A Century of Greek Poetry, 1900-2000: 1900-2000 Book

This 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. Many of the poems and the translations are published for the first time. Also, included are Kimon Friar's unpublished corrections/modifications to his original translations. Most poetry readers have some awareness of Ancient Greece as the cultural wellspring of the Western world, or some appreciation of contemporary Greece as an enchantment of sun-washed shores and ruins, but the more-than-two-thousand-year interim between these two worlds often is, to them, a blank or blurred page of history. If Homer, Sappho and Euripides live on as household names, Seferis and Elytis, both Nobel laureates, are still little known to the wider public. The poet and scholar Constantine A. Trypanis refers to Greek poetry as that "with the longest and perhaps noblest tradition in the Western world," and concludes that "in the last hundred years greater and more original poetry has been written in Greek than in the last fourteen centuries which preceded them. With the exception of Cavafy, whose poetry earned him international recognition as one of the most important poets of the twentieth century, no other major Greek modern poet has been able to attract more than a limited readership. Yet modern Greek poetry is neither marginal nor minor. It is the constituent part, and a very important one, of the literature of modern Europe. The 20th century poets, including the two Nobel prize winners, that appear in this anthology will be bringing to light a massive and splendid achievement of modern European literature and will underline its continued vitality and originality.Read More