Greek Poet Research Articles

General

General Christopher T. Begg, Victor H. Matthews, William J. Urbrock, and Rhiannon Graybill 831. Roland Boer, "Multinationality and the Utopian Project: The Case for Actually Existing Israel," Imagined Worlds, 145-59 [see #1548]. In the spirit of Benedict Anderson's work on imagined communities and the role that imposed and constructed differences play in the formation of such communities, B. applies the theoretical concept of nationalism to biblical articulations of "Israel." Against this background, B. makes the argument that whereas prejudices facilitate difference, nationalism promotes community by focusing on the process of imagining community. Israel, he argues, was the product of an intersection of nationalities and also one in which "actually existing Israel" was a simultaneously utopian/dystopian project. As part of his cross-cultural approach, which is important for a social-scientific inquiry like his, B. adduces the intense debate concerning "nationalities" at the turn of the 20th century in Austria, Russia, and elsewhere, and finds currents of similarity between the biblical project and these more recent situations. He consciously avoids anachronism by defining "nationalities" in a way that would satisfy Anderson: what is often meant in usages of the term is what are now problematically called "ethnic groups" within states or kingdoms. Each state is made up of various nationalities so that when one speaks of nationalism, one is speaking of distinct political and cultural identities within a state. Nationalism in other words, as Anderson has argued, is an imagined framework for political communities with a constructive, if not utopian intent, i.e. building a world in which the threat of difference is controlled. [Adapted from published abstract, pp. 6-7] 832. [Second Temple] Cavan Concannon, "Remembering the Destruction(s) of the Temple at the Museum of the Bible," NEA 82 (2019) 172-78. C.'s essay explores how objects related to the Jerusalem temple have been employed in theological and political discourse in the modern era. It examines how the Museum of the Bible (Washington, DC) uses a fragment of the retaining wall of Jerusalem's Temple Mount to help created a "pilgrimage" experience for visitors. C. further notes how the Museum's depictions of Jewish society are structured around and in service to NT narratives. He also explores how the Museum depicts the Bible as a remnant of the Second Temple that has survived the destruction and the vagaries of time until today. [Adapted from published abstract] 833. [Ishmael; Genesis 22; Qur'an] S. G. deClaissé-Walford, "Ishmael, the Qur'ān, and the Bible," AcTSup 27 (2019) 148-64. In comparison with his younger brother Isaac, Ishmael is a relatively minor character in the ancestral narratives of Genesis. In Islam, by contrast, which incorporates large portions of the Pentateuch into its own holy book, Ishmael takes on a heightened significance in connection with the sacrifice asked of Abraham by God, taking the place of Isaac as the designated sacrificial victim. This article examines the biblical and the Qu'ranic versions of Abraham's sacrifice from a scholarly perspective and tries to determine the grounds for and validity of the Islamic claim concerning Ishmael's role in that sacrifice. [Adapted from published abstract] [End Page 285] 834. Jan Dietrich, "Empiricism or Rationalism in the Hebrew Bible? Some Thoughts about Ancient Foxes and Hedgehogs," Sounding Sensory Profiles, 57-68 [see #1563]. D. formulates the question he wishes to address in this essay as follows (p. 57). "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one important thing." Taking up this fragment from the Greek poet Archilochus, the English philosopher Isaiah Berlin once distinguished between the fox, which builds upon his many experiences and thereby gets to know a great plurality of things, and the hedgehog, which arrives at one decisive idea and interprets the world accordingly. In the following, my aim is to find out whether the Hebrew Bible is populated mainly by foxes or hedgehogs. Read as a symbol for epistemological systems, the fox represents empiricism, the idea that insight and knowledge are based on the senses. It is sensory experience that creates knowledge. Opinions, sentences, and judgments based on experience may be called a posteriori judgments...

