Richard Berengarten Feature

Paschalis Nikolaou

In Light of Hellas

experiences of Greekness, versions of memory and roles
for translation in Richard Berengarten’s poetry

I have mentioned these names as though they were talismans that, upon being rubbed, bring to life images, faces, landscapes, moments. And they are like certificates: a testimony that my education in India lasted for years and was not confined to books. Although it is far from complete and will remain forever rudimentary, it has marked me deeply. It has been a sentimental, artistic, and spiritual education. Its influence can be seen in my poems, my prose writings, and in my life itself.

(Octavio Paz, In Light of India [tr. Eliot Weinberger])

The sun is kinging: translational byways

                    … And then it was the goatherd
With his goats in the forecourt of the filling station,
Subsisting beyond eclogue and translation.

(Seamus Heaney, ‘Sonnets from Hellas’)

The dialogue between poetry and translation has been a more than productive one across the centuries — not only in the vital sense of exchanges of worldview and sensibility, of forms that travel between national literatures, but also in terms of literary voices that find themselves between languages and cultures and then go on to relate a consciousness informed by otherness. As I have argued elsewhere (Nikolaou 2005, 2008), experiences in geographical and linguistic relocation and dislocation may lead to themes and forms that engage a felt duality, to compositions that more readily deploy multilingual modes of expression, and to translations that exhibit autobiographical proclivities. Such instances manifest translation itself not just as a disembodied activity of textual transfer, but rather as a wholly lived and experienced condition, as a state of being — and, indeed, as an essential function of human thought, communication and artistic aspiration and ambition. Octavio Paz asserts that ‘[p]oetry is waiting not only for a translation but for another sensibility. Poetry is waiting for the translation of a reader’ (cited in Barnstone 1993: 15). In reading this we realise relations that are as organic as they are essential. Such understandings are reflected in the works of authors and poets like Nabokov, Beckett, Pound and Lowell — all of whom have consciously dealt in translation, in its literariness — in its locations within their own locutions, in its place within a poetics.

Even as we should be wary of ‘biographical readings’ that might seduce us into critical reductionism, it is also counterintuitive to dispute that poets’ living circumstances (at home and abroad) may anticipate or lead to the work they produce; the passage extracted from Octavio Paz’s essays on India that opens this essay already suggests as much. In the case of Richard Berengarten, his ‘poems for friends in Greece 1967–1971’ collected in the pamphlet The Return of Lazarus show how the stay of an English poet in Greece has influenced the content as well as the forms delivered in his output of that period. Here, we witness an outsider’s perspective coinciding with a desired naturalisation: the poet not only inhabits the realities of late-sixties Greece, and especially the repercussions of the military coup d’état of 1967, but also voices aspects of a national character that he has observed and participated in:

Freedom is not a birthright or a gift of gods
but must be fought for again and again
Four Easters ago I was free and did not know it
I was young enough to think myself immortal
never having tasted death in my wineglass
I walked then on the olive covered hills
and wallowed in the hazy ouzo evening
and Rigas and Byron and Kolokotronis
were textual problems for the classroom.

(‘Eleftheria’, in Return of Lazarus 13)

While Greece has become a frame of reference that has affected Berengarten’s poetry ever since, even if more subtly and sporadically, these early poems more evidently double as a translation of the land and its people, permeated as they are with political-historical and socio-cultural references, ventriloquisms of spoken language, considered analogies of tradition, and recollections of everyday experiences. And yet, even though the tone may be confessional in places, the poems are far from autobiographical or topographical recordings. The poet has always been more interested in meaning-making, and all too well realises the imaginative transformations that define literary art; how it furthers originating experience and how it needs to reach for a wider and deeper relevance.

