Princeton Modern Greek Studies

In this new edition of George Seferis's poems, the acclaimed translations by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard are revised and presented in a compact, English-only volume. The revision covers all the poems published in Princeton's earlier bilingual edition, George Seferis: Collected Poems (expanded edition, 1981). Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1963, George Seferis (1900-1971) has long been recognized as a major international figure, and Keeley and Sherrard are his ideal translators. They create, in the words of Archibald MacLeish, a "translation worthy of Seferis, which is to praise it as highly as it could be praised." Although Seferis was preoccupied with his tradition as few other poets of the same generation were with theirs, and although he was actively engaged in the immediate political aspirations of his nation, his value for readers lies in what he made of this preoccupation and this engagement in fashioning a broad poetic vision. He is also known for his stylistic purity, which allows no embellishment beyond that necessary for precise yet rich poetic statement. Edmund Keeley (1928–2022) was the Charles Barnwell Straut Class of 1923 Professor of English, emeritus, and professor emeritus of creative writing at Princeton University. Philip Sherrard (1922–1995) was research fellow at St. Antony's College, Oxford, and lecturer in the history of the Orthodox Church at King's College London. "[Seferis] is a deeply civilized and profoundly Greek man who draws on the whole heritage of his people. . . . To read Seferis is to experience a sense of honesty, a cool scorn for any kind of evasion." "Seferis has a history and mythology and is a part of both, while at the same time he is a thoroughly 20th-century citizen of humanity at large. . . . Here is a poet who has a sweep and a delicacy calling to mind Yeats and few other names of the century." "The serenity and fullness of the imagery, his evocation of aspects of a familiar landscape, the confident rhetorical manner, the absence of any intellectual (as against sentimental) irony--all this is immensely impressive." "Reveals a dedication and insight which have made [these] translations the standard work for our time."

“Putting Greek” writer Nikos Kazantzakis's vast output into the context of his lifelong spiritual quest and the turbulent politics of twentieth-century Greece, Peter Bien argues that Kazantzakis was a deeply flawed genius-not always artistically successful, but a remarkable figure by any standard. This is the second and final volume of Bien's definitive and monumental biography of Kazantzakis (1883-1957). It covers his life after 1938, the period in which he wrote “Zorba the Greek” and “The Last Temptation of Christ”, the novels that brought him his greatest fame. A demonically productive novelist, poet, playwright, travel writer, autobiographer, and translator, Kazantzakis was one of the most important Greek writers of the twentieth century and the only one to achieve international recognition as a novelist. But Kazantzakis's writings were just one aspect of an obsessive struggle with religious, political, and intellectual problems. In the 1940s and 1950s, a period that included the Greek civil war and its aftermath, Kazantzakis continued this engagement with undiminished energy, despite every obstacle, producing in his final years novels that have become world classics.

