Poems (1945-1971)

Karen Emmerich’s poignant, eloquent versions of Sachtouris reveal not only the disturbing intensity of the original but also a remarkable diction and poetic pacing of her own. —Harold Bloom I would say, ‘Cut these poems and they’ll bleed,’ but they are already bleeding – a poet’s evidence of world and civil wars, a military junta and dictatorship. We might call these the poem’s noir, in which the poet manages to fashion a bloody and beau- tiful reflection of strange times. In this important translation, each poem is a house made of flesh, and we wander stunned by all that can happen in words. —Eleni Sikelianos As Karen Emmerich suggests in her judicious postscript to this fine translation of an important – if inadequately acknowledged – Greek poet, Miltos Sachtouris’s rather nightmarish view of the world emerges from his response to a cruel contem- porary history and his need to evoke its hidden reality. In volume after volume, this view depends on what the translator aptly identifies as a fragmentary mode of expression and a paralogical perspective, represented by repeated images made up of primary colors and apparently simple diction, both gaining increasing resonance by persistent repetition in a poetic landscape haunted by shadowy presences. —Edmund Keeley

Miltos Sachtouris (1919-2005), a native of Athens, Greece, was one of the leading Greek poets of the postwar era. He received the Second National Poetry Award in 1962, the First National Poetry Award in 1987, the Order of the Phoenix in 1995, and the Grand State Literature Prize in 2003 for his collected works.Karen Emmerich’s translations from the Greek include books by Margarita Karapanou, Amanda Michalopoulou, Ersi Sotiropoulos, Yannis Ritsos, and Vassilis Vassilikos. Her translations of Poems (1945-1971) by Miltos Sachtouris was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry. She has received translation grants and awards from PEN, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Modern Greek Studies Association. She is on the faculty of the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Oregon.

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