Greece's presence as guest of honour at last year's Frankfurt International Book Fair provided a fine opportunity to promote the nations literary output. Thus the Greek Federation of Publishers and Booksellers (tel: 010-3300924) launched a major digital archive featuring 180 poets writing after WWII - the eldest being Kriton Athanassoulis, born 1916, the youngest, Dimitris Aggelis, born in 1973.
The CD-Rom, entitled The multiple shadow of Homer: Contemporary Greek poets vis-a-vis the world (1945-2000), is an ambitious overview of four generations of Greek poets. It includes poetry in the original as well as in translation, the voices of poets themselves reading their work as well as photographs and material from TV and radio archives (provided by Third State Radio Programme, NET state TV channel, Macedonia radio, Gavriilidis Publishers and the Greek Theatre Museum ) which give valuable insight to the socio-cultural context of each post-war generation.
Poet and essayist Vangelis Kassos, chief editor of the edition, describes the project as an archive rather than an anthology, which explains why so many poets are featured. This is the first time, Kassos stresses, that Greek poets are being 'exported' in this way; and since poets evolve parallel to history, they are the ideal "cultural mediators" to promote the modern Greek nation and culture to the rest of the world.
As the project's main aim was the promotion of Greek poets abroad, the CD-Rom is only available in English. Actually, it was distributed free of charge to all industry specialists in Frankfurt and has also been delivered to the Greek communities abroad. As Kassos notes, "this little digital parcel will travel everywhere, to be read again and again, to undergo critique, to live within us".
Featured verse-masters
Some of the better known contemporary poets featured include Dinos Christianopoulos, Tassos Levaditis, Titos Patrikios, Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke and Yiorgos Pavlopoulos. Furthermore, the CD-Rom includes a biographical and bibliographical listing of poets (by alphabetical order and generation) bibliography of critical essays on contemporary Greek poetry, bibliography of translated contemporary Greek poetry along with a listing of all poems set to music. While text and voice-overs are in English, poets obviously read their works in the original Greek.
The digital archive is introduced by Kassos who picks up the Greek poetic tradition with Dionyssios Solomos, as the man who awakened "poetic consciousness" of modern Greece, runs through Palamas, Cavafy, Sikelianos, Seferis, Ritsos and Elytis, before tackling the subject at hand, namely the post-war Greek poet.
Moreover, Kassos stresses the importance of this and other multi-media projects suggesting that they do not undermine typography but they rather bring the voice of the poet to the foreground of poetry, thereby making up for the sensory lack. With the audiovisual element so central to the CD-Rom some poets were left out due to inability to locate any recordings of them reading their work, explains Kassos. Missing poets include Aris Alexandrou, Olga Votsi, Minas Demakis, Dimitris Doukaris, Nikos Karydis, Tassos Pappas, Yorgos Sarandas, Andreas Anghelakis, and Alexis Traianos et al.