Ancient Biography: Identity through Lives by ed. by Francis Cairns and Trevor Luke

Reviewed by: Ancient Biography: Identity through Lives by ed. by Francis Cairns and Trevor Luke Øivind Andersen (bio) Ancient Biography: Identity through Lives Francis Cairns and Trevor Luke, editors Papers of the Langford Latin Seminar 17, ARCA Classical and Medieval Texts, Papers and Monographs 55, Francis Cairns, 2018, xiv + 310 pp. ISBN 9780995461215, $75.00 hardcover. The volume's title might lead potential readers to expect the book to provide a general introduction to or overview of biographical literature from classical antiquity, especially the genre of Lives, the Greek bios and the Latin vita. For that, however, [End Page 464] non-classicists (and classicists as well) should turn to Tomas Hägg's magisterial The Art of Biography in Antiquity (Cambridge UP, 2012), to which the editors of this volume duly refer in the very first sentence of their preface. Under the umbrella of the book's title, the editors offer a rich collection of widely different contributions on various topics and with varying focus. They may all, however, lay claim to dealing somehow with the broader issue of "biographical writing and identity," or "the use of lives in the literary construction of both group and individual identities" (vii, viii), which is the stated overall theme of the volume. The book originates in the 2015 Langford International Colloquium at Florida State University, Narrating Lives: Biography and Identity in Antiquity. The original papers have been revised and expanded, and the collection has been fortified with further contributions from invited scholars. The thirteen papers range all over antiquity from Pindar and the Lives of the Greek poets to the Alexander Romance and late Platonists. They are neatly distributed across the book's four sections: "Biography and Cultural Identity," "Biography and Power," "Biography, Identity and Religion," and—in a shift from thematic to chronological criteria—"Greek Lives under Roman Rule." It is not always obvious why a paper is placed in the section where we find it, naturally enough perhaps given the shared focus on identity. I will make brief mention of each contribution, highlighting some. Right at the outset, Flore Kimmel-Clauzet, in "Pindar, 'Lover of Athens': Dithyramb fr. 76 and the Biographical Tradition," discusses in an exemplary manner how the Theban poet's famous praise of Athens—"O gleaming and violet-crowned and celebrated in song, / Bulwark of Greece, glorious Athens, divine city"—places Pindar in the middle between the two rival cities: Thebes, his birthplace, and Athens, which, so the story goes, paid the fine imposed on him by the Thebans and more or less appropriated the poet by honoring him in other ways as well. Both the several ancient Lives of Pindar and the biographical tradition apart from the lives embellish and negotiate this conflict in various ways, thus forging Pindar's poetic identity. One could, I presume, also say "political" identity. Kimmel-Clauzet already made her mark with her 2013 book (in French) of the lives and especially the deaths of Greek poets. The following paper, by Rex Stem, may be seen as an offshoot of his 2012 book on The Political Biographies of Cornelius Nepos. In his contribution to this volume, he demonstrates convincingly how the Roman biographer Nepos in his Lives of the Foreign Generals counteracts Roman cultural bias by displaying exemplary non-Romans. David Rohrbacher, whose The Play of Allusion in the Historia Augusta appeared in 2016, comes to grips with ethnographic and religious aspects of the late Roman biographical collection Historia Augusta. He makes the case for the work's allusive and playful character when it comes to ethnography and religion. We note that this "bizarre and untrustworthy" work is "not really a biographical collection at all" (53, 56). The section "Biography and Power" opens with an attempt by Marcaline Boyd to vindicate the second-century CE military writer Polyaenus's version of the Greek tyrant Polycrates's rise to power against the account of the much older Herodotus. [End Page 465] Alexander Skufca illuminates how Nepos in his chapters on the lives of the tyrants Dion and Timoleon explicitly and implicitly evaluates tyranny, and shows how Timoleon is able to learn by (bad) example and do better than his somewhat older colleague. The...

