Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke and Kiki Dimoula (born in 1939 and 1931 respectively) both left this life in early 2020, leaving behind a huge absence in Modern Greek letters. Both women came of literary age in a post-war Greece whose liberty would be shadowed by the military dictatorship of the Junta. Yet it would be hard to think of two Greek poets further apart in their sensibilities: one famously translatable (a translator in her own right, and widely translated by Anglophone poets), translation itself being a prime subject; and the other famously impossible to translate, where the idiosyncrasies of Greek grammar operate as one of her central metaphors. It is hard to think of two contemporary Greek poets with such different voices, but for both the matrix of poetry was the Greek language itself. Stallings will look at and discuss poems by both poets, and various approaches in translation to bringing their work across into English.

The recording of this event will be available on 13 June on the OCCT website: www.occt.ox.ac.uk/oxford-translation-day-ae-stallings

For more details about Oxford Translation Day: www.occt.ox.ac.uk/oxford-translation-day