In The Return of Lazarus, as well as in some poems on Greek themes that appear in Berengarten’s collection Double Flute (1972), the overriding sense of Greece is that of direct presence and identification. Poems such as ‘Eleftheria’, ‘In his Ancestral Garden’, ‘Three Songs of Exile’, ‘The Funeral’, ‘Male Figure Playing a Double Flute’ and ‘Zeimbekiko’ (the last two of which resurface in later collections) chronicle an intimate relationship that goes much deeper than mere idealisations of Hellenism or adoptions of antiquity. Rather, Berengarten’s Greece, like Seamus Heaney’s, is a living and lived space, where the ancient past remains contemporaneous and the present is also one of encompassed histories: Byzantine, Ottoman, Vlach and Balkan inheritances share the space and shape the people who inhabit it. Berengarten is enamoured with the resulting Romiossyne, that is, with the ‘Greekness’ he encounters in all its multifaceted manifestations: the landscape and the light, and the food, music and singing beside the quiet, weathered marbles. Taken together, these elements whisper a felt continuity that includes countless survivals, revolutions and resurrections — all of which, subsumed, also appear to connect to Berengarten’s awareness of Judeity. Indeed, for the poet, whether as Brit, Jew, Slav, Greek, or as an inheritor and bearer of each of these conditions, the dialogue between sensed identities and shared experience can prove productive, and uniquely so: ‘Ode on the End of the Third Exile’, the long, closing poem in Learning to Talk (1980: 75–79; see also For the Living 57–63), is an ambitious amalgam of eastern Mediterranean settings, both Italian and Hellenic, and Jewish tradition and Greek myth. Here the first-person protagonist is pictured as a kind of travelling musician, a jongleur or troubador, who embarks on a sea voyage. As the poem unfolds, the figures and stories of Arion, Jonah and Dionysus seem to merge. More recently, in The Blue Butterfly (2006, 2008), Berengarten’s major sequence on a massacre of Serbs that took place at Kragujevac in October 1941 during the Nazi occupation of Yugoslavia, we come across translations of two songs from Mauthausen (1965) by the Greek poet Iakovos Kampanellis, who was himself deported to that concentration camp (BB 45–46). Such moments of convergence — here found within what is perhaps the most potent synthesis of cultural elements, literary traditions and poetic forms of Berengarten’s career — imply the wealth of recognitions assimilated in the course of the poet’s wanderings. Embeddings of translation within a larger poetic whole, or across a body of work, make manifest the poet as a reader while also contributing to creative intention. Furthermore, they are suggestive of a common, expressive core in both poetry and translation.

Such instances in Berengarten pronounce a mind that integrates disparities, and a poetics that, beneath the drone of different languages, cultural perspectives and ethnic identities, strives to locate the core values and psychological responses that should name — or remind us of — our collective self as humans. When asked to ‘put in order’ his many ‘identities’ — male, Jewish, English-speaker and so on — it is no coincidence that Berengarten places ‘human’ first (Limburg 2002: 18). Here, the poet’s self-description registers a conscious preference to identify himself as ‘a European poet writing in English’ (Against Perfection, inside back cover) From the beginning of his career, Berengarten’s native sensitivity to meaningful encounters of language, literature and culture as they realise, employ or deploy one another, comes to draw fully on his varied experiences of ‘living in translation’: mainly in Greece and former Yugoslavia, but also in Italy, France and even the USA. This sensitivity, which may perhaps be likened to a kind of porosity, or semi-permeable receptivity, makes possible the empathy and inclusiveness that define his poetry and are reflected in its formal variety. Furthermore, this quality not only helps us to understand his main themes of unity and justice, but also to contextualise his search for ‘human constants’, as well as his related search for universals in poetic expression. This is not to mention a striking ability to understand and depict the diverse contents and manifold agitations of a modern consciousness, as he does to great effect in his book-length poem The Manager (2001).

Berengarten’s early poetry is shaped by his experience of Hellas while also benefiting from the perspectives of the wider European tradition that he brings with him to Greek landscapes and seascapes. In turn, Greek elements find diverse entry points into his work, contributing to its multicultural reach, to its discoveries of what is shared in difference. This is what happens in ‘Nada: hope or nothing’ (BB 9), in which the poet’s discovery of the meanings of the same word in two different languages (Serbo-Croatian and Spanish respectively) reaches an affirmation in a last line that is also a string of further translations of the word ‘hope’: ‘Nada, Elpidha, Nadezhda, Esperanza, Hoffnung’ (the second is Greek). Thus, Hellas, its artists and its poets weave their way through Berengarten’s poems. Among numerous examples of such references, echoes and intertextualities, there is the translated excerpt from Nikos Gatsos’ Amorgos (1943) in the tenth section of ‘Avebury’, which ends in the lines ‘great dusky sea, so many pebbles round your neck / so many glinting jewels in your hair’ (For the Living 34); and the (mis)quoting of Nobel laureate George Seferis in the penultimate section of The Manager: ‘So I’ve gone on trying till now. One has to go on trying. No it’s not / the past I’m talking about. I’m trying to talk about love.’ (TM 156). The influence of Yannis Ritsos can be felt in The Return of Lazarus; the rhythms of Odysseus Elytis can be heard in ‘Avebury’.

