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