When the Centre for the Greek Language first presented the idea of an anthology to Dr David Ricks of King's College, London, he was happy for the opportunity to "present a reasonably representative, single-volume picture of modern Greek writing of a kind which had never been available."

In his Modern Greek Writing: An Anthology in English Translation Ricks (author of The Shade of Homer: A Study in Modern Greek Poetry and Byzantine Heroic Poetry) showcases fifty of most important writers since 1821; Greek men of letters (but also women, like poetesses Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke and Jenny Mastoraki ) ranging from Cavafy , Seferis and Elytis to Kazantzakis , Papadiamantis and Makriyannis.

Within the book's 500 pages one finds a selection of genres: poetry, prose and memoir, historical, literary and experimental writing accompanied by Ricks' precise and informative commentary linking text to context, uncovering influences and evaluating each author's contribution to the Greek literary tradition.

How did you select the writers represented in this anthology?
I chose from among those writers who, on the basis of my knowledge of their original writings, I considered most worthy of attention and then searched for translations of them.

Were new translations commissioned especially for this anthology?
It was not the Centre's aim to commission new translations, but to provide, in part, a history: a survey of the cultural interactions between the Greek-speaking and English-speaking worlds which have generated the corpus of published translations we possess. One thing I have attempted to do (on which the critic Aris Berlis commented acutely) is do justice to worthy translations from the distant past in the first quarter of the book. That said, there is no doubt that a volume with commissioned translations would have had a quite different cast: choosing the final fifty writers might have been more difficult, but representing them by their best work in the best possible translations would have been rather easier.

Are writers or texts missing due to the lack of available translations?
As I say in the Preface, the absence of Kontoglou, Skarimbas and Beratis is particularly regrettable; and in a work of commissioned translations, I would have tried to represent Sikelianos and Karyotakis much more fully. Coverage of the field in translation can be very haphazard, with the years before1960 particularly ill served by what is available.

What difficulties did you encounter in compiling this anthology?
The difficulty about which one might grow most ill-tempered was the number of merely incompetent translations of fine Greek texts, especially in verse. A knowledge of Greek and a way with English are less often found in one person than you might think.

How would you characterise a successful translation?
Running counter to an influential strain in modern Translation Studies, I would say that a successful translation must be thoroughly domesticated within the target language: it should not inhabit a half-way house of linguistic private judgement on the part of the translator, but be integrated within the host tradition. At the limit, I accept that that makes some texts untranslatable.

Who makes up the new generation of translators working from the Greek?
I find it hard to speak of a generation, because translators, especially from Greek, lament the fact that they tend to work in isolation, but I am happy to see that some of the gaps I've mentioned (Skarimbas, Sikelianos) are now being filled by enterprising translators. Some of your own translations are included.

Which writers or period most interest you?
I'm interested in all the writers represented in the volume. Had I more time and talent, a complete translation of Karyotakis' Elegies and Satires would be a compelling enterprise.

Why was the book not conceived of as a bilingual anthology?
The Centre took the view (as it did with the excellent Greek anthology, In Conversation with Cavafy) that to include the Greek would halve the size of a selection, which was for an English-language audience. Princeton University Press once had a fine record in bilingual collections, but the price of paper now inhibits this. I'm happy to see that a forthcoming anthology to which I've contributed, A Century of Greek Poetry (Cosmos Publishing 2004) will be bilingual – and 1,000 pages!

What socio-political and historical course is traced out by the literature in the book? What do we learn about Greece from the collection?
The book attempts to trace, through the individual (and often individualistic) responses of writers since 1821, some sense of how poetry and prose have responded to (and indeed helped to create) certain moods in certain historical settings. It is easy for foreigners, who know the peaceful and prosperous Greece of today, to ignore the often-painful history behind this and also to be too little aware of the resources literature has to offer in unpropitious circumstances.

Greece was rather isolated from the important intellectual movements of greater Europe. How is this reflected in the anthology texts?
I wouldn't myself say that modern Greece was ever isolated from Europe's life of the mind: take Papadiamantis, who was completely au courant with all sorts of figures like Oscar Wilde , whom he deplored.

How are issues of the original language tackled in a translated anthology?
That is a long-standing conundrum, especially since so much literature of merit was written in the "purist" form of Greek. But trying slavishly to replicate Greek diglossia in an English text tends to produce anything but the right effect.

Could you choose just one prose writer and one poet as the most representative of the period covered in the anthology?
I don't think just two could be representative; but if I had to keep just two, I would, with Elytis, say: "Commemorate Dionysios Solomos , commemorate Alexandros Papadiamantis."