(Un)veiling Sappho: Renée Vivien and Natalie Clifford Barney’s Radical Translation Projects

Author(s): Dilts, Rebekkah | Abstract: In 1894 a strange book titled Les chansons des Bilitis (The Songs of Bilitis) was published by the popular French writer Pierre Louys. A collection of erotic poetry, it began with an introduction that claimed the poems were found on the walls of a tomb in Cyprus and were written by an ancient Greek woman named Bilitis, a courtesan and contemporary of the ancient Greek poet Sappho. In fact, Louys fabricated Bilitis and the majority of the poems in the collection. He cites some of Sappho’s real verses, but credits them to his invented Bilitis. To lend authenticity to the forgery, he listed some of the poems as “untranslated” in the book’s index, and included a bibliography with earlier translations of collections of Bilitis’s poetry, which were, of course, also false. Yet upon publication, the fraud eluded even the most expert of scholars. Perhaps most surprisingly, even when the literary hoax was eventually exposed, it did little to diminish the book’s popularity. Louys’s endeavor both challenges the ethics of “faithful” translation and raises the question: why didn’t readers care that Bilitis wasn’t a real poet?

Cavafy, Vos, Dangor: A belated reply to Phil van Schalkwyk

The influence of the Alexandrian Greek poet Constantin Cavafy on South African literature in English has received some attention, but his impact on Afrikaans letters merits further investigation. The present article partly fills that gap by examining a small body of poetry and fiction by Cas Vos and Achmat Dangor. It draws on an article by Phil van Schalkwyk to show what it might mean to write in the manner of Cavafy. Thereafter, it discusses Vos’s translations into Standard Afrikaans within his context. Achmat Dangor wrote his Cavafian poetry in a Vernacular Afrikaans. The article considers how writers and poets such as Mark Twain, David Dabydeen, Richard Rive and Adam Small have responded to the challenges and implications of writing in non-standard varieties of English and Afrikaans. Because irony and parody characterise Dangor’s initial debt to Cavafy, this piece also considers these devices. It then moves to a detailed analysis of the relevant poems by Dangor, including comparisons with the poems by Cavafy they evoke, and then to work by Dangor on Cavafy in Standard English in which he reflects on why Cavafy has influenced him. It argues that Dangor discarded a literary vernacular medium for Standard English because of the former’s implicit distinction between ‘ordinary’ (inarticulate, authentic) and ‘extra-ordinary’ (articulate, unauthentic) patois speakers. It concludes that Dangor’s switch to Standard English may have resolved a personal dilemma, but leaves unanswered many questions about the literary use of a patois.

Truth and Equivocation in Constantine Cavafy’s Poems of Antiquity

The Greek poet Constantine P. Cavafy (1883–1933) spent most of his life in the Egyptian city of Alexandria. Cavafy liked to think of himself as an historical poet. A large proportion of his poetry is set outside of Greece in the eastern, southern and south-eastern Mediterranean world at a time when the centre of Greek culture had shifted from ‘mainland Greece’ to cities such as Alexandria and Antioch, when a cosmopolitan Greek culture was contained by the Roman Empire, and later when Christianity began to take hold and challenge the Hellenic world and its values. Cavafy also liked to think of all his poetry – whether the setting was his own time and place or that of antiquity – in three categories of historical, philosophical and hedonistic, while acknowledging their overlap.This paper concentrates on his poems of antiquity, and within that on those poems which deal with questions of ambiguity, equivocation, and various forms of non-truth telling. The paper’s critical-theoretical beginning relies on the equivocal prophecies of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, William Empson’s notions of ambiguity and dramatic irony, and Cavafy’s theatrical representation of history, and then turns to Derrida’s essay on the history of the lie.Keywords: Constantine Cavafy, poetry, antiquity, ambiguity, self-deception, William Empson, Jacques Derrida

Sor Juana’s Diglossia: The Pyramids of Primero sueño

This article offers a symbolic and stylistic analysis of Sor Juana’s description of the Memphis pyramids (Primero sueño, ll. 340‒411), paying attention to its sources. It is my contention that Sor Juana reflects the early modern awareness of its distance from antiquity. I also argue that the poet’s ambivalent address to Egypt constitutes an example of ‘diglossia’. Sofie Kluge (2014) deploys this term to mean the doublespeak produced by the Baroque moralisation of pagan literature. I will use it to describe Sor Juana’s ambiguous approach to Egypt, comprising both criticism and praise. This dual assessment appears balanced until the poet uses Homer as a source, who tips the scales in favour of these constructions by revealing their allegoric nature. According to Sor Juana’s perception, Homer represented a receptacle of ancient, revered wisdom that predated Greece. In this sense, it is her understanding of this Greek poet, rather than his writings themselves, that is key to my reading of the pyramids. The conclusion will frame Sor Juana within two poetic/historiographical concepts—Góngora as the Spanish Homer and the translatio studii—in order to shed further light on Primero sueño.

