Grèce

Τρία κείμενα του Επίκουρου, τα σημαντικότερα για την ηθική φιλοσοφία του, παρουσιάζονται σε αυτή τη δίγλωσση (αγγλικά και αρχαία ελληνικά) έκδοση: Επιστολή προς Μενοικέα, Κύριαι Δόξαι, Επίκουρου Προσφώνησις, στη σπουδαία μετάφραση του καθηγητή Κλασικών Σπουδών στο Πανεπιστήμιο της Οξφόρδης Cyril Bailey.

Οι δύο ομιλίες του Οδυσσέα Ελύτη που εκφώνησε στα γαλλικά κατά την απονομή του Νόμπελ Λογοτεχνίας στη Σουηδική Ακαδημία το 1979, στην οποία ο ποιητής μιλάει για τη φωτεινότητα και τη διαφάνεια, την ποίηση και την τέχνη. Η έκδοση περιλαμβάνει τις δύο ομιλίες του στα αγγλικά, μία εισαγωγή από τον ποιητή και κριτικό Δημήτρη Δασκαλόπουλο, με τίτλο "Ο ποιητής Οδυσσέας Ελύτης", καθώς και χρονολόγιο της ζωής του ποιητή αλλά και λίστα έργων του Ελύτη που έχουν μεταφραστεί στα αγγλικά.

After twenty years, Odysseus finally returns to Ithaca, but instead of receiving the homecoming he had hoped for finds himself caught in an intense battle of wills with his faithful and long-suffering wife Penelope. When Penelope recognizes him under the guise of a beggar, she becomes furious with him for not trusting her enough to include her in his plans for ridding the palace of the Suitors. As a result, she plays her own game of fictions to make him suffer for this lack of faith, inspiring jealousy, self-doubt, and misgivings in her husband, the legendary Homeric hero. In this captivating retelling of the Odyssey, Penelope rises as a major force with whom to be reckoned. Shifting between first-person reflections, Ithaca Forever reveals the deeply personal and powerful perspectives of both wife and husband as they struggle for respect and supremacy within a marriage that has been on hold for twenty years. Translated by PEN award-winner Douglas Grant Heise, Luigi Malerba's novel gives us a remarkable version of this greatest work of western literature: Odysseus as a man full of doubts and Penelope as a woman of great depth and strength.

The author has called "The Jaguar" an extravagant story." He employs an extravagant style to stress the irony of his heroine's attempt to preserve a false image of her moral superiority in the process of promoting selfish ends. The historical events referred to in Dimitra's of herself and her family belong to the Second World Wi1r period. Dimitra, a mathematics teacher, had been an active member of the leftist resistance movement during the Nazi occupation of Greece and was persecuted as a communist in the civil war that followed. Years later, she likes to think, of herself as an uncompromising individual engaged in a noble struggle to promote the ideals of a socialist revolution. The unexpected return of her sister-in-Iaw Philio from America to claim an inheritance forces her to take a good look at the past. Her breathless interior monologue throughout the night of her confrontation with Philio reveals Dimitra's obstinate refusal to accept the "bourgeois" compromises she has meanwhile made and has been comfortably living with for the past ten years. The extravagant melodrama of Dimitra's rhetoric often becomes a caricature of dialectic reasoning, a comic version of double-think paring reality to make it fit within the confines' of wishful thinking and self-righteousness. When the verbal torrent is finally spent., the comedy fades leaving a bitter after-taste of the pathos of self-deception. In native South American religion the jaguar was regarded as a fierce deity representing forces of war, destruction and human sacrifice.

"Come now my right hand,
depict what demoniacally torments you,
but over it place

The Virgin's silver sheen
that at night masks the waters of the
marshy waste".

[...] The Journal of an Unseen April contains 49 poems in the form of journal entries, beginning on 1 April and ending on 7 May, and covers the whole period'of an unspecified Greek Easter (though some critics specify the year as being 1981 when Easter fell, as in the Journal, on 26 April). The prevailing atmosphere throughout the work is that of death, but death expressed as a transcendent, unseen life. The setting is the border area between the earthly and transcendent life; between the "now" and the "forever" of The Axion Esti. Its themes of departing and experience of what Elytis elsewhere has called the "after-death" acquired a new relevance in the month of April 1996, which came in the wake of his own departing and during which the translation was made. It was the first April without Elytis or, perhaps more correctly, the first April with an unseen Elytis. I dedicate the trans-lation to his unseen presence.

That is Acheron? A river in the north-west of Greece, in Epirus, which, in ancient Greek mythology, was the boundary between life and death. What is Kalamas? It too is a river, in the same region, which Byron associated with the Acheron in "Childe Harold`s Pilgrimage", and History, after a hundred and fifty years was to give it, and in a dramatic way, the same meaning.

