[MGSA-L] 4/20: Austerity Measures | Book Launch | Program in Hellenic Studies, Columbia University

Tue Apr 19 04:37:00 PDT 2016

Dear Colleagues,

I am writing to bring to your attention an upcoming event, our final
*University
seminar* of the year, to be held at the Heyman Center (Second Floor Common
Room), Columbia University, on April 20 at 6.00 - 8:00 pm to launch the
anthology *Austerity Measures* (Penguin, 2016). There will be a multi-media
performance of Greek poetry and much discussion of the relation between art
and politics in hard times. The poets and translators Phoebe Giannisi,
Jazra Khaleed, Peter Constantine, Rachel Hadas, and Karen Van Dyck will
read works in Greek and in English translation and Edwin Frank (NYRB) will
respond. The event is complemented by an exhibition of recent Greek zines
curated by Dimitris Antoniou and Karla Nielsen.

All my best,

Karen Van Dyck - http://heymancenter.org/events/austerity-measures/

<http://heymancenter.org/events/austerity-measures/>

-------------------------------------------------------

*Zines of the Greek Crisis* - The exhibition complementing Austerity
Measures celebrates the beginning of a new collection in Columbia
University's Rare Book and Manuscript Library entitled "Zines of the Greek
Crisis," which was established by the Program in Hellenic Studies in 2016.
The exhibition primarily features artistic, literary, and political zines
acquired from small bookstores and record shops in Athens and Thessaloniki
over the last three years. These materials--some published by zine
veterans, others by graffiti crews or anti-capitalist collectives--convey a
strong wish to destabilize mainstream crisis narratives and engage Greece's
current predicament through poetry, surrealist stories, queer theory, and a
return to the fundamentals of anarchism. Beautifully designed and presented
in unconventional forms, these zines of the Greek crisis, are unique
publications, strategically marginal, and the clear products of a
realization that the near future wont look anything like the recent past.

*Poets*

In the 1980s *Phoebe Giannisi* and some other artists created the fanzine
Mavro Mouseio (Black Museum). Although she went on to publish her poetry in
established venues like Poetics, her work continues to be featured in
alternative magazines, Farmakon among them. Her poetry reflects a visual
and classical background, gained through studies in Architecture in Athens
and later a Ph.D. in Classics in Lyon. She was a member of Urban Void, a
group of architects and artists who organized and performed on issues of
ecology and urban landscape. Her audiovisual poetry installation Tettix
showed at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in 2012. Giannisi has
translated Ancient lyric poetry and work by Hélène Cixous, Gerhard Falkner,
Andrew Maxwell, and others. She teaches at the University of Thessaly in
Volos. Her poetry includes: Αχινοί (Sea Urchins), Mavro Mouseio, 1995;
Ραμαζάνι (Ramadan), Mavro Mouseio, 1997; Θηλιές (Loops), Nefeli, 2005;
Ομηρικά (Homerica), Kedros, 2009; Τέττιξ (Tettix), Gavrielides, 2012. Read
more about her work *here*.

The engaged politics and, in the original Greek, the rhyme schemes of *Jazra
Khaleed*’s poetry owe much to the antifascist rap scene in Greece. His
works are protests against the injustices in contemporary Greece,
especially the growing racism; his poetry and performances have been
described by the international press as ‘possessing the kind of energy that
pervades the riots on the streets of Athens’. The film rendition of his
poem about the refugee situation, ‘The AEGEAN or the Anus of Death’, won
prizes at the Paris Festival for Different and Experimental Cinema and the
Balkans Beyond Borders Short Film Festival. His poems have been widely
translated for publications in Europe, the US, and Japan. As a founding
co-editor of Teflon, and particularly through his own translations
published there, he has introduced the works of Amiri Baraka, Keston
Sutherland, and many other political and experimental poets to a Greek
readership. He also writes on topics as varied as Aborigines and hip hop.
He lives in Exarchia, the inner-city Athens neighborhood most associated
with protests and police violence. Click *here* for his poetry blog.