The popular composers Mikis Theodorakis and Manos Hadjidakis are evident too: household names to Greeks because their music and lyrics are experienced as capturing and expressing what, earlier in this essay, I have referred to as Romiossyne. Furthermore, genre songs that frame Greek life, in their marriages of words and melody, can be sensed through references to the rebetika tradition, especially to one of their major interpreters, Sotiria Bellou (see ‘Zeimbekiko’ in Return of Lazarus 9 and Learning to Talk 41). Ancient thought (Heraclitus, Basilides of Alexandria), figures from myth (especially Orpheus) and the remains of the past (the winged Nike of Samothrace, two phalloi on the island of Delos, as well as Cycladic sculptures, all of which are set among the ‘stones’ of ‘Avebury’) surface throughout Berengarten’s oeuvre, finding their analogies and their references in the actual present and in the landscapes the poet inhabits or imagines. The occasional borrowing of Greek linguistic structures and rhythms, the encountered traces of Greek poetic forms, the frequent transliterations of everyday items and actions: these complete the picture and serve to embed the reader in experiences that often coincide with their verbal construction.

Together, such entries speak collectively for translational moments and movements, separate instances and singular episodes that ultimately form and inform a wider and experiential sense for translation. This is also defined in terms of an intertextuality that reflects cultural identifications, and witnessed in instances where translating becomes part of creative expression itself. At the same time, ‘translation proper’ is never far away and often provides its own starting points for a ‘literary life’. Berengarten’s living in Italy, Greece and former Yugoslavia, his immersion in their languages, gives rise to and coincides with translations undertaken: notably, of Italian poet Roberto Sanesi (1983), of Antonis Samarakis’ novel To Lathos (1965), co-translated with Peter Mansfield as The Flaw (1969), and of Tin Ujević and other twentieth century Yugoslav poets (see Out of Yugoslavia, 1993: OOY). Even more interestingly, a meeting with Greek poet and academic Nasos Vayenas in Cambridge in the late 1970s instigated a dialogue between poetry and translation as a conversing of poets: in 1978, Berengarten translated Vayenas’ second collection, Biography, into English, published in the same year. By Berengarten’s own admission (in Limburg 2002: 21–22), the reading of each other’s work has led to both translation and inspiration: The Manager owes a great deal to (the translating of) Biography, especially in terms of style (the ‘verse-paragraph’) and the treatment of experience. A similar pattern occurred on Vayenas’ side: in his 1989 collection I Ptosi tou Iptamenou (‘Flyer’s Fall’, a project of interest in itself, as it combines originals and translations in exploring the relationship between the two), the Greek poet includes a translation of a poem by Berengarten.

That poem is ‘Only the Common Miracle’, from Black Light: Poems in memory of George Seferis (BL 1983), which brings us to an elective affinity between Vayenas and Berengarten, and to the latter’s most sustained articulation of Greek culture, people and landscape. Here, in twelve poems that involve translationin all its senses, the voices and eyes of Seferis are added to the thematic and stylistic preoccupations first encountered in The Return of Lazarus. The first epigraph to Black Light is taken from C. M. Bowra’s 1957 study, The Greek Experience. The second is an epiphany that Seferis described in his journal in June 1946. It is worth quoting in its entirety:

There is a drama of blood played out between the light and the sea, all around us here, that very few sense. It is not sensualism; it is something much deeper than the fleeting desire and the so persistent smell, let’s say, of woman that prisoners yearn for. There is a drama of blood much deeper, much more organic (body and soul), which may become apparent to whoever perceives that behind the grey and golden weft of the Attic summer exists a frightful black; that we are all of us the playthings of this black. The stories we read about the houses of Atreids or Labdacids show in some way what I feel. Attic tragedy, the highest poetic image in this hemmed-in world, constantly striving to live and breathe upon this narrow golden strip of land, meanwhile, with little hope of being saved from sinking to the bottom. This creates its humaneness.

