A Greek Ballad
Selected Poems
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
A stunning collection that draws from four decades of verse by one of modern Greece’s most lauded poets
This is the first English-language collection of work by the renowned Greek poet Michális Ganás. Originally from a remote village on the northwest border of Greece, Ganás 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, Ganás’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, Ganás’s writing is infused with striking and original imagery inspired by love, memory, and loss.
Featuring expert translations—made in collaboration with Ganás himself—by David Connolly and Joshua Barley, this volume also includes a scholarly introduction to the poet’s life and work.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In these sad yet ebullient poems, the first of Gan s's to be translated into English, the poet and lyricist crafts verses that invoke the folk music he heard as a child, weaving the geopolitical events that shook Greece during that time as well as addressing more recent history. Selected and translated by Connolly and Barley, the poems progress chronologically and appear alongside the original Greek, offering a comprehensive introduction to the poet's work, and a snapshot of the political upheaval he experienced (his family was forcibly removed from Greece in 1948, the end of the Greek Civil War, by retreating Communist forces). Gan s skillfully melds loss with love: "a body is not just an embrace/ It's a homeland that will become foreign," and "copperware tin-plated at Yannena/ like your laughter glints and sparks." As noted in the preface, these translations evoke traditional Greek prosody, but even with an artful use of rhyme and half-rhyme, can only nod to it: "People/ places, they all look like strangers,/ in photos we took at other ages," he writes in "In Haftia Lay Me to Rest." The song-like quality of Gan s' writing is unmistakable in places: "if I am to spend/ my life in slavery... I may as well be a slave of love." Readers will find this a rich, rare view of a life spent in, or hoping to return, to Greece.
