Before Lyricism (Lost Literature, 18)
A collection of six long poems from the 1950s and 1960s, this book rethinks what lyric poetry can be. Through linked images, line breaks, and subtle shifts in language, it quietly explores the relations among landscape, body, memory, and time.
Work Information
Beyond lyricism, the poems redraw the outlines of image and time.
Before Lyricism gathers six long poems that Eleni Vakalo published in the 1950s and 1960s and shows how much a poem can do through the arrangement of language alone. In Karen Emmerich's translation, the tension and precision of modern Greek poetry come vividly through for English-language readers.
Review Summaries
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The collection is widely seen as demanding, but its precision of imagery and compositional strength are often praised. Some readers need time to find their way into it, yet that very difficulty is also part of its lasting afterglow.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Ugly Duckling Pr
- Published
- 2017-08-01
- Pages
- 133 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 13.97 x 1.27 x 19.69 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9781937027704
- ISBN-10
- 1937027708
- Price
- 3014 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction
Poetry. Translated from the Greek by Karen Emmerich. BEFORE LYRICISM includes six book-length poems: The Forest (1954), Plant Upbringing (1956), Diary of Age (1958), Description of the Body (1959), The Meaning of the Blind (1962), and Our Way of Being in Danger (1966). Each of these, apart from Plant Upbringing , was published as a separate book, which Vakalo herself designed. ( Plant Upbringing was originally included in the volume Wall Painting , of which Vakalo later repudiated all but this single long poem.) For Vakalo, these poems formed a larger, accretive whole, which she titled Prin Apo Ton Lyrismo (Before Lyricism) . By bringing these poems together under a single cover, BEFORE LYRICISM allows us to see the complex web of intertextual relations that bind these books together. Meanwhile, by bringing these poems into English, this volume will enrich not only our knowledge of this key period in Vakalo's career, but English-language readers' understanding of modern Greek poetry as a whole.
Eleni Vakalo (1921-2001) was a Greek poet, art critic, and art historian. She authored nine volumes of art history and art theory, and had regular columns of art criticism from 1955 to 1975 (with a two-year hiatus during the period of the junta’s strictest censorship); she also produced a radio broadcast of art criticism, and organized art-related teach-ins at factories. In 1958, she and her husband, the painter and stage designer Yiorgos Vakalo, founded the Vakalo School of Arts and Design, where she taught until 1990. Vakalo published fourteen books of poetry, and was intimately involved with the design and production of her early books. Indeed, Vakalo’s training as an art historian pushed her to initiate new poetic uses of the page, drawing on her knowledge of modern and contemporary art to rethink the role of the visual in the printed text. She received the State Poetry Prize in 1991, and the prestigious Academy of Athens Prize in 1997. Karen Emmerich is a translator of eleven books of Modern Greek poetry and prose. Her recent translations include Christos Ikonomou’s Something Will Happen, You’ll See (Archipelago), Sofia Nikolaidou’s The Scapegoat (Melville House), and Amanda Michalopoulou’s Why I Killed My Best Friend (Open Letter). Her co-translation with Edmund Keeley of Yannis Ritsos’s Diaries of Exile (Archipelago) was awarded the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, and her translation of Poems (1945-1971) by Miltos Sachtouris (Archipelago) was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle award. She holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University, and is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University.