A Greek Ballad: Selected Poems

by Michalis Ganas, David Connolly (Translator), Joshua Barley (Translator)

Overview

A stunning collection that draws from four decades of verse by one of modern Greece’s most lauded poets

This is the first English-language collection of work by the renowned Greek poet Michális Ganás. Originally from a remote village on the northwest border of Greece, Ganás witnessed the Greek Civil War as a young child, and was taken into enforced exile in Eastern Europe with his family. Weaving together subtle references to the events and places that have defined his life’s story, Ganás’s terse and technically accomplished poems are a combination of folklore, autobiography, and recent history. Whether describing the mountains of his youth or the difficulties of acclimation in Athens of the 1960s and 1970s, Ganás’s writing is infused with striking and original imagery inspired by love, memory, and loss.
 
Featuring expert translations—made in collaboration with Ganás himself—by David Connolly and Joshua Barley, this volume also includes a scholarly introduction to the poet’s life and work.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780300249354
Publisher:	Yale University Press
Publication date:	09/24/2019
Series:	Margellos World Republic of Letters Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	352
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Michális Ganás is an acclaimed Greek poet and lyricist living in Athens. David Connolly is an award-winning translator and former professor of translation studies at the Aristotle University of Thessaloníki. Joshua Barley is a translator of Greek literature and a writer, based in Athens.

Editorial Reviews

09/16/2019

In these sad yet ebullient poems, the first of Ganás’s to be translated into English, the poet and lyricist crafts verses that invoke the folk music he heard as a child, weaving the geopolitical events that shook Greece during that time as well as addressing more recent history. Selected and translated by Connolly and Barley, the poems progress chronologically and appear alongside the original Greek, offering a comprehensive introduction to the poet’s work, and a snapshot of the political upheaval he experienced (his family was forcibly removed from Greece in 1948, the end of the Greek Civil War, by retreating Communist forces). Ganás skillfully melds loss with love: “a body is not just an embrace/ It’s a homeland that will become foreign,” and “copperware tin-plated at Yannena/ like your laughter glints and sparks.” As noted in the preface, these translations evoke traditional Greek prosody, but even with an artful use of rhyme and half-rhyme, can only nod to it: “People/ places, they all look like strangers,/ in photos we took at other ages,” he writes in “In Haftia Lay Me to Rest.” The song-like quality of Ganás’ writing is unmistakable in places: “if I am to spend/ my life in slavery... I may as well be a slave of love.” Readers will find this a rich, rare view of a life spent in, or hoping to return, to Greece. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

Sad yet ebullient poems. . . . A comprehensive introduction to the poet’s work, and a snapshot of the political upheaval he experienced. . . . Ganás skillfully melds loss with love. . . . A rich, rare view of a life spent in, or hoping to return, to Greece.”—Publishers Weekly

Received an honorable mention for the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize, sponsored by the Modern Language Association of America

Praise for Michális Ganás:
 
“Throughout his poetry we find the dashed hopes and ideals of his youth transformed into a stifled cry in the confined, peripheral Greece of the neighbourhood, the café and the football pitch.”—Kostas Papageorgiou, in The Generation of the 1970s
 
“Ganás draws on the full resources of modern Greek poetry in order to create his own voice. To read him is to be inspired to reread a whole tradition through him.”—David Ricks, King’s College, London
 
“With formal modes ranging from the epigram to the folksong to the prose poem, Ganás creates clear images that seem to refer constantly to some unspoken truth.”—Dimosthenis Kourtovik

From the Publisher