AFTER GREECE
Truman State University Press.
T.S. Eliot Prize in Poetry, 2001.
New Books:
Goat Funeral, poems. Sheep Meadow Press.
Winner of the Helen C. Smith Memorial Prize, Texas Institute of Letters
Best Book of Poetry, 2006
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About Goat Funeral:
“This is the best second book of poems I’ve read in a decade. Of course a certain bloom or glamour (or is it transparency?) is off, but the verse is requited by richer (fallen?) harmonies. Contours are Apollonian as in After Greece, but the poet knows now that vision, like flesh, is fleeting, even fled, and his assurance blurs, the amber clouds; hence “those moments / of clarifying emptiness / toward which we must steer, the swerve from.” Clearly Bakken has already embarked, with this subsequent (but not subaltern) inspection of his cherished Hellenic adequacies (“So many islands, so much blessed salt, / this feast we could not finish by ourselves”), on an ardent if sometimes arduous odyssey. In poetry of this order—so luminous, yet so willing to be lost: “each switchback leads us deeper in”—peregrination itself will be a march of triumph. No captives.”
—Richard Howard
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The Lions' Gate: Selected Poems of Titos Patrikios.
Translated by Christopher Bakken and Roula Konsolaki
T ruman State University Press. November, 2006.
About The Lions' Gate:
These fine translations, rendering a selection from some fifteen volumes of Titos Patrikios’s work over a period of 54 years, demonstrate why his voice has come to be recognized as one of the most compelling in Greek poetry since the Second World War. Heir to Seferis and Ritsos, he shares with these precursors the capacity to raise his personal vision and sensibility to a level that illuminates the tragic climate of his country in harsh years of civil war, dictatorship, exile, and disillusionment. During the course of his prolific career, the poet’s imagery blossoms from its surrealist roots into a brighter, simpler mode, an access to wisdom and human understanding that is without sentimentality but that offers the prospect of a certain resolution however contrary the times. That this development remains clear in this English version of Patrikios’s work is testimony to the persistent care and high quality of these translations.
—Edmund Keeley
Titos Patrikios belongs in the twentieth-century pantheon with Yannis Ritsos, Nazim Hikmet, and Pablo Neruda. He writes out of a deep and anguished humanity; his work is earthy, unremitting, noble. The Lions' Gate brings a significant Greek poet into English with exemplary care and clarity.
—Edward Hirsch
The elegant translators have given us a perfectly fluent
and flawless version of the poems of Titos Patrikios, a poet who is a mirror of
five decades of Greek history. I am drawn most to the meticulous snapshot poems
that catch a moment of love, politics, Greek life. Whitman's poignantly acute
Civil War poems come to mind. Here is an amazing example of the poet and his translators:
"Every morning the sun rises behind the guardhouses / wearing filthy hospital
pajamas, / crossing slowly the courtyard of the sky. / / After so many years /
it too has taken up the habits of the detainees." ("Habits of the Detainees")
Patrikios is a sun and star figure in modern Greek poetry.
—Willis Barnstone
Utterly free of sentimentality or self-pity, Titos
Patrikios’s poems have an edge honed by many difficult years of exile. How
remarkable, then, that the predominant impression left by The Lions’ Gate
is of joy—a joy no less radiant for being hard-won. "My flesh / always
hurts when beaten, / always rejoices when caressed. / It hasn’t learned a
thing." ("Flesh") Bakken and Konsolaki’s translations, poised
and clear, do justice to the economy and force of the original Greek. This is
a beautiful and heartening collection.
—Rachel Hadas
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Kai Meta Tin Ellada Ti...
Roula Konsolaki's Greek Translation of
Christopher Bakken's After Greece
Lagoudera Editions, Athens (2005)