"Winner of the John D. Criticos Prize" Gonda A. H. Van Steen is Assistant Professor of Classics and Modern Greek at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Aristophanes has enjoyed a conspicuous revival in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Greece. Here, Gonda Van Steen provides the first critical analysis of the role of the classical Athenian playwright in modern Greek culture, explaining how the sociopolitical "venom" of Aristophanes' verses remains relevant and appealing to modern Greek audiences. Deriding or challenging well-known figures and conservative values, Aristophanes' comedies transgress authority and continue to speak to many social groups in Greece who have found in him a witty, pointed, and accessible champion from their "native" tradition. The book addresses the broader issues reflected in the poet's revival: political and linguistic nationalism, literary and cultural authenticity versus creativity, censorship, and social strife. Van Steen's discussion ranges from attitudes toward Aristophanes before and during Greece's War of Independence in the 1820s to those during the Cold War, from feminist debates to the significance of the popular music integrated into comic revival productions, from the havoc transvestite adaptations wreaked on gender roles to the political protest symbolized by Karolos Koun's directorial choices. Crossing boundaries of classical philology, critical theory, and performance studies, the book encourages us to reassess Aristophanes' comedies as both play-acts and modern methods of communication. Van Steen uses material never before accessible in English as she proves that Aristophanes remains Greece's immortal comic genius and political voice. "A riveting, complex and often surprising exegesis that should be made compulsory reading for all students of the Greek world, ancient and modern alike . . . Aristophanes has formed a constant and central element in Greek politics and Greek theatre. Van Steen deserves all credit both for isolating this richly rewarding virgin lode, and mining it with such skill and perseverance . . . Venom in Verse is that rarity among scholarly studies: a beautifully written book, to read and reread rather than merely consult, with added pleasure at each fresh perusal."---Peter Green, Times Literary Supplement "Van Steen demonstrates how dramas originally crafted to play a role in shaping the world's oldest democracy have similarly served the development of a new one on the same territory. Those who associate Aristophanes' only with ancient will certainly profit from reading this volume." "A delightful and instructive book . . . wonderful and highly useful."---Marina Kotzamani, Journal of Modern Greek Studies "In this impressive monograph, Van Steen chronicles the reception history of modern Greek Aristophanic performance from the important revival of Plutus in 1868 to the most recent interpretations of this playwright. She also explores Aristophanes' role as a cultural icon in Greek society, bridging the gap between the elitism of the classics and the mass appeal of Attic comedy." "This is a good subject, which has never been properly explored before, and it deserves a well-researched book devoted to it.... Because Aristophanes is so obviously vulgar, popular and accessible, his work cuts across the dichotomy between the elevation of Ancient Greece as noble and pure versus its repudiation as elitist and exclusive. Van Steen explores these intertwining political and cultural dialectics with knowledge and finesse."-Oliver Taplin, Oxford University "Van Steen's intellectual horizon extends beyond classical philology, to include critical theory and performance theory . . . Her arguments and foci are refreshing."-"Stratos Constantinidis, Ohio State University

In the dramatic monologues that make up “The Fourth Dimension”, especially those based on the grim history of Mycenae and its royal protagonists, the celebrated modern Greek poet Yannis Ritsos presents a timeless poetic paradigm of the condition of Greece, past and present. The volume also contains a group of modern narratives, including the famous, and much-anthologized, "Moonlight Sonata." Ritsos, rightly, regarded “The Fourth Dimension” as his finest achievement. It is now presented to English-speaking readers for the first time in its entirety. From "Philoctetes" All the speeches of great men, about the dead and about heroes. Astonishing, awesome words, pursued us even in our sleep, slipping beneath closed doors, from the banqueting hall where glasses and voices sparkled, and the veil of an unseen dancer rippled silently like a diaphanous, whirling wall between life and death. This throbbing our childhood nights, lightening the shadows of shields etched on white walls by slow moonlight.

Valued for their sensual and social intensity, Greek dance-events are often also problematical for participants, giving rise to struggles over position, prestige, and reputation. Here Jane Cowan explores how the politics of gender is articulated through the body at these culturally central, yet until now ethnographically neglected, celebrations in a class-divided northern Greek town. Portraying the dance-event as both a highly structured and dynamic social arena, she approaches the human body not only as a sign to be deciphered but as a site of experience and an agent of practice. In describing the multiple ideologies of person, gender, and community that townspeople embody and explore as they dance, Cowan presents three different settings: the traditional wedding procession, the "Europeanized" formal evening dance of local civic associations, and the private party. She examines the practices of eating, drinking, talking, gifting, and dancing, and the verbal discourse through which celebrants make sense of each other's actions. Paying particular attention to points of tension and moments of misunderstanding, she analyzes in what ways these social situations pose different problems for men and women.

