Modern Greek Poetry

Digte.

In exploring the significance of Homer for the poetry of modern Greece - benign shade or looming shadow? - Dr Ricks is tackling a theme that has implications for the study of poetic influence in general. In this 1989 book, he takes the work of Sikelianos, Cavafy and Seferis and subjects a selection of poems to a careful scrutiny. These poems are not imitations of Homer but fresh engagements with Homeric themes, and comparison of the modern versions with the original is found to be illuminating for the poets' methods of composition. Dr Ricks does not lose sight of the larger significance of his subject, and modern poets from outside Greece - Eliot and Pound, in particular - find their way into the discussion. All Greek is translated and the reader has no need to be a specialist in modern or in ancient Greek to find this study absorbing and instructive.

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

Originally published in 1996, this volume contains essays by scholars, critics and translators and includes themes such as the myth in the Cretan Renaissance and the use of ancient myth by 19th and 20th Century poets. Some essays deal with individual mythical figures such as Odysseus, Orpheus, Prometheus and Aphrodite, while others deal with the problematic issue of the use of myth by Greek women poets. The discussion is completed by comparing attitudes to the ancient Greeks as embodied in English and modern Greek poetry.

While many serious readers in Canada will have been exposed to the ancients, and to the works of some, high-profile modernists-like Cavafy, Seferis and, perhaps, even Ritsos -most modern Greek poetry has remained largely out of reach for English-speaking monoglots. But that is changing quickly, chiefly as the result of the efforts of one man. Enter Manolis Aligizakis, a Greek-Canadian poet of considerable lyrical achievements of his own. Quite apart from having published many volumes of his own much-celebrated poems, Manolis has, for years now, devoted himself to preparing high-quality and nuanced translations of the works of modern Greek poets. He has to this point given us his take mainly on the above-mentioned and better-known writers (for which we are all grateful). Now, however, he has graduated to a truly Heraclean undertaking, one that opens the door for English-speaking readers to the work of many highly respected Greek poets who, it is to be regretted, are essentially unknown outside their own country. Neo-Hellene Poets: An Anthology of Modern Greek Poetry, 1750-2018 is a skeleton key to the poems of 60 Greek moderns whose writings, we can now easily see, deserve a wider readership. The deft and skilled translations that make up the Anthology are helpfully supplemented by brief but informative biographical profiles of the subject poets, putting them on the map for Englishspeaking readers in a way that has never been done before.