The programme for the SMGS Graduate Colloquium 2023 is out now! The Society for Modern Greek Studies is holding this year's Graduate Colloquium at the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, Oxford University, on 17 June 2023. Register your attendance through the link you will find on the programme. We look forward to seeing you there!

The Society for Modern Greek Studies calls on graduate students (research or taught) from universities in the UK and abroad to participate in its annual Graduate Research Colloquium, which this year will take place in Oxford on Saturday 17 June.

Full details can be found  in the attached document.

Proposals, including an abstract of 200 words maximum as well as a brief biographical note, should be emailed to Trisevgeni Bilia at trisevgeni.bilia@st-annes.ox.ac.uk no later than Saturday 15 April 2023.

The 2021 Graduate Research Colloquium of the Society for Modern Greek Studies will take place on Zoom on Friday 8 October. Qualified postgraduate and doctoral students are invited to submit proposals by 20 June 2021. Further details can be found on the poster attached.

The postponed Graduate Research Colloquium 2020 will take place, online, on December 12.

To attend:

https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/91277608246?pwd=UEJsMGZZNS81blRKYW5ueWtheWR5Zz09 

Meeting ID: 912 7760 8246

Passcode: 998125

Please find below and attached the final programme. Prior registration is required. To register please follow the link to the event: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/smgs-graduate-colloquium-2020-tickets-128... The Zoom link for attending will be circulated closer to the time, only to those who register. For further information please contact the organiser, Claudio Russello, SMGS student representative on claudio.russello@merton.ox.ac.uk.

Greek Poets in Translation: Ganas and Ritsos

13 January 2020, 18:00 to 20:00

King's College

Strand Campus, Strand, London, WC2R 2LS

organised in collaboration with the Department of Classics and Centre for Hellenic Studies, King’s College London.

Joshua Barley

Joshua Barley read Classics at Oxford and Modern Greek at King’s College, London. He lives in Athens, where he works as a translator and writer. His articles on Greek subjects have appeared in The White Review and other journals, and he is co-editor of the online journal Pericles at Play. He has translated Ilias Venezis’ Serenity and Makis Tsitas’ God is my Witness for Aiora Press. His translations of Michalis Ganas (with David Connolly) are published by Yale University Press as A Greek Ballad.

My talk will look at the process of translating the poetry of Michalis Ganas. Taking individual poems as a starting point, I will consider the particular challenges presented by Ganas’ intricate and often formally complex poetry. The discussion of specific poems will necessarily lead to a broader consideration of the translation of traditional Greek metre and form, particularly of the folk song, to which Ganas is deeply indebted. I will look at various approaches (from theoretical, historical and practical points of view) to these issues and give an account of my own imperfect solutions. There will also be discussion on the practical relationship of poet to translator (particularly in the case of a non-English-speaking poet) as well as translator to co-translator, all grounded in first-hand experience from the translation of the recently-published collection A Greek Ballad (YUP) – the first book-length publication of Ganas in English.

John Kittmer

John Kittmer read Classics at Cambridge and Oxford, and has recently been awarded a PhD in modern Greek literature at King’s College London, for his thesis on the poet Yannis Ritsos. He is now working on a translation of Ritsos’ verse memoir, The Monstrous Masterpiece, and preparing an edition of Ritsos’ translation of songs by Bertolt Brecht. He is chair of trustees for The Anglo-Hellenic League and the Gilbert Murray Trust, and is a member of the Management Committee of the Centre for Hellenic Studies.

In my talk, I will introduce and examine the work of Nikos Stangos, who published two books of his translations of the poetry of Yannis Ritsos in the early 1970s. I will consider the working relationship between Stangos and Ritsos, as it appears from their unpublished correspondence, and examine the translations themselves, looking at principles of selection and practices of translation. Since neither Ritsos nor Stangos was a native English speaker, I will consider the particular challenges posed by translation from one’s native tongue into a language that is not one’s own. And I will do a reading of some of the translations.