Value Pluralism and Public Ethics

‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing’. -Archilochus quoted in Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox, 22The fragment from the Greek poet Archilochus, quoted in Isaiah Berlin’s essay ‘The Hedgehog and the Fox’, serves as a metaphor for the long-standing contrast and rivalry between two radically different approaches to public ethics, each of which is couched in a radically different vision of the structure of moral value. On the one hand, the way of the hedgehog corresponds to the creed of value monism, reflecting a faith in the ultimate unity of the moral universe and belief in the singularity, tidiness and completeness of moral and political purposes. On the other hand, the way of the fox corresponds to the nemesis of monism, the philosophical tradition of value pluralism, to which this collection of essays is devoted. This dissenting countermovement, which emerges most clearly in the writings of Isaiah Berlin, Stuart Hampshire, Bernard Williams and John Gray, is fuelled by an appreciation of the perpetuity of plurality and conflict and, correspondingly, by the conviction that visions of moral unity and harmony are incoherent and implausible. In the view of the value pluralists, ‘there is no completeness and no perfection to be found in morality’ (Hampshire 1989a: 177).

THE ATHENIAN ALTAR AND THE AMAZONIAN CHATBOT: A PAULINE READING OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND APOCALYPTIC ENDS

AbstractThis article explores questions about chatbots in particular and artificial intelligence (AI) in general from a Pauline, that is, a Christian theological perspective. It does so in a way that focuses on a particular scene in the New Testament: Paul in the Athenian Areopagus, considering an altar to an “unknown God,” quoting Greek poets and philosophers, and sharing curious theology as he dialogues with Stoic and Epicurean thinkers (Acts 17:16–34). By examining the sociohistorical nuances of this scene and their philosophical and theological implications, this article shows how the altar Paul considers philosophically and theologically becomes the focal point for an important dialogue about apocalyptic ends, or ideas about who we are, where we are going, and who or what is responsible for that who‐ness and where‐ness. In turn, this can teach us how to ask practical questions, which can uncover the unsuspected apocalyptic ends represented by, or even contained within, common technological objects such as chatbots.

