Karen Van Dyck

The New Greek Poetry

Austerity Measures

Margarita Lymperakē

Three Summers

Since the crisis hit in 2008, we have heard much about Greece's economic travails. This year, the world watched as Syriza dramatically took a stand against austerity - and, after months of attrition, finally capitulated. But this is not the whole story. As Karen Van Dyck shows in this anthology of the very best contemporary Greek poetry, the last decade has also seen a remarkable flowering of new creative talent. These are poems concerned with the personal and the political; with the small revelations of gardening and the viciousness of streetfights; with bodies, love, myth, migration, and economic crisis.

In this pioneering study of contemporary Greek poetry, Karen Van Dyck investigates modernist and postmodernist poetics at the edge of Europe. She traces the influential role of Greek women writers back to the sexual politics of censorship under the dictatorship (1967-1974). Reading the effects of censorship--in cartoons, the dictator's speeches...

Greek Poetry Since 1967

Kassandra and the Censors

'I remember caresses, kisses, touching each other's hair. We had no sense that anything else existed' - Elena Penga, 'Heads' 'Nothing, not even the drowning of a child Stops the perpetual motion of the world' - Stamatis Polenakis, 'Elegy' Since the crisis hit in 2008, Greece has played host to a cultural renaissance unlike anything seen in the country for over thirty years. Poems of startling depth and originality are being written by native Greeks, émigrés and migrants alike. They grapple with the personal and the political; with the small revelations of gardening and the viciousness of streetfights; with bodies, love, myth, migration and economic crisis. In Austerity Measures, the very best of the writing to emerge from that creative ferment - much of it never before translated into English - is gathered for the first time. The result is a map to the complex territory of a still-evolving scene - and a unique window onto the lived experience of Greek society now.

Edmund Keeley

Peter Constantine

Peter Bien

This unique bilingual anthology presents the achievements of Greek poetry in the 20th century. Included are 109 poets and 456 poems, with the Greek original and the English translation on opposite pages. Included are the internationally recognized C.P. Cavafy, the Nobel Prize winners George Seferis and Odysseus Elytis, as well as all the major Greek poets of the 20th century. Many of the poems in the Greek original and many translations are published for the first time. The four editors, all award winning authors and translators, not only selected the poems but also have translated many of them. In all 63 translators contributed their work to this anthology. Also, included are Kimon Friar's unpublished corrections/modifications to his original translations. -- Cosmos Publishing.

1900-2000

A Century of Greek Poetry

In this pioneering study of contemporary Greek poetry, Karen Van Dyck investigates modernist and postmodernist poetics at the edge of Europe. She traces the influential role of Greek women writers back to the sexual politics of censorship under the dictatorship (1967-1974). Reading the effects of censorship—in cartoons, the dictator's speeches, the poetry of the Nobel Laureate George Seferis, and the younger generation of poets—she shows how women poets use strategies which, although initiated in response to the regime's press law, prove useful in articulating a feminist critique. In poetry collections by Rhea Galanaki, Jenny Mastoraki and Maria Laina, among others, she analyzes how the censors'tactics for stabilizing signification are redeployed to disrupt fixed meanings and gender roles. As much a literary analysis of culture as a cultural analysis of literature, her book explores how censorship, consumerism, and feminism influence contemporary Greek women's poetry as well as how the resistance to clarity in this poetry trains readers to rethink these cultural practices. Only with greater attention to the cultural and formal specificity of writing, Van Dyck argues, is it possible to theorize the lessons of censorship and women's writing.

Karen Van Dyck

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