"One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 1991" "If the Saint calls you, if you have an open road, then you don't feel the fire as if it were your enemy," says one of the participants in the Anastenaria. This compelling work evokes and contrasts two forms of firewalking and religious healing: first, the Anastenaria, a northern Greek ritual in which people who are possessed by Saint Constantine dance dramatically over red-hot coals, and, second, American firewalking, one of the more spectacular activities of New Age psychology. Loring Danforth not only analyzes these rituals in light of the most recent work in medical and symbolic anthropology but also describes in detail the lives of individual firewalkers, involving the reader personally in their experiences: he views ritual therapy as a process of transformation and empowerment through which people are metaphorically moved from a state of illness to a state of health. Danforth shows that the Anastenaria and the songs accompanying it allow people to express and resolve conflict-laden family relationships that may lead to certain kinds of illnesses. He also demonstrates how women use the ritual to gain a sense of power and control over their lives without actually challenging the ideology of male dominance that pervades Greek culture. Comparing the Anastenaria with American firewalking, Danforth includes a gripping account of his own participation in a firewalk in rural Maine. Finally he examines the place of anthropology in a postmodern world in which the boundaries between cultures are becoming increasingly blurred. "As a contribution to postmodernism, it reveals the possibilities and paradoxes inherent in that movement. As a contribution to the ethnography of ritual healing, the book confirms the basic theory and provides comparative data."

In this collection leading anthropologists provide a comprehensive yet highly nuanced view of what it means to be a Greek man or woman, married or unmarried, functioning within a complex society based on kinship ties. Exploring the ways in which sexual identity is constructed, these authors discuss, for example, how going out for coffee embodies dominant ideas about female sexuality, moral virtue, and autonomy; why men in a Lesbos village maintain elaborate friendships with nonfamily members while the women do not; why young housewives often participate in conflict-resolution rituals; and how the dominant role of mature married householders is challenged by unmarried persons who emphasize spontaneity and personal autonomy. This collection demonstrates that kinship and gender identities in Greece are not unitary and fixed: kinship is organized in several highly specific forms, and gender identities are plural, competing, antagonistic, and are continually being redefined by contexts and social change. "[This] outstanding collection ... will without doubt be essential reading for anyone concerned with Greece, the Mediterranean, and the Balkans, especially in respect of the nexus between kinship, marriage, gender, friendship, religion and symbolism."

In present-day Greece many people still speak of exotikNB--mermaids, dog-form creatures, and other monstrous beings similar to those pictured on medieval maps. Challenging the conventional notion that these often malevolent demons belong exclusively to a realm of folklore or superstition separate from Christianity, Charles Stewart looks at beliefs about the exotikNB and the Orthodox Devil to demonstrate the interdependency of doctrinal and local religion. He argues persuasively that students who cling to the timeworn folk/official distinction will find it impossible to appreciate the breadth and coherence of contemporary Greek cosmology. Like the medieval cartographers' fantasies, which were placed on the "edges" of the physical world, Greek demons cluster in marginal locations--outlying streams, wells, and caves. The demons are near enough to the community, however, to attack humans--causing illness or death, according to Stewart's informants. Drawing on an unusual range of sources, from the author's fieldwork on the Cycladic island of Naxos to Orthodox liturgical texts, this book pictures the exotikNB as elements of a Greek cognitive map: figures that enable individuals to navigate the traumas and ambiguities of life. Stewart also examines the social forces that have by turns disposed the Greek people to embrace these demons as indicative of links with the classical past or to eschew them as signs of backwardness and ignorance. "The major contribution of Charles Stewart's study is the evidence he provides of the essential link between the demons that have had an important part in modern village life and the traditional demons in the Greek Orthodox cosmology."