Seven Poems

Seven Poems NICOLAS CALAS (Translated by Avi Sharon) hellenizing surrealism: a greek door to europe Nicolas calas (Kalamares) may be considered merely a minor Greek poet, but he had a major global persona and influence. In the middle of the last century he played a catalyzing role in the international avant garde: He was a Zelig-like polemicist in three languages (Greek, French, and English) and across three cultural capitals (Athens, Paris, and New York). But he always fought on a singular front: surrealism. Born in Lausanne in 1907, he grew up in Athens and by the later 1920s began to stand out in literary circles (he was over 6' 4") for his modernist if not revolutionary views. Starting from an interest in Freud and Marx, the subconscious and the revolutionary, Calas soon arrived at their natural synthesis—surrealism. Around the time when a distinctly Greek form of surrealist poetry emerged, with the 1935 publication of “Blast Furnace” by Andreas Embiricos, Calas was on his way to becoming its unofficial spokesman. He moved to the epicenter of the movement in Paris and with the 1938 publication of Foyers d’Incendie became the “most lucid and audacious” of founder André Breton’s acolytes, both prophet and demagogue of the group. Carried along in the current of European artists and thinkers leaving Europe for New York, he would continue the fight on the western wing of the faction (literally, coming to blows at a cocktail party with Clement Greenberg, representing the opposing Abstract Expressionist side). In 1942 he published another clarion pamphlet, Confound the Wise, giving the movement voice in English and befriending its most visible local supporters and practitioners, from Peggy Guggenheim to Marcel Duchamp. arion 27.1 spring/summer 2019 The Wyndham Lewis of the operation, Calas was a cross-border catalyst, evangelizing the role of surrealism as a liberating and generative force in modern literature and art. For him and other writers and poets, the weapon that would most effectively derange the reader’s habitual conformism into revelatory and revolutionary perception was the surrealist image, poetry’s lingua franca. For Greek practitioners it was completely natural for that magical representation to arise out of their god-infested, sun-filled landscape. Here they had a force that was both blinding and enlightening, penetrating and transformative, local and universal. For Calas, the primary echo or reflection of that essential image was the island of Santorini , referenced in several of the translations here (and reminiscent of his fellow national Nikos Gatsos’s use of the island of Amorgos in a similar context). It stood as the very symbol of fiery transformation, an image monstrous enough to shock the reader into a super-rational embrace of its own form of logic. This Hellenization of surrealism, like the Hellenization of modernism itself, was to become an important, transformative power in its own right. For many, the origin (and likewise, for many, the enclosing border ) of surrealism was France. “But it is French. It is their invention ,” was how William Carlos Williams saw it, to his chagrin. Williams was convinced that the objective concentration on the image itself (“no ideas but in things”) could offer a salutary corrective to American poetry of his time. “It is the surrealists who have invented the living defense of literature,” he wrote in a 1929 essay. But for a poet so at one with the American Grain to be reconciled with surrealism’s ‘Francite’ he needed some way to cross the divide. His admiration for Calas’s work in clarifying and promoting the group’s ideas enabled the Greek poet to serve as a mediator, to allow the creative transference of its rebellious wisdom into Williams’s poetry. To borrow the title of one of his early American essays, Calas provided Williams a “Greek door to Europe.” In translating four of Calas’s French poems into English, published in 1941 with a frontispiece by the surrealist painter and magician Kurt Seligman, Williams leveraged Calas as the vehicle through which the “enabling foreignness” of surrealism could be grafted into the grain of his American modernist work, just as he set out on his magnum opus, Paterson. In a similar way...

Discussion on Positive Effects for Students’ Moral Development from Integrating Mentors and Doctoral Students into One Party Branch

The word “mentor” comes from the Odyssey by the Greek poet Homer. Odyssey entrusted his friend Mentor to care for and educate his son, Telemachus.The word “mentor” later refers to a trustworthy advisor, counsellor and friend.A mentoring relationship has been defined as a “nurturing process in which a more skilled or experienced person, serving as a role model, teaches, sponsors, encourages, counsels and befriends a less skilled or less experienced person” (Anderson & Shannon, 1988). This paper mainly focuses on how to successfully mentor the doctoral students through the integration of mentors and doctoral students into one party branch.

De zwerftocht van een agrafon

Abstract In his collection Oostersch: Verzen naar Perzische en Arabische dichters (‘Oriental: Verses after Persian and Arabic poets’), published in 1924, the Dutch poet J.H Leopold (1865-1925) included his poem ‘Jezus, die door de wereld ging’ (‘Jesus, who went through the world’). It ends with an agraphon, or saying, ascribed to Jesus but not recorded in any of the biblical gospels. The standard edition notes that the poem can be traced back, via successive translations, to a verse by the Persian poet Nezâmi (ca. 1200). This contribution shows that the agraphon is widespread in Persian literature and that it in all likelihood finds its origin in the eighth or ninth century in a Sufi milieu. The poem surfaces as early as 900 in Hindu India and in a Jewish context in Spain before 1200. So, agrapha can throw light on interreligious text exchange in the Middle Ages. More recently, in 1941 the Greek poet Sikelianos rewrote the poem in view of his situation in Athens. The composer Tavener has adapted the text for his composition Agraphon (2001).

