain things, forgive that. Joel also reports that you’re about to discuss those three countries in class tomorrow, so I thought I’d toss down a few notes to get the conversation rolling, in the hopes that you might fire specific questions my way, or fire ideas into the blog’s friendly ether, and I can cover whatever I haven’t more easily in subsequent responses.

Joel asked me:

As you were selecting poets for the sections of the anthology you edited, to what extent were your choices based on a desire for the selections to be representative of the current poetry scene in the country? On a desire to include the poets you thought most important, regardless of how representative? Or on other desires entirely?

I answer:

In case you don’t know, Wayne Miller and Kevin Prufer, the anthology’s editors, divided our page limits according to each country’s population (so Cyprus gets two pages, and Greece six, and Turkey many more) and the instructions were simple: it was up to us to fill those pages as we saw fit, according to our own tastes and rules of literary logic. They just trusted us.

Since most of the regional editors were themselves poets, they did this knowing that we’d be idiosyncratic and personal in our choices, perhaps, rather than academically “responsible” or mathematically representative. Their aim, as I understood it as a regional editor, was to produce an anthology that re-awakened American poets to what was happening in European poetry: which is to say, the audience for the anthology was American poets, not Comparative Literature scholars (I’m guessing the Comp. Lit. folks would have produced a very different kind of anthology).

I dealt with each section differently, according to my understanding of each place and the situation of poetry within each place. I’ll try to confess what I was thinking with regards to each country, offering what amounts to a highly personal rationale for my editorial choices. I can only get to Greece and Cyprus tonight. Push me a little and I’ll promise to talk about Turkey (which I co-edited) in the near future.

Greece

This is the country I know the best, since I’ve lived there and visited there off and on for almost two decades. I speak the language and translate Greek poetry.

So it was easy for me to go there to do “research,” hanging out in Athens for several weeks, tapping into the very hierarchical and nepotistic literary scene there, and interviewing poets and editors regarding the “young poets” of Greece.

What I found out was rather astounding: the concept of the “young poet” doesn’t really exist in Greece. When I asked one famous editor who the crucial young poets were he said, “ask me again in twenty years…then we’ll know.” It’s rare for poets to publish much before their thirties and it’s rare for any poet to have a real reputation before their late forties. In short, there wasn’t much consensus about much before that.

So I went back to some simple criteria: I’d choose poets whose work I admired, whose translations seemed to “work” in English. And I decided early on to offer at least a few poems by each poet rather than just one poem by six or eight poets. That meant making choices that have no doubt perplexed and angered some of my Greek friends. Some have, no doubt, wondered what I was thinking.

Well, I knew that I wanted to dedicate at least half of my selection to women poets. Here’s a crucial subject for your blog: in many countries in Europe (Eastern Europe in particular), there’s barely a tradition for women poets. Greek women poets may reach way back to Sappho, but there’s not much between B.C. and the 20th century to hang on to with regards to a tradition. And feminism has come late to Greece as well, since it is an Orthodox Christian and openly patriarchal culture. But in the last two or three decades, women are beginning to find their voices in every sphere, and in poetry as well. One of the greatest living Greek poets is Kiki Dimoula. Another is Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke. They are passing the baton to a new generation of Greek women. I wanted my selections to represent this exciting development accordingly.

So two women poets have their say here: Liana Sakelliou (who spent a lot of time in the U.S., married an American, and who is deeply influenced by H.D., Plath, and the Midwestern American poets) and Marigo Alexopoulou, a very new arrival on the scene, who seems a little more firmly planted in her home country (even though she took her Ph.D. in England).

Of the male poets, Haris Vlavianos is perhaps the ultimate “establishment poet,” the editor of the most important poetry magazine in Greece, as well as the editor or the most important poetry publishing house in Greece. He’s the translator of Ashbery, Jorie Graham, Stevens, Poe, and many other American poets into Greek. I thought he’d give American readers some sense of the cosmopolitan nature of the Greek intellectual: Greece is a small country, but its intellectuals cast their glance very wide. His poems reflect that pretty openly, I think.

Giorgos Chouliaras, a kind of diplomat in the U.S., barely lives in Greece, which means many Greek poets have pretty much forgotten about him or written him off as an ex-pat (though he is very much Greek and his poems reflect that). You’ll feel the timbre of political poetry and a sense of exile in his work, reminiscent as it is of someone like Milosz, ready to do the work of witness. He is representative of the engaged poet in the generation following the junta and all the nastiness it represents. And, well, David Mason’s translations were just so damn good that it seemed right to throw caution to the wind and include him.

So, do you see how capricious and irresponsible I am?


Cyprus

I went to Cyprus about five years ago and spent several nights intentionally dining in excellent restaurants in Nicosia right next to the “Green Line,” the wall that separates the Greek and Turkish parts of the city. The Berlin Wall may have fallen but the wall in Cyprus has not. One feels the Cold War there, those tensions and violence we’d almost forgotten. So I’d sit in a fancy Greek place, eating octopus on white tablecloths listening to Vivaldi while, from just over the wall, I’d listen to some Turkish kids blasting Madonna from their car stereo, arguing about who knows what, all of this within the gaze of the heavily armed guards stationed at the check-point towers.

Somehow I wanted my selections in the anthology to reflect this uncanny edge and Babel.

The very week I visited Cyrpus, fat men from the U.N. were at a fancy hotel in the Alps trying to broker a deal to “re-unite” the island. Their plan failed. The Greeks of Cyprus wouldn’t agree (and it would take a long entry to explain why), it was clear.

Only two intellectuals on the whole island had spoken up IN FAVOR of the U.N. plan in the papers, and both were poets: Stephanos Stephanides (Greek) and Gur Genc (Turkish). These two poets had met in spite of the green line and had become friends, translating their poetry to one another, for one another. When I went with Stephanos to the Turkish side of the border and met Gur Genc, when I watched the two of them kiss, then argue about the things poets care about (what else: language, the truth, et al.), I knew that they truly represented the situation of Cypriot poetry. Given two pages, it was kind of a no-brainer.

I included the other poem by Lyssandros Pitharas because it was gorgeous. And because I knew a little of his story: Pitharas (a very promising young Cypriot-Greek, writing in English) had a Turkish lover and he died of AIDS. I’ll spare you my over-determined reading of the metaphor that represents and let his stunning posthumous poem speak for itself.

Kalinichta (that's Greek for "good night"),

Christopher Bakken