March 28, 2024

The Saturday Profile: Work of Greek Poet Kiki Dimoula Shows Reflection of Country’s Hard Times

KIKI DIMOULA, Greece’s feisty, 81-year-old national poet, was holding court on a recent afternoon, musing about her work and the fate of her country. Asked to describe the mood in Greece today, she did not mince words. “Darkness and chaos,” she said, drawing on a cigarette.

Ms. Dimoula may have a flair for the dramatic, but her words are always chosen carefully. Her poetry — spare, profound, unsentimental, effortlessly transforming the quotidian into the metaphysical, drawing on the powerful themes of time, fate and destiny, yet making them entirely her own — has earned her a near-cult following in Greece.

One of her Greek writer contemporaries, Nikos Dimou, has called Ms. Dimoula “the best Greek woman poet since Sappho,” and she is the first living female poet ever to be included in the prestigious French publisher Gallimard’s poetry series. But her work has rarely been translated into English.

Last fall, a new collection of her selected poems, “The Brazen Plagiarist,” appeared from Yale University Press, translated by Cecile I. Margellos and Rika Lesser, bringing her work into English for the first time in nearly two decades.

Ms. Dimoula does not speak English. “I was lazy,” she said apologetically, and is concerned that her Greek verbal acrobatics do not translate well. In the introduction to the new collection, she writes that she worries “whether the bridge from one language to another is sound enough.”

The bridge, as it happens, is plenty strong. As is the writer.

“My homeland is my language,” Ms. Dimoula said. She was seated on a dark velvet sofa in the elegant Athens sitting room of Ms. Margellos, a translator and literary critic who with her husband, the Greek investor Theodore Margellos, have endowed the Margellos Republic of Letters imprint at Yale University Press.

“It is my identity, it reassures me,” Ms. Dimoula said of her language. Around her, the walls were painted with neo-Ottoman motifs. A vase of blood-red dahlias sat on the mirrored coffee table. Ms. Dimoula leaned back on a silk turquoise throw pillow. Her gray hair was cut stylishly short. The lines around her eyes revealed a legacy of laughter and loss.

IN a literary tradition in which poets have been revered almost as untouchable gods, Ms. Dimoula comes across as earthy and approachable. Born and raised in Athens, Ms. Dimoula worked for years at a desk job at the Bank of Greece — as had her father and her husband — before she quit working in 1974. She raised two children and is a devoted grandmother.

The desk job was no fun. “It was a prison,” she said. Every morning during Greece’s military dictatorship from 1967 to 1974, her supervisor would have her take a metal phoenix, the symbol of the colonels, out of a drawer and place it on his desk. “My bird, Dimoula, my bird!” she said, laughing at the memory.

Those were dark times. Today, with Greece dismantling its social protections amid a crushing debt crisis, she is concerned that things might get even more terrible. “I believe they can get even worse than the junta period,” she said. “The junta put under surveillance and limited the freedom of the leftists; now the whole country is being persecuted.”

Like all Greek retirees, Ms. Dimoula has seen her pension cut. “Because of 100 people that abused power, the whole country has been asked to pay,” she said angrily, drawing on another cigarette, referring to Greece’s many financial scandals.

SHE said she follows the news and listens to the political speeches, especially those of the Socialist party leader, Evangelos Venizelos, famous for his oratory. “He’s very careful; he’s a speaker by nature,” she said. “I’m examining the quality, not the authenticity” of his speeches, she added. Asked if she believed a word he said, she shook her head vehemently. “No,” she said.

In a 2011 speech when she received Greece’s most prestigious literary award, the Grand National Prize for lifetime achievement, Ms. Dimoula talked about the role of culture during the crisis. “How society perceives matters of art in general depends on how far its soul has accepted the belief that art, poetry in this case, will not impose cutbacks on the escape it provides,” she said then.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/12/world/europe/work-of-greek-poet-kiki-dimoula-shows-reflection-of-countrys-hard-times.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Public Domain Works Can Be Copyrighted Anew, Justices Rule

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld a federal law that restored copyright protection to works that had entered the public domain.

