Untitled

Modern Greek Literature at Princeton
Building a Program and a Collection
by dimitri gondicas
orking in Modern Greek literature is a lonely enterprise:
“Wfew know its riches, very few teach the subject, even fewer
come to the literature as scholars or critics, especially in the United
States,” wrote Edmund Keeley, Class of 1948, in his Cavafy’s Alexandria.
1 Twenty years later, in the preface to the second edition, 2 he
would remark: “working in Modern Greek literature is no longer
the lonely enterprise I saw it to be in [1976]. The discipline of Modern
Greek Studies, then in its infancy, has grown measurably during
the intervening years and has now found a hospitable — if sometimes
less than ample — home in a number of American Universities.”
Overshadowed by and unfairly compared to their venerable Classical
ancestors, the writers of modern Greece remained virtually
unknown outside their country for the greater part of this century.
When not totally ignored, Modern Greek literature was until recently
relegated to “minor” status, for the simple reason that it was
unavailable in translation and therefore inaccessible to critics and
the broader public. This is no longer the case: in the last two decades,
C. P. Cavafy has become recognized as a major twentiethcentury
poet in any language; two Greek poets, George Seferis and
Odysseus Elytis, have earned Nobel prizes; the novels of Nikos
Kazantzakis have achieved broad circulation; and the poet Yannis
Ritsos has received international acclaim. How did this dramatic
change occur? How does a virtually unknown national literature
become an international literature?
It takes translator-scholars, academic institutions, and publishers
working together to discover new foreign poets and establish new
1 Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1976, p. vii.
2 Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996, p. ix.
343