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Manolis Anagnostakis

Poetry and Politics, Silence and Agency in Post-War Greece

Vangelis Calotychos

The book reflects on the life and work of a significant poet, public figure, and influential commentator of the cultural, social, and political history of Greece post-World War II: Manolis Anagnostakis (1925–2005). It considers his oeuvre in relation to the work of his peers and to traditions of writing, both Greek and non-Greek, as it challenges the assumptions and determinations of his critics. The volume explores the author’s sustained reflection on what it is poetry “does,” if anything, and how it goes about this at different historical moments. It does so through the framework of his political and social perspectives as well as against principles of committed action, above all, to leftist ideas and movements. For Anagnostakis is vitally important for thinking about the relation of politics to poetics and the complex, and in some quarters contradictory, relation of leftist politics and the travails of (euro)communism to poetry and literature. This analysis, therefore, coincides with the larger questioning of the role for the Left post-1989.

The volume focuses not only on the poet’s canonical poetry up to 1971, but also on the period of his subsequent, self-imposed “silence” and his other “meta-poetic” writings after that date. Two of Anagnostakis’s previously unavailable late collections and a posthumously published interview with the poet appear here in English translation for the very first time. Coming but a few years after the poet’s death in 2005, this rare book-length study of a single Greek poet (other than Cavafy) features articles by leading critics from the American academy. Like Anagnostakis’s own work, these contributions represent a diverse range of approaches and voices: at turns essayistic, impressionistic, and creative, and, at others, scholarly, punctilious, and critical.

University Press Copublishing Division / Fairleigh Dickinson University Press

Pages: 258 • Trim: 6¼ x 9¼

978-1-61147-465-7 • Hardback • April 2012 • $120.00 • (£92.00)

978-1-61147-466-4 • eBook • April 2012 • $114.00 • (£88.00)

Subjects: Literary Criticism / Poetry, Biography & Autobiography / Literary Figures, History / Europe / Greece, Literary Criticism / European / General

Manolis Anagnostakis

Poetry and Politics, Silence and Agency in Post-War Greece

Hardback

eBook

Summary

The book reflects on the life and work of a significant poet, public figure, and influential commentator of the cultural, social, and political history of Greece post-World War II: Manolis Anagnostakis (1925–2005). It considers his oeuvre in relation to the work of his peers and to traditions of writing, both Greek and non-Greek, as it challenges the assumptions and determinations of his critics. The volume explores the author’s sustained reflection on what it is poetry “does,” if anything, and how it goes about this at different historical moments. It does so through the framework of his political and social perspectives as well as against principles of committed action, above all, to leftist ideas and movements. For Anagnostakis is vitally important for thinking about the relation of politics to poetics and the complex, and in some quarters contradictory, relation of leftist politics and the travails of (euro)communism to poetry and literature. This analysis, therefore, coincides with the larger questioning of the role for the Left post-1989.

The volume focuses not only on the poet’s canonical poetry up to 1971, but also on the period of his subsequent, self-imposed “silence” and his other “meta-poetic” writings after that date. Two of Anagnostakis’s previously unavailable late collections and a posthumously published interview with the poet appear here in English translation for the very first time. Coming but a few years after the poet’s death in 2005, this rare book-length study of a single Greek poet (other than Cavafy) features articles by leading critics from the American academy. Like Anagnostakis’s own work, these contributions represent a diverse range of approaches and voices: at turns essayistic, impressionistic, and creative, and, at others, scholarly, punctilious, and critical.

Details

University Press Copublishing Division / Fairleigh Dickinson University Press

Pages: 258 • Trim: 6¼ x 9¼

978-1-61147-465-7 • Hardback • April 2012 • $120.00 • (£92.00)

978-1-61147-466-4 • eBook • April 2012 • $114.00 • (£88.00)

Subjects: Literary Criticism / Poetry, Biography & Autobiography / Literary Figures, History / Europe / Greece, Literary Criticism / European / General

Author

Vangelis Calotychos is associate professor of modern Greek literature and culture at Columbia University in New York.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Editor’s Note on Translations
Introduction by Vangelis Calotychos
Chapter 1 “I am left-handed, essentially”
MANOLIS ANAGNOSTAKIS (interview conducted with the poet by the author Michel Faïs in 1992; translated into English and adapted by the poet Yiorgos Choullaras)
Chapter 2 Manolis Anagnostakis and the Love of Writing by Liana Theodoratou
Chapter 3 “Sense Variously Drawn": The (Visual) Poetics of Miltos Sachtouris and Manolis Anagnostakis by Karen Emmerich
Chapter 4 Theodorakis Takes on Anagnostakis: Reinventing the Lyric by George Syrimis
Chapter 5 Anagnostakis Revisited and Revised: The Politics of Reading and Re-Reading by Elsa Amanatidou
Chapter 6 “The Issue Is What You Say Now”: Lives Of The Poets: Manolis Anagnostakis by Yiorgos ChouliarasChapter 7 Manolis Anagnostakis and the Modernist Discourse of Silence by Marinos Pourgouris
Chapter 8 Poetry’s Incalculable Account by Stathis Gourgouris
Chapter 9 Farewell to the Revolution! by Vassilis Lambropoulos
Chapter 10 Self-Reading, Self-Anagnosis: The Progressive Ethos of the Late Anagnostakis by Vangelis Calotychos
Chapter 11 Το Περιθ?ριο ’68 – ’69 / The Margin ’68 – ’69 (1979) by Manolis Anagnostakis
(translated into English by George Fragopoulos)
Chapter 12 ΥΓ. / P.S. (1983) by Manolis Anagnostakis (translated into English by George Fragopoulos & Gerasimus Katsan)
Bibliography
Notes on Contributors
Index

Manolis Anagnostakis

Poetry and Politics, Silence and Agency in Post-War Greece

Vangelis Calotychos

Manolis Anagnostakis

Poetry and Politics, Silence and Agency in Post-War Greece

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