Edmund Keeley , perhaps this century's foremost translator of Greek poetry, has known nearly all the writers who reign in the modern Greek literary pantheon. In his just-published Inventing Paradise , Keeley explores how Henry Miller and  Lawrence Durrell  , together with their Greek counterparts, created an image of Greece that endures even today. Diane Shugart talks with Keeley about the literary invention of modern Greece.

Since the British Romantic poet Lord Byron threw himself body and soul into the rebellion of the Greeks against their Ottoman rulers in 1821, Greece has seduced successive generations of writers, painters, poets, and ordinary travellers. Among those who have succumbed to the country's almost mystical allure is the writer Edmund Keeley, the foremost scholar of modern Greek literature and translator of modern Greek poetry.

Keeley's infatuation with Greece dates back to his childhood in Thessaloniki , where his father served as the American consul. Those tender years, which Keeley recalls as "a paradise," were interrupted in 1939 by a home leave order to his father - a break that was extended to a full decade by World War II. Keeley was finally able to return in 1949 and has been coming back every year since then - literally, each summer with his Greek wife, Mary, and figuratively, throughout a 40-year career as a professor at Princeton University and author of more than 25 books.

His critically acclaimed works span from fiction, to translations of  George Seferis  , Constantine Cavafy ,  Odysseas Elytis  , Angelos Sikelianos , and Yiannis Ritsos , to literary criticism, and an authoritative investigative work into the still-unsolved murder of CBS journalist George Polk in Thessaloniki in 1948.

But it is not the years spent in Greece that, to borrow an image from Seferis, wound Keeley, rather the years during which he was absent from this country.

 "That break has been important in my life because I became in effect a refugee, an exile from a country and a language that I loved," he says of the 10 years that intervened from the time his family left Thessaloniki until he was able to return. "That period still haunts me." 

It is that lost time that he seeks to regain through his latest book, Inventing Paradise: The Greek Journey , 1937-1947 (Farrar, Straus, Giroux). The book is a pilgrimage - personal, literary, historical - through the different Greeces painted in the novels of Henry Miller and Lawrence Durrell , writers whose influence on American and English literature match that of Elytis, Seferis, Sikelianos, and Ritsos on Greek literature. Their experiences were formative, not only for themselves but also for subsequent generations of writers such as Keeley, Patrick Leigh Fermor , and Kevin Andrews , whose imaginations were so inflamed by the work of Durrell and Miller that they followed in quest of their own Greek experience. Their books also propagated the Greek myth crafted on screen by Michalis Cacoyiannis in Zorba the Greek and Jules Dassin in Never On Sunday and which spurred the tourism boom of the Sixties and Seventies.

Although incisive about both Miller and Durrell, Inventing Paradise is only incidentally biographical. The sojourns in Greece of these two writers are an intellectual device Keeley uses to conceal his true aim: exploring the invented paradise - and, alternately, purgatory - crafted by his beloved Greek poets.

 "I wanted to present the Greek poets I'd been working with since Oxford in the Fifties to an English-speaking audience in a way other than writing straight criticism," Keeley says. "I wanted to show there were human beings behind the poems, to show they had created an inventive and artistic image of Greece that was profoundly interesting." 

The approach has resulted in a book that is profoundly interesting, as Keeley laces the common threads running through the lives of Miller, Durrell, Leigh Fermor, Andrews and, indeed, his own, unravelling the mystery of Greece if only by exposing the invention in their individual Edens.