Synopsis
As it moves back and forth over time, Bathed in Moonlight explores the ambiguity of what is lost and what is gained in poetry. While
Vassiliki Rapti's poems certainly engage with the voices of her native Greek tradition they would also seem to be in dialogue with
poetries beyond the borders of the western world. She tends to locate individual experience in the collective. And so, with intense
lyricism and transformative, vivid expression, each poem creates its own separate world of emotional strength. These poems are fluent,
vibrant, reflective, sensitive, open and brilliantly sensory. They reflect Rapti's wonder at the world, the cyclic nature of life and
language. Her voice spins, floats, and whirls from spiral shells, floating lakes, the ever vigilant moon and calls through fragments
of memory, the depths of the underground and the unspoken that hides between each line.
About the Authors
Vassiliki Rapti was born and raised in Greece, and studied Comparative Literature and Media in Greece, France, and the United States. She holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature with an Emphasis in Drama from Washington University in St. Louis, and is the author of several books, including Ludics in Surrealist Theatre and Beyond (Ashgate, 2013), the co-edited volume Ludics: Play as Humanistic Inquiry (Palgrave/MacMillan, 2021), and the bilingual poetry collection Transitorium (Somerset Hall Press, 2015). Her translation publications include Greek surrealist author Nanos Valaoritis, and her poetry and translations have been published in various international journals. She received a Parnassos Literary award in Greece in 1998. Her poetry is fueled by surrealist imagery, a pursuit of playfulness in artistic expression, and a desire to capture wonderment in everyday life. She is Chair of the Ludics Seminar of the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University, where she founded the Advanced Training in Greek Poetry Translation and Performance Workshop, and currently teaches World Literature and Digital Culture at Emerson College. She is the founding director Citizen TALES* Commons, an international collective of scholars and artists. The poetry collection that forms the core of this volume was published in Greek in Athens by Εκδόσεις Μελάνι in 2021. In November 2022, the Voice of Greece (Η Φωνή της Ελλάδας), the radio arm of the Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation (ΕΡΤ, featured Vassiliki as its Poet of the Week, with twice daily readings of her poetry throughout the week. *Translators, Artists, Ludics Learners, Explorers, and Storytellers
A native of Toronto, Canada, Peter Bottéas holds a Master's degree in Translation from the Université de Montréal and worked for many years as a translator, revisor, editor, and educator in French Canada. After a twenty-year detour as a psychotherapist in Boston, he recently returned to one of his first loves, literary translation, and is currently the primary translator of Greek Boston-based poet Vassiliki Rapti. The author and translator have done several poetry readings together in New York and Boston, as well as in on-line forums. He is a member of the multidisciplinary think-tank and creative forum Citizen TALES Commons and, along with Vassiliki, is co-host of the podcast series Borders Unbound: Hellenic Poetry of the Diaspora and Beyond. Peter is also an occasional voice-over artist, an infrequent poet, and an aficionado of French and Greek poetry set to music.
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