Greek Poetry Resources

 

Learning Greek

Ancient Greek differs considerably from modern, and is not easy to learn or appreciate. But its study yearly by thousands of university students throughout the world shows the task is not impracticable. Try these if you want to begin understanding what readers over 2800 years have felt: ancient greek tutorials, translatum and harvard classics. Excellent resources exist at corax, classical drama sites, enchiridion, Greek grammar on the web, univ. california, gnomon classics, persius, tlg, internet ancient history sourcebook and didaskalia. General books include The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature (1989) and the those listed in biographies following the Greek and Oral Poetry sections of The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (1993).

Modern Greek — very different from the classical — can be learnt with book, CD and cassette: try languagequest, dealtime, abroadlanguages, gogreece, worldlanguage or filoglossia. There are also free learning sites at Greek through the Internet, resources for learning Greek, introduction to modern Greek, and modern Greek as a foreign language. Greek speakers will find these useful: modern Greek poetry, Greek poetry links and Internet resources in modern Greek

Greek-English-Greek dictionaries can be found at: ancient: persius, translatum, woodhouse, kamous and online dictionary. For modern Greek: ectaco, freelang, stars21 and worldlingo.

Some useful language exchanges: friends abroad, xlingo, mylanguage exchange, polyglot learn language, and lingozone.

Homer

Homer is a classic in many senses. Though odd at times, his language has never been bettered. The morality is primitive, but formed a basis of Greek and later education. The two epics are the fountainhead of western literature. No translation quite recaptures the splendour and nobility of the original. The Homer bibliography is immense, but short listings can be found on cal. state univ, london univ and brooklyn college. You can hear ancient Greek spoken on hagel and daitz, and music on the austrian acad. of sciences.

Sophocles

Workable translations exist — Lattimore, Fitzgerald, Pevear, Michie, Myatt and others — and some which are better as poetry — Butler, Murray, Pope — but none come close to the experience of reading the original. Those who possess no Greek may wish to approach Sophocles by first reading the plays in English, then immersing themselves in the history and culture of the classical world, perhaps then moving to some of the great poetry the work has inspired, and finally to seeing the plays enacted.

Cavafy

Cavafy translates well into English — his Greek was indeed influenced by the English he spoke well — and online versions of his poems are provided by: george barbanis, huck gutman, alicia ostriker, rae dalven, keeley & sherrard and thrace. What little biography exists for Cavafy is collected in R. Liddell's Cavafy: A Critical Biography (1974), and the following will also be of interest: E. Keeley and P. Sherrard's C.P. Cavafy: Collected Poems (1992), G Jusdanis's The Poetics of Cavafy (1987), C.T. Dimaris's A History of Modern Greek Literature (1972) and E. Keeley's Modern Greek Poetry: Voice and Myth (1983).

 

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