Graphematic Emblems in Selected Poems by John Hollander Sahar Abdul Ameer Haraj Al-Husseini

Graphematic poem or shape poem or pattern poem, like any other poem, is a poem that discusses diverse and common subjects like love, idea, time and many other topics ; yet with a certain difference that is the subject is similar to the printed format of the text. To say that it presents a picture of certain familiar object that is similarly the subject of the poem. Such poems are likewise termed shaped verse. They are not new for they are part of a long convention that ranges from Alexandrian Greek poets to Lewis Carroll and beyond. John Hollander(1929 –2013) is an American poet who wrote pattern poetry with a variety of diverse themes . His Types of Shape (1969) offers twenty-five shaped poems in the convention of George Herbert, a seventeenth century English poet. Graphematic poems must also to a certain degree own their special self-reflective picture in so far as the shape as well as the content are concerned. They show a wide array of themes and Hollander's graphematic poems show fascinating investigates with unbending forms that undermine the authority of his writing. Hollander in uniting content and form supports creating one authoritative outcome in the field of poetry.

Graphematic Emblems in Selected Poems by John Hollander Sahar Abdul Ameer Haraj Al-Husseini

Graphematic poem or shape poem or pattern poem, like any other poem, is a poem that discusses diverse and common subjects like love, idea, time and many other topics ; yet with a certain difference that is the subject is similar to the printed format of the text. To say that it presents a picture of certain familiar object that is similarly the subject of the poem. Such poems are likewise termed shaped verse. They are not new for they are part of a long convention that ranges from Alexandrian Greek poets to Lewis Carroll and beyond. John Hollander(1929 –2013) is an American poet who wrote pattern poetry with a variety of diverse themes . His Types of Shape (1969) offers twenty-five shaped poems in the convention of George Herbert, a seventeenth century English poet. Graphematic poems must also to a certain degree own their special self-reflective picture in so far as the shape as well as the content are concerned. They show a wide array of themes and Hollander's graphematic poems show fascinating investigates with unbending forms that undermine the authority of his writing. Hollander in uniting content and form supports creating one authoritative outcome in the field of poetry.

Древнегреческий миф в европейской поэзии в период творчества греческого поэта К. П. Кавафиса (1863–1933)

Древнегреческий миф в европейской поэзии в период творчества греческого поэта К. П. Кавафиса (1863–1933)

Theory of Shadows by Paolo Maurensig

Paolo Maurensig Theory of Shadows Trans. Anne Milano Appel. New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2018. 179 pages Paolo Maurensig’s Theory of Shadows uses the game of chess as a vehicle to meditate on the Holocaust. Its central character is the infamous Alexandrovich Alekhine, a grand master who collaborated with the Nazis. This novel of ideas opens in spring 1946, with Alekhine living at the Hotel do Parque in Estoril, Portugal, just as the Nuremberg trials in Germany have issued their first warrants. In his tense and factbased mystery, Maurensig returns to his fascination with the relationship between chess and war he first explored in his celebrated The Luneberg Variation (1997). In his framing prologue and epilogue , the author recounts his obsessive investigation of Alekhine’s death in April 1946. Traveling to Estoril to reconstruct Alekhine’s final days, Maurensig writes, “I like to think I am retracing his footsteps.” A waiter at the Hotel do Parque during the war claims there is an official version that leaves many questions still unanswered. No one even knows for certain where Alekhine is buried. By presenting the story from Alekhine’s point of view, Maurensig allows readers to discover the many layers of his self-deception , including that chess is not political: “My adversary was on the chessboard, not in life.” He thinks his art exempts him from moral judgment. Only when he feels endangered does he confront his evasions, his impostures. He ignores the persecution of the Jews and does nothing to stop the violence. He attacks Jewish players in print and does not protect Jewish grand masters when he has the chance. Photographs of him with Josef Goebbels and Hans Frank surface. His dreams contain evil portents; he imagines interrogations. One night, in the middle of dinner, a stranger stares at him, drawing her index finger across her throat. In the brilliant darkness of his story, Maurensig investigates the cost of complicity with evil. Elizabeth Fifer Center Valley, Pennsylvania Javier Marías Berta Isla Madrid. Alfaguara. 2017. 552 pages. In his latest novel, Berta Isla, Spanish writer Javier Marías delivers an intense, emotionally charged story based on what, at first sight, could be labeled as a story of love and espionage. Set between Madrid and London, the novel tells the story of Berta, a Spanish woman who for twenty-one years (more precisely, between 1969 and 1990) awaits the return home of Tomás (or Tom) Nevinson, her Spanish-British husband. Both characters first fall in love as youngsters while in high school, but once they are Nota Bene Tehmina Khan Things She Could Never Have Mawenzi House Through her short stories, Khan takes us into the complexities of the lives of modern Pakistanis, writing through lenses of class, race, gender, and sexuality . Charmingly modern language surrounds readers, soaking them in the culture of her world while demonstrating the subtleties of an oftenmisrepresented Muslim society. Maria Laina Rose Fear Trans. Sarah McCann World Poetry Books Rose Fear is the first English collection from Greek poet Maria Laina, elegantly captured here in a dual translation that carries us through enchanting yet unsettling sections on “Time,” “Witches,” and “Travel.” Like a grim fairytale, Laina’s silvery lullaby lyricism morphs into beautifully dark chants and hanging, haikulike scenes as it moves between voices and scraps of stories, complicating and recoloring the feeling of fear itself. WORLDLIT.ORG 73 ...

