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Reading Greece
Reading Greece9 hours ago
📚📚A long-awaited and much-anticipated biography of one of the great modern #poets, "Constantine Cavafy: A New Biography" by Peter Jeffreys and Gregory Jusdanis" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025) looks closely at #Cavafy’s artistic journey, from his early poetic experiments to his startling reinvention in middle age, when he renounced much of what he had written and developed a new poetics. Erotic, philosophical, and linguistically suggestive, this widely imitated yet singular style is now recognized and revered as Cavafian.

Reading Greece spoke to Peter Jeffreys Peter Jeffreys and Gregory Jusdanis about their decision to write a new biography of Cavafy, the challenges they faced in reconstructing his life, how they contextualized the themes he delved into within his modern cosmopolitan setting, as well as how their biography situates Cavafy in a global literary context.

The translator of the book in Greek (Εκδόσεις Μεταίχμιο - Ekdoseis Metaixmio, 2025),, Mihalis Makropoulos, also spoke to Reading Greece about the challenging aspects of translating the book, how he navigated translating culturally specific references, especially those rooted in Hellenistic, Byzantine, or colonial Alexandria contexts, and whether he expects that this biography will shed new light on the life and work of Cavafy.

Consulate General of Greece in Boston
Reading Greece
ΒΟΟΚΟF THE MONTH: “Constantine Cavafy: A New Biography” by Peter Jeffreys and Gregory Jusdanis
A long-awaited and much-anticipated biography of one of the great modern poets, Constantine Cavafy: A New Biography by Peter Jeffreys and Gregory Jusdanis, captures the complexities of Cavafy’s life and work, showing him to have been a troubled, brilliant poet who sacrificed love for his art. In r...
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Reading Greece
Reading Greece1 day ago
📌 17 November commemorates the Athens Polytechnic Uprising in 1973, which was a massive demonstration of popular rejection of the Greek military junta of 1967–1974. The uprising actually began on November 14, 1973, and escalated to an open anti-junta revolt and ended in bloodshed in the early morning of November 17, after a series of events starting with a tank crashing through the gates of the Polytechnic.

The poetry collection titled "The Body and the Blood (One more attempt at a poem for the Polytechnic)" by Yannis Ritsos refers to the Polytechnic uprising, to the limitation of the body that acts and claims the “unfamiliar” within space, to the intervention of an extensional ‘youth’ that becomes ‘body and blood’. The moment the body stands against the tank, freedom is ‘re-invented’. Yet, there is no heroic action except an openness to death, the shaping of the conditions for the incarnation of the ‘generous’ action. In this framework freedom is constituted in action, in uncertainty, in the scope of reaction, the potential and the non-death.

II

One writes slogans on the wall, the other
shouts slogans above the streets, the third
framed by the window sings openly Romiosyni Romiosyni
they carried the wounded to the library
a vine leaf like a palm on the wounded knee
sorrowful statues amidst the smoke – where did you forget love
students, builders, curses, posters, cheers, flags
love is the dream, love is the world
lowered forehead of the bull, more and more people are coming
younger and older, schoolchildren with a handful of nuts, with
knapsacks
two red birds drawn crosswise on their notebooks
the newlyweds emerging from the photographer’s
they tie white ribbons on the iron gate
blind lottery vendors, an upright guitar, drugstore lamps
night falls in the city, lighted numbers, closed theaters,
closed notepads, underground poems, pierced flowers
the hidden landscape emerges silently above the night from the
unfathomable depths.
tonight is the time for everything- he says
tonight the continuation of everything – he says
tomorrow for all mankind, for the whole future
that is what he said on the roof
he was holding a huge steering wheel and turning the city
down on the asphalt one could hear the noise of the crowd
a black dog, a basket, a small mirror
two huge shoes of the bitter jester and the broken glass
and the odor coming from the stove of the chestnut vendor
large like a ship.

X

After the tanks the quietest silence, they gathered the burned
vehicles, the ashes
they washed off the blood at the early dawn
they carried away the dead to the iron gate, the broken trees
the young did not return home
shadows wander around the telephone booths
from window pane to window pane the face of the extinguished
fire
they found the one hanged in the rented room
the other in the locked closet
the other with his forehead on his knees as if reading his last
book […]

XII

What they called, in sum, glory or rebellion or sacrifice
a day so transparent as if nothing blameworthy had happened
the night before
a little farther down one could already hear the cheers
the window-panes were changing color, red dominated
the music wandered elsewhere, tall stools remained empty
the windows were being transformed into doors – he was saying – […]

[Excerpts from The Body and the Blood (One more attempt at a poem for the Polytechnic) by Yiannis Ritsos, translated by C. Capri-Karka and Ilona Karka]
Reading Greece
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Reading Greece
Reading Greece4 days 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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