Category: Reading Greece

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Reading Greece
Reading Greece6 hours ago
📍 On 17 November, Greece honours the memory of the Athens Polytechnic Uprising, a massive student riot against the military dictatorship (1967-1974).

Greece was under military rule, and for three years writers had remained silent rather than submit to censorship. But in 1970 they rebelled and published a book called “Eighteen Texts” an innocuous title that camouflaged a piercing protest against dictatorship and repression. In the words of poet Manolis Anagnostakis, “Words must be hammered in like nails that the wind might not take them.”

“Eighteen Texts” consciously signalled the resumption, under an oppressive regime, of the cultural ferment that paralleled the political liberalization of Greece in the early sixties. The military regime had recently lifted preventive censorship, and although it was still very dangerous to challenge the policies regarding freedom of thought and freedom of the press, these authors took advantage of the purported relaxation of censorship to produce this volume.

The lifting of preventive censorship, they state in their Prologue, does not emancipate the intellectual life of a country if areas of creativity continue to be surrounded by barriers that hinder unconditional presentation of ideas and make their full evaluation impossible. The right to free artistic and intellectual creation is bound to the dignity of man.
Reading Greece
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Reading Greece
Reading Greece2 days ago
📌Ιt was a year ago, on 12 November 2024, that distinguished poet Michalis Ganas passed away.

A Greek Ballad: Selected Poems” by Michalis Ganas, translated by David Connolly and Joshua Barley (Yale University Press 2019) is a stunning collection that draws from four decades of verse by one of modern Greece's most lauded #poets.

Originally from a remote village on the northwest border of Greece, Ganas witnessed the Greek Civil War as a young child, and was taken into enforced exile in Eastern Europe with his family. Weaving together subtle references to the events and places that have defined his life's story, Ganas's terse and technically accomplished poems are a combination of folklore, autobiography, and recent history. Whether describing the mountains of his youth or the difficulties of acclimation in Athens of the 1960s and 1970s, Ganas's writing is infused with striking and original imagery inspired by love, memory, and loss.

Featuring expert translations-made in collaboration with Ganas himself-by David Connolly and Joshua Barley, this volume also includes a scholarly introduction to the poet's life and work.

GREECE, YOU KNOW . . .

Greece, you know, is not only a wound.
Frothy coffee in your off hours,
TV and radio on the verandas,
bronze burnish, bronze body,
bronze bottle-top Greece at my lips.
In the yards the isinglass of the sun
traps your eyes like insects.
Behind the yards disemboweled houses,
playing fields, prisons, hospitals,
people of God and doorknockers of the Devil,
and the tram drivers drinking alone
Arachova’s stiff wine.

Here slept fine young men
with their rifles at their sides,
with barefoot children in their sleep.
Headscarves went sailing by,
carpets and rugs from the watermill.
Now it’s army boots grating gravel
in this great ginnery of the rocks
and the tram drivers drinking alone
Arachova’s stiff wine.

📷Konstantinos Pittas, Michalis Ganas in July 2021
Reading Greece
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Reading Greece
Reading Greece2 days ago
📚📚How familiar are you with the #GreekLit programme?

The Ministry of Culture, as part of its policy to promote the Greek language abroad, launched the GreekLit programme in 2021 to subsidize the translation of titles in all categories of Greek ##book production into other languages.

GreekLit programme aims to support the dynamic Greek book production and the promotion of Greek authors abroad through #translations and continuous updates on activities and news related to Greek #literature. These are works of modern and ancient literature, literary, scientific and artistic creation in the Greek language that can penetrate foreign book markets and contribute to the dissemination of both Greek cultural heritage and contemporary creation.
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The GreeekLit programme is implemented by th Hellenic Foundation for Books and Culture (HFBC), with funds from the Recovery and Resilience Facility.

💡For more info: https://elivip.gr/en/greeklit/

Υπουργείο Πολιτισμού
HFBC Ελληνικό Ίδρυμα Βιβλίου και Πολιτισμού
Reading Greece
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