Karen Van Dyck - Austerity Measures

Karen Van Dyck is the Kimon A. Doukas Professor of Modern Greek Literature in the Classics Department at Columbia University. She writes on Modern Greek and Greek Diaspora literature, and gender and translation theory. Her translations include her edited and co-edited collections: The Rehearsal of Misunderstanding: Three Collections by Contemporary Greek Women Poets (Wesleyan, 1998); A Century of Greek Poetry (Cosmos, 2004); The Scattered Papers of Penelope: New and Selected Poems by Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke (Graywolf, 2009), a Lannan Translation selection; and The Greek Poets: Homer to the Present (Norton, 2010).

Her translations of this new generation of writers from Greece have appeared in Brooklyn Rail, Asymptote, and The Baffler.

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India | New Zealand | South Africa Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com. First published 2016 Selection and editorial matter copyright Karen Van Dyck, 2016 The moral right of the editor has been asserted ISBN: 9780241250631 For Jacob, Benjamin, and Leander When there is less to go around, people fight, grab, get tough. Lately, Greece and the Balkans have been living with more than their share of less. Hunger, unemployment, slashed pensions, and ruined businesses draw chalk circles around victims daily in Athens. Electricity and water shortages reach levels associated with countries at war.

More than 27 per cent of Greeks are unemployed. Fifty-five per cent of young people, particularly those in the areas of technology and education, have left Greece to find work elsewhere. Forty per cent of children were living in poverty in 2014, and the number is now approaching 50 per cent. Public debt is the highest in Europe, over 180 per cent of GDP, while austerity measures make staying in the euro zone as difficult as a Grexit. The need for fast answers pushes voters to political extremes. Broken promises and corruption on all sides breed unfounded accusations and fatalism.

Hardly anyone keeps money in the bank any more. News of murders and robberies shares equal airtime with ads for high-tech security systems. Meanwhile, refugees fleeing Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq arrive on islands like Lesvos in their hundreds, and at times in their thousands, not wanting to be in Greece, but unable to get to countries with better social services. And where the refugee boats go, local fishermen follow, lining up on shore to jockey for their engines, hoping to resell them at a profit. More people, less to go around. Much more. Much more.

Poets writing graffiti on walls, poets reading in public squares, theaters, and empty lots, poets performing in slams, chanting slogans, and singing songs at rallies, poets blogging and posting on the internet, poets teaming up with artists and musicians, poets teaching workshops to schoolchildren and migrants. In all of the misery and mess, new poetry is everywhere, too large and too various a body of writing to fit neatly on either side of any ideological rift. Even with bookshops closing and publishers unsure of paper supplies for the next book, poets are getting their poems out there. Established literary magazines are flourishing; small presses and new periodicals abound. And if poetry production is defying economic recession, it is also overleaping the divisions of nation, class, and gender. Greek poetry poetry written in the Greek language can be written inside or outside of Greece, by Greeks or non-Greeks, rich or poor, women or men, young or old.

Not since the Colonels Dictatorship in the early 1970s, when poets such as Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke, Jenny Mastoraki, and Pavlina Pampoudi first appeared, has there been such an abundance of poetry being written, nor such a multitude of projects undertaken. Indeed, the historical affinity does not stop there: it is those same poets of the Dictatorship who are doing the lions share of mentoring in the new generation. The present anthology samples this living tradition, bearing witness not only to the hard lives being led in Greece and the Balkans today, but also to what poetry does best: offering new ways to imagine what can be radically different realities. From the lyrical dream fragments of Anna Griva to the apocalyptic neo-realism of Stathis Antoniou to Thomas Tsalapatiss wry postmodern prose poems, nothing here is as one might expect, even from the Greek poetry of the recent past. Not many statues; not much myth, at least in the classical sense; no patriotism; not even the very intense light or references to the sea we know from the Nobel Laureates George Seferis and Odysseas Elytis. What most distinguishes the poetry of this new millennium from what came before it is, on the one hand, its diversity there are no clear-cut schools or factions and, on the other hand, the cultural conditions that it takes for granted.