(For the Living 149)

This passage was later transformed into the poem ‘Kichli’ (‘The Thrush’, 1947), a crowning moment both in Seferis’s oeuvre and in Greek literary modernism. Then, in ‘Black Light’, Berengarten converses with the Greek poet, further exploring Seferis’ intimations and associating them with the ‘Greek experience’ he has filtered through his own linguistic and cultural perspectives. The result can be read as homage to a land loved and remembered; the sequence was written in the summer of 1982, after Berengarten’s return to Cambridge. It also clearly involves a deepening integration into the poet’s awareness of what has surrounded him:

Blood, they insist through day, Sperm. Sweat. Salt.
Crazy birds chirping, old crones cackling,
village philosophers full of homely wisdom,
bright eyed and red cheeked, children laughing,
they purr, miaow, bark, they whinny, roar and howl:
Write, write, they wail. Sing with us, they hum.
Do not forget your origin. The gold sun, they shriek
is a black apple buried under the lake of darkness
and we its pips, the black seeds of the sun.

Without them, no sky, no sea, no land, no light,
no wisdom no madness no love no breath
without them no song or poem
No       they will never leave me

(For the Living 172).

The intensity of feeling in this poem, as in others, is matched only by its textual complexity. Lines from Seferis become epigraphs to each poem in the sequence, and are also found embedded and transmuted within almost all of them. English language and Greek wording keep reaching meaningful unions. Transliterations evoke landscape and people, importing the textures of a lived-in Hellas. And Berengarten’s ‘notes and acknowledgments’ at the end of the early small editions of ‘Black Light’ (retained and extended in For the Living 222–225) confirm a wealth of Greek literary, cultural and critical absorptions, among them Nasos Vayenas’ study of Seferis, The Poet and the Dancer, published in Greek in 1979. So, in these various ways, Berengarten pursues this awareness of how death’s blackness not only shadows this light and this life, but also enables them, providing the backdrop that they need to truly exist, in poetry that evidently functions too as an attempted translation of Seferis’ vision. Above all, what is understood here, via the writings of Seferis as other, is the relationship between living and creating, between experience and the literary imagination. The intertextual and metatextual eddies and shimmerings that suffuse ‘Black Light’ provide answers of their own to Berengarten’s elective affinity, showing how necessary the workings of empathy and identification may be within the poetic condition. At the same time, these poems are both ‘in memory’ and made of memory, responding to its callings, while place-names, events and surroundings are powerfully recalled — as is a light that stands (as shorthand) for everything Hellas comes to mean.

More recently, the second of the ‘Nine Codas’ in book with no back cover (38–39) recounts a leisurely evening spent ‘on the waterfront at Milina’ by what appears (from the names) to be an international group of tourists on holiday in Greece’s Pelion area. The poet is among them, eavesdropping on their dialogues and moods, as he evokes the sense of the place. In line 9 of the poem he writes: ‘And now the sun, as the Greeks say, is kinging into sea haze’ (38). The italicised word here is a literal translation of the verb vasilévei, as found in the exact Greek equivalent of the English phrase ‘the sun is setting’.

Poetry and poets strive for a renewing of language, for (re)translations of the world; they aim to enrich our experience, which may mean: to explore the possibility of experiencing what is familiar differently. In Berengarten’s work, the relationship between poetry, translation, and a Hellas construed as one of the poet’s ‘formative readings’, runs deep; thus verbal invention coincides with a translation that allows us to perceive, through Greek eyes, what has always been part of our experience.

Epistrophé

Strange debt [… ] translation does not involve restitution of a copy or a good image, a faithful representation of the original: the latter, the survivor, is itself in the process of transformation. The original gives itself in modifying itself; this gift is not an object given; it lives and lives on in mutation.

(Jacques Derrida, ‘De Tours de Babel’ [tr. J. F. Graham])

The dialogue between poetry and translation is ongoing: later, the act of translation returns to Berengarten’s poems in a reciprocal arc. Since his work is so open to Greek and other socio-cultural elements, linguistic patternings and literary traditions, and since so many transfers have already been made into and within ‘original’ compositions of his, such as the Blue Butterfly and ‘Black Light’, it is hardly surprising that these originals readily lend themselves in turn to a ‘translation proper’. This, inevitably, involves a return to the first ground of their expression, that is, to the bedrock of their constituent cultural environs and underlying languages. Here, the inter-linguistic movement itself illuminates and comments on significances first conveyed in Berengarten’s English poems; and at the same time, in this context, the methods and meanings of translation both as process and as literary topos are more deeply enriched and more subtly clarified.

