A Century of Greek Poetry 1900-2000: Bilingual Edition - Hardcover

Peter Bien; Edmund Keeley; Karen Van Dyck; Peter Constantine

4.5

8 ratings by Goodreads

9781932455007: A Century of Greek Poetry 1900-2000: Bilingual Edition

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1932455000 ISBN 13: 9781932455007

Publisher: Attica Editions, 2004

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

This unique 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. Included are the internationally recognized C.P. Cavafy, the Nobel Prize winners George Seferis and Odysseus Elytis, as well as all the major Greek poets of the 20th century. Many of the poems in the Greek original and many translations are published for the first time. The four editors, all award winning authors and translators, not only selected the poems but also have translated many of them. In all 63 translators contributede their work to this anthology. Also, included are Kimon Friar’s unpublished corrections/modifications to his original translations.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

From the Publisher:

This unique 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 Also, included are Kimon Friar’s unpublished corrections/modifications to his original translations.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.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.