By a 6-to-2 vote, the justices rejected arguments based on the First Amendment and the Constitution’s copyright clause, saying that the public domain was not “a category of constitutional significance” and that copyright protections might be expanded even if they did not create incentives for new works to be created.

The case, Golan v. Holder, No. 10-545, considered a 1994 law enacted to carry out an international convention. The law applied mainly to works first published abroad from 1923 to 1989 that had earlier not been eligible for copyright protection under American law, including films by Alfred Hitchcock, books by C. S. Lewis and Virginia Woolf, symphonies by Prokofiev and Stravinsky and paintings by Picasso.

The precise number of affected works is unknown but “probably number in the millions,” Marybeth Peters, the United States register of copyrights, said in 1996.

The law was challenged by orchestra conductors, teachers and film archivists who said they had relied for years on the free availability of such works.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writing for the majority, said the law had merely put “foreign works on an equal footing with their U.S. counterparts.”

“Assuming a foreign and domestic author died the same day, their works will enter the public domain simultaneously,” she wrote.

She gave examples. “Prokofiev’s ‘Peter and the Wolf’ could once be performed free of charge,” while now, she said: “The right to perform it must be obtained in the marketplace. This is the same marketplace, of course, that exists for the music of Prokofiev’s U.S. contemporaries: works of Copland and Bernstein, for example, that enjoy copyright protection, but nevertheless appear regularly in the programs of U.S. concertgoers.”

Indeed, she said, foreign works not eligible to be copyrighted in the United States before the 1994 law are somewhat worse off, as they receive “no compensatory time” for the period they had been in the public domain.

The Constitution authorizes Congress “to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.”

In dissent, Justice Stephen G. Breyer, joined by Samuel A. Alito Jr., wrote that the clause meant to require a utilitarian approach, one under which authors were granted limited monopolies in order to encourage them to produce societally valuable works.

“Does the clause empower Congress to enact a statute that withdraws works from the public domain, brings about higher prices and costs, and in doing so seriously restricts dissemination, particularly to those who need it for scholarly, educational, or cultural purposes — all without providing any additional incentive for the production of new material?” Justice Breyer asked. The answer, he said, was no.

“The statute before us,” Justice Breyer wrote, “does not encourage anyone to produce a single new work.”

Justice Ginsburg countered with a broader interpretation of the provision. “The copyright clause,” she wrote, “does not demand that each copyright protection, examined discretely, operate to induce new works.” Rather, she wrote, the intellectual property laws generally, including the international copyright system, must address the general purpose of the clause, that of encouraging “the dissemination of existing and future works.”

Justice Ginsburg also rejected challenges to the law based on the First Amendment, saying that free speech interests are adequately protected by the fair use doctrine and the principle that only expression and not ideas are eligible for copyright protection.

Justice Breyer said the majority’s approach did not take adequate account of the importance of free expression. “By removing material from the public domain, the statute, in literal terms, ‘abridges’ a pre-existing freedom to speak,” he wrote, referring to a key word of the First Amendment.

Justice Breyer added that the decision upholding the law would have negative practical consequences, as owners of copyrights now charge for works that were once free. “If a school orchestra or other nonprofit organization cannot afford the new charges, so be it,” he wrote. “They will have to do without — aggravating the already serious problem of cultural education in the United States.”

Justice Elena Kagan did not participate in the case, presumably because she had worked on it as United States solicitor general.

In a second decision issued Wednesday, Mims v. Arrow Financial Services, No. 10-1195, the court unanimously ruled that a 1991 federal law, the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, allowed consumers to sue in federal court over abuses involving automatic dialing equipment, recorded messages, unsolicited faxes and similar practices.

The law mentioned suits in state courts, and the question for the justices was whether that meant those were the only available courts. Justice Ginsburg, writing for the court, said the law did not bar suits in federal courts.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=107c98bfbaeb77dae8ecc11d2f41ef73