With reference to the ‘Greek aspect’ of Berengarten’s oeuvre, and more specifically, ‘Black Light’, here I return to its translation by Nasos Vayenas and Ilias Layios. In my review (2006: 168–171) of Mavro Fos: Poiimata eis mnimin Yiorgou Seferi (MF, 2005), I wrote of the sense of ‘homecoming’ generated by this bilingual edition, in which poems already drenched in Greekness now undergo and simultaneously come face to face with their own translation — a procedure that often inevitably coincides with a kind of ‘un-translation’ or ‘de-translation’. For here, I emphasise, ‘[… ] the fragments of Seferis in English revert to the originals, italicised transliterations of words like koré or tsípouro and other cultural appropriations disappear into a ‘target language’ now claiming its own fabric’ (Nikolaou 2006: 170).

Already in literary dialogue with Berengarten, already translated by and having translating him, Vayenas here produces versions of poems permeated by yet another poetic voice that has helped shape Vayenas’ own; and in that sense, this project also constitutes the repayment of a debt to Seferis. Both the six translations by Vayenas and the seven by Layios are based on the preliminary general awareness, and subsequent more finely-tuned realisations, of how the translator is required to unravel the original in re-creating its essences, and how translation must re-think itself in order to really take place. At certain points these versions inevitably trace their translators’ own poetic accents; yet together they also constitute a new cohering entity, which not only presents a further manifestation of Seferis’ ‘black light’ but returns his mediating vision, now joined to Berengarten’s own ‘Greek experience’, to Hellas, to its language and literature, and to Greek readers. In my review, I concluded that Mavro Fos therefore resembles a game of mirrors, in which

[… ] originals conspire with translations toward scenes of recognition: the translating that attends the poetry is allowed to surface, translations reveal what they share with literary creation, the two poet-translators glimpse their own reflection in what Berengarten has made. We confront a quartet of sensibilities in multi-layered, many-sided conversation that lays bare interdependences of poetry, translation, and influence.

(ibid.: 171)

The resulting reader-experience is compounded not least by the bilingual presentation on facing pages: this kind of ‘mirroring’ simultaneously identifies and expands the intertextualities of the source text. And so it is fitting, too, that the translation coincides with a furthering of the original: at the end of Mavro Fos we now find Berengarten imagining an encounter with Seferis, in a new prose piece entitled ‘An Old Man in the Harbour’, facing a translation by Vayenas (MF 58–63) that reaches us as a sort of textual afterthought, a reflection perhaps assisted by the occasion of translation, twenty years after the publication of the original, English ‘Black Light’.

We may well suspect Berengarten’s satisfaction with this progression, which is also an epistrophé — and one in which truths of translation and those of poetry enact each other. In this connection, another short sequence by Berengarten entitled ‘Transformations’ (For the Living 105–116), which he dedicates to the memory of the artist Frances Richards, clearly implies both the senses and the roles of translation within creative composition. The six parts of this sequence include responses to four of a set of ten lithographs by Frances Richards (1975) inspired by Rimbaud’s Les Illuminations. Frances Richards’ loose-leaf folio includes sheets on which the relevant excerpts from Rimbaud, translated into English, are copied in her own handwriting, together with an illustrated title page announcing: ‘Prose poems from Les Illuminations of Arthur Rimbaud put into English by Helen Rootham’. In their turn, Berengarten’s poems, inspired by Frances Richards’ images, are subtitled: ‘from Rimbaud’s Les Illuminations’.

This consolidates the fact that these poems already have two transubstantiations as their source texts. ‘Transformations’, then, witnesses experience and imaginative thought travelling not only from one creative mind to another, but also from one artistic medium to another: from poetry to painting, and back to poetry. Here, Frances Richards’ visual interpretations of the French poet are incorporated into Berengarten’s own attempts to render visible in poetry the essentially translational effort that motivates projects of art. At the same time, any translation, as Derrida and many others remind us, involves transformation, metamorphoses. And so does the epigraph Berengarten uses for ‘Transformations’, a dialogue between Quince and Bottom in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Act 3, Scene 1) in which Quince exclaims, ‘Bless thee, Bottom! bless thee! thou art translated.’