What is "Kalamas and Acheron"? A cycle of stories, closely connected, which can be read as a novel, where the two rivers become the boundary not only between life and death, but also between human passions of enemies and friends, between utopia and reality, love and violence, joy and misery, past and present, nostalgia and revulsion, memory and fantasy. And finally, a boundary like a taut rope, on which human fate teeters in the balance.

"Kalamas and Acheron" is also the book that, when it was first published in 1985, won the First State Award.

Kaleidoscope: Poems in Bloom delights the senses through beautifully descriptive poems in concert with vivid watercolor images, to create a richly evocative visual experience rarely seen in volumes of poetry. The author's forty two poems reflect her passion for language and her keen observation of the flowering world both in the countryside surrounding her tiny village on the Greek island of Crete, and in the Minnesota of her youth. Following nature s seasonal flow, Kaleidoscope begins with a bouquet of springtime wildflowers, from the shy wild orchid that waves its tiny butterfly wings to the scarlet fringe of poppies adorning the fields of April and May. It then continues on to summer, honoring the survivors of searing heat ( nettles, thistles, thorns / those tough denizens of drought) and finally celebrates the turn to autumn. In Crete this is a time of ripening oranges and olives and also of new growth, as the long-awaited rains inspire the return of the pale pink cyclamen and the first glimpse of anemone, that tiny scrap of indigo silk. Unique among contemporary poetry books, almost every page of Kaleidoscope boasts a complementary watercolor image. Created by the talented artist Joan Elkins, these forty eight fluid images reflect the vibrant and fleeting life of flowers that inspire the poems themselves. The reader is invited to walk along with poet and artist and savor their shared visions of the flowering world.

This present translation brings one of the most beloved works of modern Greek literature to readers of English for the first time in its entirety. Land of Aeolia tells the story of the author’s childhood summers in Anatolia before World War I, before the Greek genocide, the Greco-Turkish war, the author’s captivity by the Turks, and before the exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey in 1922 that led to the permanent loss of his homeland. It is a testament to the power of literature to evoke that which is irrevocably lost. In this story of his childhood, half fiction, half truth, Ilias Venezis describes and affirms a world in which the lives of humans, be they smugglers, saints, brigands, farmers, camel drivers or children, are reflected in nature — in her mountains, rivers, trees, eagles, bears, eels, and lizards, and all her manifestations — and therefore share an innate affinity with her mysterious world. 'This book has a timeless attraction as a celebration of the child's instinctive empathy with all manner of creatures and things. With its talking seas, mountains, and lizards, it anticipates the magical realism of Latin American fiction.' From the Prologue by Bruce Clark.

Here is the story of a remarkable life that began in the Austro-Hungarian Empire of Franz Joseph, spanned two World Wars, and played out on three continents. Born into the Polish aristocracy, Ola Pawlowska was told she would never have to earn her living. War and early widowhood changed all that. Fleeing Nazi-occupied France to Canada with her young daughter, Ola worked at various jobs, mainly as a secretary at the Polish Legation but in Canada she also encountered the Bahá í Faith, and in 1953 she became a Knight of Bahá u lláh to the St Pierre and Miquelon Islands off the Canadian coast. But the services for which she is best remembered still lay ahead. Pioneering to the Congo in the early 1960s fulfilled a life-long dream to live in Africa. She was to stay for the next thirty years, loved by many and courageously confronting the many challenges of a rapidly expanding Bahá í community in a country with vast distances to be covered. And in her eighties, Ola Pawlowska pioneered yet again to her beloved homeland of Poland, where she saw the establishment of Poland s first National Spiritual Assembly. Beautifully written by Ola s daughter Suzanne Schuurman, this book is a real page-turner. The world of the pioneers who responded to the Guardian s call has vanished; the history of the Bahá í world is now being written in every island and territory; but Ola s story will be an inspiration to all those who possess the spirit of adventure.

Pacy and propulsive . . . Crackling with energy, violence and stirring speeches' DAILY MAIL'Iggulden draws the Greek world convincingly and he is strongest writing battle scenes' THE TIMES'The master historical storyteller. This swords-and-sandals epic brings the ancient world to life' DAILY EXPRESSTHE FIRST BOOK IN CONN IGGULDEN'S EPIC NEW SERIES THE GOLDEN AGE_______Pericles stands in the shadow of his father: a man who once saved Athens. To make his own name he must prove himself in the liar's den of Athenian politics: pitting wits against friends, sceptics, enemies. But words alone do not make a leader. A force of Persians threatens the city and Pericles must find courage on the battlefield. In its time of need, Athens' warriors must be lions . . . _______PRAISE FOR CONN IGGULDEN:'Brings war in the ancient world to vivid, gritty and bloody life' ANTHONY RICHES'Another masterpiece from Iggulden' 5***** Reader Review'It's like being on the battlefield' 5***** Reader Review 'An epic piece of historical fiction, full of political intrigue and vivid action' ROBERT FABBRI