Is Greek Poetry All Greek to You?

There’s been a lot of talk lately about early 20th century Greek poetry, what with the buzz surrounding the new translations of C. P. Cavafy’s Unfinished Poems published this winter by author and cultural critic Daniel Mendelsohn. So much buzz, in fact, that one might easily forget for a moment that there have been a large number of other fascinating poets writing in Greek in the nearly 80 years since Cavafy’s death in 1933. This week the Bridge Series will be introducing us to a number of these poets with the help of two translators of their work, continuing in the Bridge tradition of pairing an older, well-established translator with an emerging one. Edmund Keeley is the distinguished translator of Cavafy, George Seferis, Yannis Ritsos, Odysseus Elytis, Angelos Sikelianos and others; and Karen Emmerich, while much younger, has already produced a very impressive body of work and reaped accolades for her translations of Amanda Michalopoulou (which won the NEA’s International Literature Prize), Eleni Vakalo, Ersi Sotiropoulos, Maria Crossan, Miltos Sachtouris, Margarita Karapanou and others. Don’t you want to know about all these wonderful Greek writers you may never have heard of? You’ll have your chance this coming Thursday, April 14, at 7:00 p.m., at the Bridge’s usual home: McNally Jackson Books.

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