The Rehearsal of Misunderstanding: Three Collections by Contemporary Greek Women Poets: "The Cake" by Rhea Galanaki, "Tales of the Deep" by Jenny Mastoraki, "Hers" by Maria Laina

The appearance in English translation of collections of poems by four of Greece's leading poets is a cause for celebration, and not just because the poets happen to be women. Greek has been fortunate, among the less commonly spoken languages of Europe, in attracting excellent translators. It might be argued that the quality of the poetry attracted the translators, but there is also the undeniable influence of a background in ancient Greek that made the language of modern Greek poetry, its physical setting, and its subject matter more appealing to a generation of English and American translators than, say, the poetry of modern Poland. The fascination of modern Greek poetry was, at least until the 1960s, part of a broader phenomenon. It was a love affair that began with the philhellenes and lasted as long as Greek poets continued to write about what had attracted foreigners to Greece in the first place—continuity with an ancient, hallowed past, and a dramatic, sun-drenched landscape. When modern Greek poets stopped writing about these themes, it was harder to interest non-Greek readers in their work. How were poets writing about urban anomie, drugs, sex, men, adolescence, and death still distinctively Greek, and did it matter any more? Feminism stimulated some translators to render the works of previously unknown Greek women writers; literary connections and fluency in foreign languages helped other poets to find their translators. Occasionally a poet's work attracted the attention of a translator for qualities that had little to do with where it was written.

An interest in feminist poetics certainly affected Karen Van Dyck's choice of poets, but so did an interest in issues that are not specific to women writers. Her anthology is a companion volume to her book Kassandra and the Censors: Greek Poetry Since 1967 (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1998), in which she explores the effects of censorship imposed by the authoritarian regime of 1967-1974 on the practice and strategies of writing, particularly on the women writers who began their literary careers during those years. As she says in her introduction to the anthology, Van Dyck's title The Rehearsal of Misunderstanding refers to the "proliferation of double entendres, obscure references and indirect constructions in the three individual collections" as well as to "the challenges facing writers in Greece under and after the dictatorship" (xvi). Van Dyck contends that poets who had established themselves before the dictatorship, and who imposed various forms of censorship on themselves in protest against the regime, returned to their familiar style of writing once the dictatorship ended. Younger writers, however, particularly the three women poets of her anthology, continued to use strategies that articulated and subverted other structures of power and authority. "For Galanaki, Mastoraki and Laina," Van Dyck maintains, " the challenge to authority became a feminist problem in the late 1970's and early 1980's" (xviii).

Van Dyck's thesis may not be an essential background for reading these three poets, but her introduction carefully situates the writers in a political and literary landscape, one that encourages us to view the often exasperating obscurity of the poems as a necessary "rehearsal of misunderstanding." To understand is not necessarily to admire. I must confess that of the poems in this anthology only a handful seem to me likely to endure as literature. Rhea Galanaki has established herself as a successful novelist, and it is her narrative skill that helps hold the fragments of poetry in this anthology...