“This deserves an international audience,“ urges the firebrand Greek economist and politician Yanis Varoufakis as he endorses this bi-lingual collection of Greek poetry in translation. It wouldn’t be Yanis, however, without a new sentence comprising just one additional word with eager exclamation mark: `Now!’
Get to it, he means, for this has messages for every European citizen. As he sees it, the silver lining of austerity – a `self-defeating’ policy, according to Varoufakis – has been the cultural renaissance of which the great wave of poetic creativity is part, caught within this chunky paperback’s 420-odd pages.
Do not expect some great harangue against Merkel and Berlin and Brussels from the 50 or so poets anthologised and rendered into English by a number of translators, the best-known of whom may be David Constantine.
"In post-crisis Greece, questions of blame and recrimination multiply in the face of rising suicide rates and hunger strikes, " writes van Dyck in her introduction. " Did we do this to ourselves, Greeks ask, or was it done to us? The poems and translations collected here demonstrate that the impasse that the Greeks are now facing is not only theirs, but all of ours, as we struggle to live in a faster, more culturally heterogeneous world with tools from a slower, more homogeneous past."
While there are recognisably political poems, many draw on sources from throughout the Western Meditteranean. Stathis Gourgouris, on the other hand, was born and raised in Los Angeles, and is now Professor of Comparative Literature at Columbia University.
Or take Stathis Baroutsos, the blog poet who has been translated into English, Spanish, Kapampangan, Tagalog, and Japanese. Yet he has never been published in Greece, the country in which he grew up. The poet's dark, forlorn-sounding poem Speed Dating is rendered - as are all of the poems - in the original Greek and in English translation on the facing page.
Some want me a lot/ some just a bit, and I/ walk the streets with careful eyes and unsure dreams./
I haven’t picked anyone.
Barutsos, born in Germany in 1980, or Danae Sioziou, also born in Germany in 1987, are good examples of the multi-cultural span of the anthology, which displays tendrils and side branches. So you get poems from, say, a Greek-Albanian and from a Greek-Cypriot.
Greek-Cypriot he may be and one of Cyprus’s most internationally -acclaimed poets, but the work of Mehmet Yashin, born 1958, draws on a greater Levantine tradition. He learned early on to have a distinctive voice from listening to his grandmother who used both the Turkish and Greek alphabets in her daily interactions.
The Serbian born Moma Radic only moved to Athens on a tourist visa in 1993 yet he managed to publish his first book in Greek, Serbian Folktales, in 2004. His first Greek poetry collection followed in 2010. He displays lyrical grace in lines such as the following, from the poem Noon:
You await/ The rain like a finger/you invite the clouds/bearing vacant/ caresses
Austerity Measures is an absorbing collection that repays on every visit.
Paddy Kehoe