---

Works Cited

Barnstone, Willis. 1993. The Poetics of Translation: History, Theory, Practice. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

Berengarten, Richard. 2004. For the Living. Selected Writings 1: Longer Poems 1965–2000. Cambridge: Salt Publishing.

— . 2008. The Blue Butterfly. Selected Writings Vol. 3: The Balkan Trilogy Part 1. Cambridge: Salt Publishing.

Bowra, C. M. 1957. The Greek Experience. New York: Mentor Books.

Burns, Richard. 1971. The Return of Lazarus: Poems for Friends in Greece 1967–1971. Cambridge: The Bragora Press.

—  . 1980. Learning to Talk. London: Enitharmon Press

— . 1999. Against Perfection. Norwich: The King of Hearts.

— . 2001. The Manager: a poem. London/Bath: Elliott & Thompson.

Derrida, Jacques. 1985. ‘De Tours de Babel’ (tr. J. F. Graham) in Graham, Joseph F. (ed. and trans.) Difference in Translation. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press: 165–207.

Gatsos, Nikos. 1943. Amorgos. Athens: Aetos.

Heaney, Seamus. 2003. ‘Sonnets from Hellas’ in Electric Light. London: Faber and Faber: 38–43.

Kampanellis, Iakovos. 1965. Mauthausen. Athens: Themelio.

Keeley, Edmund and Sherrard, Philip (tr.). 1966. Four Greek Poets (Cavafy, Seferis, Elytis, Gatsos). Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

Limburg, Joanne. 2002. ‘Human Above All: Richard Berengarten’s The Manager’, The Jewish Quarterly, Spring 2002: 17–23.

Nikolaou, Paschalis. 2005. ‘From the Many Lives of Self-Translation’ in In Other Words 25: 28–34.

–––. 2006. Review of Black Light and Mavro Fos in Modern Poetry in Translation (Third Series) 5: 168–171.

–––. 2008. ‘Turning Inward: Liaisons of Literary Translation and Life-Writing’ in Paschalis Nikolaou and Maria-Venetia Kyritsi (eds.). Translating Selves: Experience and Identity Between Languages and Literatures. London and New York: Continuum: 53–70.

Memmi, Albert. 1968. ‘Negritude and Judeity’ in European Judaism 3(2): 4–12.

Paz, Octavio. 1997. In Light of India (tr. E. Weinberger). New York, San Diego, London: Harcourt Brace.

Richards, Frances. 1975. Les Illuminations, ten lithographs and a title page. (‘Prose poems from Les Illuminations of Arthur Rimbaud put into English by Helen Rootham’). London: The Curwen Press.

Samarakis, Antonis. 1965. To Lathos. Athens: Eleftheroudakis.

–––. 1969. The Flaw (tr. Peter Mansfield and Richard Berengarten). London: Hutchinson; New York: Weybright and Talley.

Sanesi, Roberto. 1981. ‘Elegy for Vernon Watkins’ (tr. Richard Berengarten) in Poetry Wales 17(2): 52–53.

–––. 1983. In Visible Ink: Selected Shorter Poems (ed. Richard Berengarten). Skye: Aquila.

Seferis, Yiorgos. 1931. Strophé. Athens: Papadimas.

–––. 1947. Kichli. Athens: Ikaros.

Seferis, George. 1969. Collected Poems, 1924–1955 (tr. Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard). London: Jonathan Cape.

Vayenas, Nasos. 1978. Biography (tr. Richard Berengarten). Cambridge: Lobby Press.

–––. 1979. O Poiitis ke o Choreftis [The Poet and the Dancer]. Athens: Kedros.

–––. 1989. I Ptosi tou Iptamenou. Athens: Stigmi.

Paschalis Nikolaou completed his Ph.D. at the University of East Anglia, supported by an Alexander S. Onassis Foundation scholarship. He is the co-editor ofTranslating Selves: Experience and Identity between Languages and Literatures (Continuum, 2008). His reviews, translations and poetry have appeared in, among others, MPT, Etchings and The London Magazine, and his essays on translation studies in various edited volumes. He currently teaches literary translation at the Ionian University (Corfu, Greece), and also acts as an advisor on translated poetry from Europe for the literary magazine The Wolf. With Richard Berengarten, he is co-editing a bilingual volume of Selected Poems by Nasos Vayenas, to appear in 2010.