*Translators*

*Peter Constantine* has introduced a new generation of Greek online poets
to American readers in publications such as Words Without Borders and World
Literature Today. He tends to choose poems with broad appeal over those
with specialized historical or literary allusions. He is a co-editor of *The
Greek Poets:* *Homer to the Present* and *A Century of Greek
Poetry:1900–2000*. His translations from Arvantika, a Greek minority
language, have appeared in Modern Poetry in Translation. A Guggenheim
Fellow, he was awarded the PEN Translation Prize, the National Translation
Award (USA), and the Koret Jewish Literature Award. Besides his
translations from Greek he has also translated works by Babel, Chekhov,
Machiavelli, Rousseau, Tolstoy, and Voltaire.

*Rachel Hadas*, author of more than twenty books of poetry, translations,
and essays, studied Classics at Harvard, poetry at Johns Hopkins, and
Comparative Literature at Princeton. Since 1981 she has taught in the
English Department at Rutgers University. She has received a Guggenheim
Fellowship and an award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and
Letters. Her most recent poetry collection is Questions in the Vestibule
(2016), published by Northwestern University Press. She writes often on
Greek poetry in the The Times Literary Supplement. Her translations from
the Greek focus on poems about Ancient Greece and myth, and like her friend
and mentor, the poet and translator James Merrill, view the Ancient and
Modern traditions as a continuum.

*Karen Van Dyck* has translated the work of the Generation of the 1970s,
most notably Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke, Rhea Galanaki, Maria Laina, and
Jenny Mastoraki, and collaborated with Eleni Sikelianos on translations of
the multilingual nineteenth century poet Dionysis Solomos. Her translations
devise formal experiments that construct connections between the Greek
texts and poetry in English. Her edited and co-edited translations include *The
Rehearsal of Misunderstanding: Three Collections by Contemporary Greek
Women Poets*, *A Century of Greek Poetry*, *The Scattered Papers of
Penelope: New and Selected Poems* by Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke, *The Greek
Poets: Homer to the Present* and, most recently, *Austerity Measures: The
New Greek Poetry*. Read more *here*.

*Respondent*

*Edwin Frank *was born in Boulder, Colorado and educated at Harvard and
Columbia Universities. He is the author of *Snake Train: Poems 1984-2013*
and the founding and present editor of the New York Review Classics series
with its ground-breaking translations of new and out-of-print works
including Anne Carson’s *Grief Lessons* and Erich Auerbach’s *Dante: Poet
of the Secular World* and *The Cretan* by George Psychoundakis. Read his
recent interview where he discusses his greatest literary rediscoveries,
the history of the Classics series, and the success of John Williams’s
*Stoner* and Magda Szabó’s *The Door*, among other topics, with Susannah
Hunnewell on *The Paris Review*’s blog *here*.

*Curators*

*Dimitris Antoniou* is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Program in
Hellenic Studies at Columbia and curator of the Greek zines collection. His
teaching and research draw on approaches in Modern Greek studies,
anthropology, and history in order to examine the political and historical
dimensions of immateriality. He has recently completed an ethnography of an
unbuilt mosque in the suburbs of Athens and is currently collaborating with
architects and artists on research that explores the story of a
phantasmatic cathedral in 1970s Greece.

*Karla Nielsen* is curator of literature in the Rare Book and Manuscript
Library at Columbia University. Her research and teaching focus on the
interrelation of literary form and material format. In the past Karla
worked for small press and academic publishers at the California Digital
Library and in special collections libraries at the University of Illinois
at Urbana-Champaign, the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, and
the Prelinger Library in San Francisco.

[image: Inline image 1]

-- 
Katerina Stefatos
Program Coordinator
Hellenic Studies, Classics
tel: 212 851 0297
fax: 212 854 7856
ks3061 at columbia.edu
hellenic.columbia.edu
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