Among the Ruins: Guide to Greece by George Kalogeris

In some ways, Kalogeris is scrupulously loyal to the Greek language as he knows it. In other ways, he is remarkably and confidently free. The demotic Greek he remembers hearing growing up can sometimes be, as he himself describes it in his notes, “idiosyncratic.” At a reading of “Ambassador of the Dead” captured on YouTube, for instance, he informs his audience that sometime after writing the poem he learned that a word in it which he had thought had meant a certain kind of folk song (trapézika) in fact “doesn’t exist in Greek.” And yet he “couldn’t change the poem because that was how [he] remembered it.” It’s as if any change would show disrespect to his family’s memory. In contrast, his recasting into verse of Pausanias’s prose in translation involves clever feats of cutting and splicing. Take “Pausanias at the Tomb of Hyacinth.” To make quick comparisons between depictions in art of two male youths, the mythical Hyakinthos and the historical Antinous, and the motivations for paying them tribute, Kalogeris draws not only from several passages in Books 3 (Laconia) and 8 (Achaia) but also from Frazer’s commentary on these passages. And in the translations, he is equally bold, if not more so. He lops off the beginning five lines and the final one-word sentence of “Argonauts,” a poem he translates from George Seferis’s Mythistorema. Nor does he make any attempt to match the varying line lengths or the strophic structure, instead choosing pentameter couplets. These cuts are no mere Procrustean roguery. Kalogeris seems to be calling attention to the fact that the beginning lines, a quotation from Plato’s Alcibiades that Seferis was fond of, was already subsumed into the song the sailors in the poem sing. And the final word, dikaiosune (justice)—what does it mean to begin with? In whose voice is it? It seems like a cold pronouncement rendered by a voice outside the frame of the sailor narrative. Kalogeris decides to give us the narrative.

It is hard to do justice to Kalogeris’s collection, and this review leaves much for future readers to discover. You may find not only that each individual translation stands on its own among his original poems, but that, as with his previous book, Dialogos (paired poems in translation), his choice and placement are superb. C. P. Cavafy’s “Home from Greece,” written in the voice of a citizen of the ancient Greek diaspora, speaks not just across the centuries for Cavafy, who was Alexandrian by birth, but one century later for the translator, a native of Winthrop, Massachusetts: