A Century of Greek Poetry

This volume is an offering by four American translators no one of whom is a native speaker of Greek but each of whom has discovered the riches of the modern Greek language not so much in school as owing to long familiarity with Greece, its people, and its literature. The poems collected here in translation constitute our thanks to twentieth-century Greek poets for giving us so very much.
Our offering is meant, however, to honor not just twentieth-century practitioners but the entire corpus of Greek poetry. Individual poets do not exist alone; they grow out of national traditions, react to them, change them. And national traditions, too, just like individual poets, relate to something broader. Modern Greek poetry has crossed with non-European writing to some degree, but chiefly it has grown out of, reacted to, and changed European and American poetry, which in turn grew largely out of ancient Greek poetry either directly or via Latin. So, in thanking twentieth-century Greek poets we are implicitly also thanking both their Greek predecessors and the diverse non-Greek poets who influenced them.