Sensibility, Melancholia, and Subjectivity in Mary Robinson’s Sappho and Phaon

Mary Robinson’s sonnet sequenceSappho and Phaon: In a Series of Legitimate Sonnets(1796) is at once a celebration of the Greek poet’s eminence, as Robinson suggests in the preface, and a commentary on the reason and sensibility dialectic that dominated the 18thcentury. As such, it dramatizes the conflict between reason and sensibility, which is here also associated with erotic desire, showing the repercussions that the excess of feeling has upon the self without the governing principle of reason. This essay argues that Robinson drew upon the pathology of love melancholy, as well as on sublime and gothic aesthetics, to render the state of disjointed selfhood as a personal and artistic crisis which cannot be sublimated into art, and which subsequently results in the poet’s creative impasse and death. It also stresses the idea that through Sappho, Robinson aimed to represent the figure of the eighteenth-century woman writer, showing the need for a balance between reason and feeling so that desire could be transformed into artistic energy to serve a social purpose within the public sphere, addressing more universal issues of the human condition instead of focusing on private sorrows.

Rachel (Rae) Dalven: An Accomplished Female Romaniote Historian, Translator, and Playwright

Rachel Dalven was a Romaniote Jew, translator of modern Greek poetry, playwright, and historian of the Jews of Ioannina, Greece. She was an educated and well-traveled independent woman, who brought to the English-speaking audiences in the West the poets Cavafy, Ritsos, and Yosef Eliya as well as many female Greek poets. She visited the Jewish community of Ioannina several times in the 1930s, and wrote about the deportation and annihilation of the Jews from Ioannina in Auschwitz-Birkenau. She was a cross between a Greek-speaking Romaniote Jew and a Sephardic Jew, both little-known subgroups within the Jewish minority. Residing in New York City, she benefited from being in a rich cultural hub with its connections and benefits in encouraging and enabling translation, poetry, theater, academic research, publishing, and travel grants.

On the Last Day

Stephanie Papa is a poet and translator based in Paris, France. She is a PhD candidate at Paris 13 University and is the poetry co-editor for Paris Lit Up magazine. Her work has been published in The Stinging Fly, Verve Press, Niche, Four Chambers Press, and more. Xavier Bordes is a French poet and translator born in Arc-en-Argens. He’s the author of twenty collections, most recently L’Astragalizonte et autres poèmes, published by Traversées in 2016. His collection Comme un bruit de source, published by Gallimard, won the Max Jacob prize in 1999. He has translated Greek poets including Odysseus Elytis, C. P. Cavafy, and Manolis Anagnostakis. On the Last Day by Xavier Bordes Maybe it will be like the end of a year when you find yourself alone in a deserted room like a statue at the end of a public garden path faced with bare autumn after the birds have taken flight Suddenly they had all fluttered up All in one winged thrust, following the clouds toward warmer weather For a long time now their mad chatter has died out Their quarrels Their endless lovers’ coos The dusk stretches on the desolate avenue like an immense distance inside you The trees’ blue mesh makes the buildings pale like old men’s foreheads scrawled with veins The white cold is coming It was there on the first day The white cold that sends a shudder with its black night A sort of hospital room where the spirits of the dead Lurk – like a premonition of eternity Translation from the French By Stephanie Papa PHOTO: CLAUS GRÜNSTÄUDL/UNSPLASH WORLDLIT.ORG 65 ...

