BOOK OF THE MONTH: “Chimera” by Phoebe Giannisi
Chimera in ancient Greek is a composite being, a creature where different species meet inside one...
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Reading Greece
Reading Greece is a series of interviews featuring Greek writers and other stakeholders of the Greek book market. It forms part of Greek News Agenda, issued by the Public Diplomacy Secretariat of the Hellenic Ministry of Foreign Affairs
📚📚In November's BOOK OF THE MONTH, Reading Greece presents "Chimera" by Greek poet Phoebe Giannisi recently translated into English by Brian Sneeden (New Directions, 2024).![]()
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The center of "Chimera" engages with a three-year field research project on the goat-herding practices of a community of Vlachs, a people of Northern Greece and the Southern Balkans who speak their own language and practice transhumance. ![]()
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Giannisi lays out her vision for a chimeric poetics, poetics of assemblage that are both informed by the human and the non-human, where poetry blends with writing, myth, orality, field recordings, state archives, and ancient texts. The book proposes a kind of chimeric polyphonic poetry, a female version of the etymology of the word tragedy, aegodia, a multiple poetic object that brings together different kinds of poetic materials inside one multiple text body.
BOOK OF THE MONTH: “Chimera” by Phoebe Giannisi
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Chimera in ancient Greek is a composite being, a creature where different species meet inside one body as various bodily parts. But the original meaning of the word, as we already find it inside the H...
📍 Today, Greece honours the memory of the Athens Polytechnic Uprising, a massive student riot against the military dictatorship (1967-1974).![]()
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Greece was under military rule, and for three years writers had remained silent rather than submit to censorship. But in 1970 they rebelled and published a book called “Eighteen Texts” an innocuous title that camouflaged a piercing protest against dictatorship and repression. In the words of poet Manolis Anagnostakis, “Words must be hammered in like nails that the wind might not take them.”![]()
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“Eighteen Texts” consciously signalled the resumption, under an oppressive regime, of the cultural ferment that paralleled the political liberalization of Greece in the early sixties. The military regime had recently lifted preventive censorship, and although it was still very dangerous to challenge the policies regarding freedom of thought and freedom of the press, these authors took advantage of the purported relaxation of censorship to produce this volume.![]()
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The lifting of preventive censorship, they state in their Prologue, does not emancipate the intellectual life of a country if areas of creativity continue to be surrounded by barriers that hinder unconditional presentation of ideas and make their full evaluation impossible. The right to free artistic and intellectual creation is bound to the dignity of man.
🎊Italy will be the Guest of Honour at the 21st Thessaloniki Book Fair / Διεθνής Έκθεση Βιβλίου Θεσσαλονίκης, which will take place from 8 to 11 May 2025. ![]()
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With a successful presence of more than 20 years, Thessaloniki Book Fair 2025 will present once more a multidimensional programme, creating a large community united not only by the love of books, but also by the desire for dialogue, cooperation and the highlighting of contemporary concerns.