Peter Bien is Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College. Kazantzakis: Politics of the Spirit, Volume 2 is published in hardcover by Princeton. Bien has translated Kazantzakis's novels The Last Temptation of Christ, Saint Francis, and Report to Greco into English, and is the author of Kazantzakis and the Linguistic Revolution in Greek Literature (Princeton). "No author who lives in Greece," writes Peter Bien, "can avoid politics." This first volume of his major intellectual biography of Nikos Kazantzakis approaches the distinguished--and controversial--writer by describing his struggle with political questions that were in reality aspects of a fervent religious search. Beginning with Kazantzakis's early career in fin-de-siècle Paris and his discovery of William James, Nietzsche, and Bergson, the book continues by describing his experiments with communism in turbulent Greece, his visits to Soviet Russia, and the publication of his epic Odyssey in 1938. Bien demonstrates that politics and religion cannot be separated in Kazantzakis's development. His major concern was personal salvation, but the method he employed to win that salvation was political engagement. Did deliverance lie in nationalism? Communism? Fascism? He eventually rejected each of these possible solutions as morally appalling. Abused by both left and right, he insisted on an "eschatological politics" of spiritual fulfillment. This compelling biography will be essential reading for Kazantzakis scholars and for a wide audience of those who already admire the Greek author's work. In addition, it will provide an introduction to the first three decades of Kazantzakis's career for those who have yet to enjoy such passionate and stirring novels as Zorba the Greek, The Greek Passion, and The Last Temptation of Christ. This first volume provides an introduction to the initial three decades of Kazantzakis's career for those who have enjoyed such vibrant and stirring novels as Zorba the Greek, The Greek Passion, and The Last Temptation of Christ. "Bien is arguably the best, and beyond a doubt most learned, exponent of modern Greek literature writing in English today."---Peter Green, New Republic "Splendidly produced, properly documented, with a rich international bibliography and an index of names and titles plus a detailed chronology, Kazantzakis: Politics of the Spirit vindicates the claim made in its title and impresses scholars and admirers of the phenomenon called Nikos Kazantzakis."---M. Byron Raizis, World Literature Today

Peter Bien, professor emeritus of English and comparative literature at Dartmouth College, has translated Kazantzakis's The Last Temptation of Christ, Saint Francis, and Report to Greco. He is also the author of an authoritative two-volume study of Kazantzakis's works. The life of Nikos Kazantzakis-the author of Zorba the Greek and The Last Temptation of Christ-was as colorful and eventful as his fiction. And nowhere is his life revealed more fully or surprisingly than in his letters. Edited and translated by Kazantzakis scholar Peter Bien, this is the most comprehensive selection of Kazantzakis's letters in any language. One of the most important Greek writers of the twentieth century, Kazantzakis (1883–1957) participated in or witnessed some of the most extraordinary events of his times, including both world wars and the Spanish and Greek civil wars. As a foreign correspondent, an official in several Greek governments, and a political and artistic exile, he led a relentlessly nomadic existence, living in France, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Germany, Italy, Spain, the Soviet Union, and England. He visited the Versailles Peace Conference, attended the tenth-anniversary celebration of the Bolshevik Revolution, interviewed Mussolini and Franco, and briefly served as a Greek cabinet minister-all the while producing a stream of novels, poems, plays, travel writing, autobiography, and translations. The letters collected here touch on almost every aspect of Kazantzakis's rich and tumultuous life, and show the genius of a man who was deeply attuned to the artistic, intellectual, and political events of his times. "[T]he best possible place to start to try to understand a remarkable writer."---Mark Mazower, Times Literary Supplement "In a very real sense, the present volume is the raw material of the biography, turned into an enjoyable repast by the skillful hand of its editor."---David Holton, Anglo-Hellenic Review "Nikos Kazantzakis was one of the great literary letter writers of the twentieth century, and this eagerly awaited volume is the first fully representative selection of his correspondence in any language. Providing rich insights into the workings of his mind, this expertly annotated volume is a milestone that will immediately become authoritative."-Roderick Beaton, author of George Seferis: Waiting for the Angel, a Biography "These crystalline and eloquent translations of Nikos Kazantzakis's letters help us grasp his intellectual intensity and spiritual verve. He emerges as a thoughtful, ardent man who was single-minded in his search for wisdom. This is an intriguing and compelling volume that highlights the nexus between Kazantzakis's life and literary art."-Darren J. N. Middleton, author of Broken Hallelujah: Nikos Kazantzakis and Christian Theology