Folk Poetry Of Modern Greece

A wide-ranging study of popular poetry and songs from the end of the Byzantine Empire to the present.

This 1900 volume gathers modern Greek songs designed for both classical scholars and lovers of folklore in general. It contains a wide variety of works divided according to genre; each poem is introduced within the main body of the text and additional critical analysis is given at the end.

Placing Modern Greece is about literary representations of Greece in the period of Romanticism, encompassing the time in the 1820s when it became a territorial and political reality as a nation state. Constanze Guthenke claims that the imagining of and attitude towards Greece was shaped by a fascination with the material, and by the highly conceptualized tension between the ideal on the one hand, and the material on the other. Her study focuses on nature and landscape imagery as vehicles of representation, on their specific inner workings, and on their dynamic, which conditions how and whether Greece as a modern entity in the making can be represented at all. Offering readings from German and contemporaneous Greek authors, Guthenke supplies a commentary on the translation and crossings of representational models and their limits.

This anthology is composed of recently revised translations selected from the five volumes of work by major poets of modern Greece offered by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard during the past two decades. The poems chosen are those that translate most successfully into English and that are also representative of the best work of the original poets. C. P. Cavafy and Angelos Sikelianos are major poets of the first half of the twentieth century. George Seferis and Odysseus Elytis, who followed them, both won the Nobel Prize in literature. Nikos Gatsos was a very popular translator, lyricist, and critic.

This anthology is composed of revised translations selected from five volumes of work by major poets of modern Greece offered by Keeley and Sherrard during the 1960s and '70s. Poems chosen are those that translate most successfully into English and that are also representative of the best work of the original poets--C.P. Cavafy, Angelos Sikelianos, George Seferis, Odysseus Elytis, and Nikos Gatsos.