The Scattered Papers of Penelope: New and Selected Poems by Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke, Karen Van Dyck

Abstract

^^^^B poet by thename ofMihyar,this ^^^^B collection's Mihyar is a persona ^^^^B adoptedbyAdonis (itself a pen ^^^^B name and persona, that of a Near ^^^^B Eastern harvest god). Adonis's ^^^^fl Mihyar embodies the revolutionary, ^^^^B the anarchic, themystical, and the ^^^^B esoteric.One critichas gone so faras ^^^^B to callMihyar a post-religious figure ^HH^I and has argued that in this collec ^BjH tionMihyar /Adonis is a prophet of ^HjjH the profane. Prophecy is certainly ^B?H conspicuous. Indeed, language and ^BflH theprophecy itbegets are Adonis's ^Hj|H "manifesto." Consider "I'm a lan ^Ha^B guage for a god who's yet to come, ^HjjH / the sorcerer of dust." Or, as Beard ^B?H and Haydar put it, "To talk about ^B|H Mihyar is todiscuss what poetry can HH do"; or, as Adonis himself puts it, ^^^^H "He is thephysics of things." ^^^^B The 141 poems of Mihyar, ^^^^M though alchemical, like Adonis's ^HHH later poetry, are unlike his later ^^Rj^fl work in thatthey aredeeply lyri ^^ ^B cal.Adonis would go on toproduce ^^^^B some of themost significantpoetry ^^^^B everwritten inArabic in the twenty ^^^^B collections after Mihyar, butMihyar ^^^^B remains defining and amust-read. ^^^^B Shawkat M. Toorawa ^^^^BCornell University IKaterina Anghelaki-Rooke. The Scat tered Papers of Penelope: New and Selected Poems. Karen Van Dyck, ed. & intro. Saint Paul, Minnesota. Gray wolf. 2009. 123 pages. $15. isbn978-1 55597-519-7 Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke is one of Greece's most important contem porary poets. She has received the Greek National Prize forPoetry and the Athens Academy Prize and is the author of sixteen poetry collections, ofwhich five have been translated intoEnglish. Thismost recentanthol ogy of her poetry, edited by Karen llllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll ./f Van Dyck (one ofAnghelaki-Rooke's main translators),gathers togethera strong selection of poems from the differentperiods ofherwriting, also including translations by Edmund and Mary Keeley, Kimon Friar,Rae Dalven, and others. Anghelaki-Rooke's verse has the clarity of contemporary vision layeredwith more than twomillen nia of Greek language and poetry. She takes everyday experience and turns it into an allegory ofmodern life.Her poems anchor the abstract metaphysics ofmyth in theordinary rituals of everyday existence. During the dark years of the military dictatorship in Greece (1967 74), Anghelaki-Rooke was an out spoken activist and champion for the freedom towrite. In her fight against censorship, in spite of the danger toherself,her voice reached out toEurope and theUnited States. Through her activism and that of her circle of women poets, censor ship came to an end before thedic tatorship fell. She opened the door tomany different ways of feminist poetic expression, which was a con siderable accomplishment inGreece's still male-dominated culture. As Karen Van Dyck has written in her introduction, Anghelaki-Rooke's poetry is not directed specifically at women or at Greek readers: "Her poetry can be seen to fitinto the tra dition of thebest ofAmerican femi nist poetry, alongside Adrienne Rich and Anne Sexton,where writing the body and rewriting myth are central concerns. Anghelaki-Rooke's poetry, though, is lessmilitant. Her Penelo pes and Helens cook dinner fortheir husbands and suitorswith one hand and write poetrywith theother." Anghelaki-Rooke is also consid ered one of the foremost translators ofEnglish and Russian literatureinto Greek. She has translated, among others, Dylan Thomas, Samuel Beck ett, Edward Albee, Seamus Heaney, and Derek Walcott intoGreek, but in my view her singlemost impressive feat of translation is her monumen tal translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin. The range and power ofKateri na Anghelaki-Rooke's language, as she recasts and reweaves the Greek IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIMIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIMIIIIIIIMIIIMIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII 66 i World Literature Today Petr Borkovec FROMTHE INTERIOR Poems 1995 - 2005 Tr.m?>Lued fro;n the ( by Justin Quinn idiom into forms that are power ful and new, has been compellingly captured by the translators in this volume. As she said in a recent interview: "Allmy lifeI've been say ing that I serve poetry. Lately Ihave begun to see thatwhat I am really doing is serving language. Poetry is the instrument, the medium. I have an almost religious attachment to language." (Editorial note: Three of Anghelaki-Rooke's Penelope...