The Rehearsal of Misunderstanding: Three Collections by Contemporary Greek Women Poets

by Karen Van Dyck (Translator)

The Cake by Rhea Galanaki
Tales of the Deep by Jenny Mastoraki
Hers by Maria Laina

While the poetry of Cavafy, Elytis, Ritsos, and Seferis is readily available to English speakers, Greek women's poetry remains virtually unknown to non-specialists. The Rehearsal of Misunderstanding, which includes poems by Rhea Galanaki, Jenny Mastoraki, and Maria Laina, fills a serious gap in contemporary poetry in translation, in general, and in Greek poetry, in particular. Drawing on the formative experience of writing under an authoritarian regime (1967-1974), women poets in the 1980s forged a poetics which unsettled and disrupted fixed meanings and gender roles. Each of the three collections in this anthology rehearses the myriad ways we are misunderstood and misrepresented by others and ourselves. Like recent American language poetry by women which draws on the work of Emily Dickinson and Gertrude Stein, these series of interwoven poems transform hermeticism into a feminine survival strategy for recognizing how meaning is lost, disfigured, or denied.

Genres: Poetry

Paperback

First published April 30, 1998

About the author

Karen Van Dyck is the Kimon A. Doukas Professor of Modern Greek Literature at Columbia University. She writes on modern Greek and diaspora literature and on gender and translation. She has edited or co-edited several volumes of poetry, including A Century of Greek Poetry (2004); The Greek Poets: Homer to the Present (2010); and, for NYRB Poets, Austerity Measures: The New Greek Poetry (2017). She is also the translator of Margarita Liberaki’s Three Summers, an NYRB Classics title. Her translations have appeared in Brooklyn Rail, Asymptote, and The Baffler.

Reviews

[Sophie Mangano · Rating 5 out of 5]

HERS by Maria Laina

[Philip Coulter · Rating 3 out of 5]

Of the three, I particularly liked Hers by Maria Laina. It felt a little more economical with language.