Five Contemporary Greek Poets

In the summer of 2009 we had the opportunity to attend the translation symposium that Susan Gevirtz and Siarita Kouka have been organizing for several years in Lefkes on Paros. Their organization of the symposium is inspired; there’s just enough structure to permit spontaneity, collaboration and improvisation.

The structure of the symposium is ideal: translation work and cultural exchange in the morning, a break in the afternoon, readings each evening, and long winey conversational dinners deep into the gorgeous Greek summer nights.

It’s impossible to visit Greece and not be struck by the physical beauty of the country and by the warmth and openness of the Greeks. The same was true of the Greek poets; their warmth and generosity were deeply touching. All of them spoke and wrote English beautifully, which was especially striking considering the Anglophones’ lack of any Greek.

The revelation, though, was the poetry of the Greeks, in terms of its quality, its diversity and originality, and its very international aesthetic, with an especial resonance with English language and specifically with American poetry.

The work of the Greeks is both particularly Greek and more broadly very international. Perhaps the most obvious affinities with American poetry are evident in Socrates Kabouropoulos’ work. Many of Kabouropoulos’ poems are originally written in English, and Robert Lax’s influence would be obvious even if Kabouropoulos didn’t so graciously acknowledge it. But Lax lived in Greece for most of his adult life, and perhaps his work represents an intersection between American English and Greek landscape and culture. Few American poets have done as much with Lax’s example as Kabouropoulos.

If there is affinity in the work, there must also be an affinity in the culture. The disarming brashness and frankness of Mairi Alexopoulou’s work feels very American to an American, but it is also deeply Greek. Another compelling element of Alexopoulou’s work is her play with language. Her poems in English often incorporate ungrammatical language which serves to disrupt the reader’s comfort just enough to invite an even closer attention to the voices in her poetry. And Alexopoulou’s off-hand, casual, irreverent (and even disrespectful) treatment of literature, myth and history are also very Greek and at the same time very American.

Phoebe Giannisi’s re-workings of Greek myths are somewhat different, more intimately engaged with the particulars of the myth, more patient with a detailed re-telling. Like Alexopoulou, though, Giannisi’s approach is not reverential and allows for (or forces) a complete re-thinking of the myths. Perhaps it would be more accurate to call Giannisi’s re-tellings “re-weavings” because they alter the fabric of the stories. The methodology is similar to Cavafy’s (or to Borges’ or Jean Rhys’ or Christa Wolf’s) but the result completely original, entirely Giannisi.

Katerina Iliopoulou’s poems create a different kind of mythology, a more personal one. In “Tenaron” she writes of the place where the world ended for the ancient Greeks and from which Hades could be entered. But her experience is entirely her own, unmediated by another story. “B” and “Insomnia” also feel mythological (and Theseus and Orpheus enter the poem in “B”) but again the mythology is a personal one, of Iliopoulou’s own making, very much in the manner of American poets. Her poems speak from the inside, from personal, elemental experiences, which are also the stuff of myth.

Like Kabouropoulos’ poems, the tone of Vassilis Manoussakis’s work will feel very familiar to American readers. These poems are very personal, very much based in emotion and in the emotion of the moment, but not romantic—there’s an impulse toward brief, elliptical narrative that satisfies by leaving something out, something for the reader to supply. There’s a yearning toward insight in Manoussakis’ poems that engenders a sense of recognition for the reader. In this way Manoussaki’s work opens out from the intimate and invites us to take pleasure in the lyric.

We want to thank all everyone, Greek and American, who attended the symposium. All of the poets there, not just these five, definitely deserve a wider audience. We want to give especial thanks to Susan Gevirtz and Siarita Kouka for everything that they’ve done with such generosity and grace. And we of course we want to thank our fellow translators, Andrew Maxwell, Joseph Mosconi, and Richard Pierce. Andrew Maxwell and Joseph Mosconi are deeply gifted and original poets who also have the ability to put their egos aside and enter into another poet’s work that’s always required in translation. And Richard Pierce is a brilliant and original sculptor who also happens to be a gifted translator.

We learned so much at the symposium and throughout this process. Our thanks, again, to everyone.

—Valerie Coulton & Edward Smallfield