A Man and the World: the poetic anthropology of K. Kavafis and G. Seferis

The article is an attempt to analyze the poetry of two famous Greek poets, K.Kavafis and G.Seferis as anthropological projects whose textual space is designed to present two different types of human cognition with regard to history and cultural tradition. Being a peculiar incarnation of cultural and social histories, a MAN appears as a person in progress in Kavafis’ poetry; hence the author’s tendency to picture a human experience as an open coordinate system. An important principle unifying the poetry of K. Kavafis, which arises from the principled fragmentation of his poetic world, can be formulated as follows: the essence of a person always has a potential dimension, part of our nature, which manifests itself in the current situation, is oriented towards the future and such an orientation has an ontological status. A person has a unique openness to the world and it causes the poet's main attention. First of all, because such openness in the transition from the world of nature to the world of society becomes the object of claims, produced by different institutions created by man, but at the same time, that control him, often depriving him of the right to be himself, attempting on his bodily completeness and spiritual integrity. Kavafis’ poetry with the help of a complex structure of artistic time and the art of hinting creates a mechanism for "re-opening a person"-in progress. We can suggest that Kavafis constructs his hero’s image in a photographic manner, where the historical figures, circumstances, actions and generally the whole historical knowledge as a discourse prepare the frame for poetic camera to make a 3-D picture that binds contemporary mode of reader’s existence with panchronic dimension of the text. On the contrary, the poetics of G.Seferis, who was both Kavafis’ literary competitor and artistic heir, suggests a concept of a MAN as a closed and strictly determined system that can evolve only if the law of excluded middle is applied; therefore, in terms of a human being’s actions and experiences, its intent is on a predefined axiological model. Poet's aim in the anthropological sense is not so much the creation or change of the potential identities of man, but rather the search for certain unchangeable principles that constitute the essence of human existence, but are outside the person himself. At different stages of the poet's work this principle can be presented as: the Greeks as a cultural community; Greece as the materialization of ethical principles; the soul as an immortal part of a person, creating its integrity and immutability, counteracting its body as unstable and unstable. As in a movie, persona of Seferis’ poetry acts like an actor in accordance with the instructions taken from the movie director that turns our views from the hero himself to the author’s intentions which explains the effect of masking the heroes using often by G. Seferis.

Female images of goddesses and heroines within the macro-concept HUMAN (on the material of Theocritus’ Idylls)

Women’s characters of Aphrodite, Helena, Berenice and Alcmene of the idylls of Theocritus, a prominent Greek poet of the Hellenistic period, are analyzed in the context of the macro-concept HUMAN. Such a research plays a great role in the study of the author’s idiostyle and his conceptual system. In the representation of the poet a woman can be a mother and a wife (Gorgo and Praxinoa from the XV idyll, Alcmene from the XXIV idyll), an unlucky, betrayed lover (Simaetha from II idyll), a naive shepherdess of goats (girl from the XXVII idyll), a proud nymph (Galatea from the XI idyll), a noble princess (Berenice from the XVII idyll), a demonstrative wife and crafter (Helena from the XVIII idyll) and others like that. In the questions of the study of the macro-concept of the HUMAN in the system of the ancient Greek language in general and on the material of Theocritus’ Idylls the human sphere should be considered in three segments: biological, spiritual and social. The dominant female image in the Theocritus’ idylls is the image of the goddess Aphrodite, whose characteristics can be found in almost every idyll. The images of heroines Helena, Berenice, and Alcmene are also important. These images have been analyzed in the context of the macro-concept HUMAN in more details. The lexical and stylistic displays of these images have been studied in particular. It is noted that the image of Aphrodite is cross-cutting for all idylls and has both positive and negative characteristics. Instead, the images of the heroines of Helena, Berenice and Alcmene are mostly realized in one of the idylls and are presented too ideally.