George Seferis - Book of Exercises II
$22.00
224 pages
November 14, 2024
ISBN 978-1-954218-28-4
Distributed by Asterism (US) and Turnaround Publisher Services (UK & EU)
BIOS
GEORGE SEFERIS (1900–1971) was a Greek poet, diplomat, and literary critic who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1963. As a diplomat for the Greek nation, Seferis served during the Metaxas dictatorship of the 1930s, in exile throughout World War II, during the Greek Civil War and the Cyprus crisis. His death during the Junta dictatorship was a moment of national mourning and resistance.
JENNIFER R. KELLOGG is a literary translator from Modern Greek and holds a PhD in Modern Languages and Literatures from the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB). In 2019 she was an Emerging Translator Mentee of the American Literary Translators Association. Her translations have appeared in The Common and Kenyon Review.
George Seferis
Book of Exercises II
Translated from Greek by
JENNIFER R. KELLOGG
The first English translation of legendary Greek poet George Seferis’s lesser-known political, satiric, and erotic poetry as well as previously unseen material from his diaries.
Poet, diplomat, and literary critic George Seferis (1900–1971) won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1963. He is known to most readers as a myth-loving modernist. Book of Exercises II—a multi-genre volume, containing political, satiric, erotic, panegyric, and calligraphic poems drawn from the poet’s diaries between 1931 to 1971—opens up a hitherto unknown Seferis to English-language readers, offering a closer look at his creative process, opinions, and personal life.
Winner of the 2024 Elizabeth Constantinides Memorial Translation Prize from the Modern Greek Studies Association (MGSA).
“The starkly prophetic voice of George Seferis is unmistakable in this valuable gathering of poems, many of which are here appearing in English for the first time. Especially in his poems from the 1940’s and 1950’s, Seferis could be speaking to our moment—and in their dark wisdom, the poems seem to know it. Three quarters of a century have only strengthened the power of this vision and this voice.” —Rachel Hadas
“With poems that run the gamut from playful to tragic, erotic to satirical, mythic to crude and humorous, this collection never ceases to show off surprising new facets of a poet we thought we already knew. Jennifer Kellogg’s masterful translation is inspired in the most literal sense of the word: it breathes new life into these remarkable texts, sets them dancing before our eyes, so that we can discover Seferis’s verse all over again, as if for the very first time.” —Kareem James Abu-Zeid
“These are poems written in the off-hours by a poet-diplomat on the move, some from exile in Cairo and South Africa, others under a dictator, and many during ‘a time of wounding,’ WWII and the bloody Greek Civil War. By day the man struggled to manage the messes nations make, while by night the poet let loose. This is the hitherto hidden Seferis in English encounters, now deploying all those sharp tools: humor and irony, with the ribald and the ridiculous on display alongside pensive beauty and joy. In these stellar translations of one of modern Greece’s most vital voices, we are afforded a fuller sense of this bedrock poet’s range.” —Eleni Sikelianos
“‘Seferis unplugged and uncut in English!’ … by turns savagely ironic, quietly playful, or inward-looking and pensive, but always offering incisive commentary on his time and place. After so many decades of translations and retranslations, many of us in the committee were taken aback by how this book really does draw out fresh nuance from Seferis, and it achieves this not only through the idea-worlds of the poems themselves but through Kellogg’s deft, daring, and often acrobatic translations. … Kellogg’s book will doubtlessly help a broad and diverse readership to open new, inviting windows not only onto Seferis himself but onto Greek literature more generally”. —Judges’ Citation for the Elizabeth Constantinides Memorial Translation Prize
