Events Calendar – British School at Athens

Panel discussion

Writing the Townscape
The city, of any size, looms large in Greek literature and translation from the Greek. This session explores literary resonances of the city in literature from Greece and Cyprus. Beyond the big cities that have long acted as gravity points, cities and towns such as Nicosia and Kerkyra will be discussed as well. The speakers will shed light on temporal as well as spatial expansions of the broader topic of the Greek city and its literary reception.

Panel 1: Multidimensional Athens and Patras

Co-hosted with Aiora Books.

Chair: David Holton
Panel: David Ricks, Konstantina Georganta, Athanasios Balermpas

David Ricks: ‘Sounds of the City: Auditory Effects in the Short Prose of Michael Mitsakis’
Abstract: Michael Mitsakis, admired in his time before his descent into grave mental illness, has come to be recognized as one of the sharpest observers of urban life in Greece in the late 1880s and 1890s. But the power of his distinctive and obsessive style rests as much on the polyphony – usually, cacophony – which his persona of the restless flâneur experiences in the city. Some examples will be discussed here, with attention to the challenges they pose for the translator.

Bio: David Ricks is Professor of Modern Greek and Comparative Literature Emeritus, King’s College London. His translations of modern Greek poetry and short prose, from Solomos to Ganas, have appeared in magazines and anthologies. Sights and Scenes, his translation of a dozen texts by Michael Mitsakis, will be published by Aiora Press in 2027.

Konstantina Georganta: ‘Athens in Verse’
Abstract: Urban poetics in Athens. Long poems imagined largely on the city. The Athenian townscape of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries as a scene for the everyday and the historical, a glass of ouzo at the Athens Railway Station kafeneion on a Good Friday and the Shooting Range of Kaisariani in the unworldly light of Attica dawn. Ruins. I will share a few notes and ideas on poems set on Athens and the way in which they map the city and the lives of its inhabitants.

Bio: Konstantina Georganta is the author of Conversing Identities: Encounters between British, Irish and Greek Poetry, 1922-1952 (Rodopi, 2012) and Three Long Poems in Athens: Erēmē Gē-Perama-Kleftiko. Translations and Essays (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2018). She is the editor and main translator of the volume Athens in Poems: An Imaginative Map of the City (The Colleagues’ Publications, 2019). Athens-Anoyia-Delphi: Louis MacNeice’s 1950s Greece on the BBC is forthcoming with Brill Publishers. She has also been running the website athensinapoem.com since 2014.

Online panel discussion

17:00 UK / 19:00 Greece (1.15’)

Registration link to come soon.