Poems on the craft, the risks and the subversive power of poetry, selected by the translator in conjunction with the author from the the Greek Collected Edition of Andonis Fostieris’ poems published in 2021 (Apanta ta Poiimata 1970–2020). A bilingual edition with the Greek text from that edition and facing English translations by Irene Loulakaki-Moore. In her Introduction the translator writes:- If Fostieris draws the reader’s attention to the alphabet, its sounds and the processes of syllabification, reading and writing, in other words to the “materiality of the text” and the “mechanisms of writing”, it is because, like many poets of his generation, he is suspicious of the ways in which vocabularies create descriptions of the world and ourselves, instead of adequately or inadequately expressing them. The socio-political, economic and intellectual developments in Greece and elsewhere in the 1970s rendered obsolete previous generations’ search for the “lost centre” and the grand narratives that validate it. Unlike the Modernist poet-authority, Fostieris, does not stand in the centre of his creation, like a unique owner of truth and sole creator of meaning… Fostieris’ poetics surpasses Modernism and marks a turn towards the Post-modern, constituting a new approach to the role and function of contemporary poetry, while it also proposes a coherent conceptualization of the role of language and its relation to the truth… One could say that Fostieris and the poets of his Generation attempted what Surrealism (another avant-garde movement which met with a great deal of resistance in Greece) had attempted: the secularization of inspiration… The transformation of inspiration after the Surrealists made available for everyone what had been the privilege of the poet-initiate, in line with Lautréamont’s injunction: “Poetry should be made by everyone. Not just by one.” With his “prolonged hesitation between sound and meaning” (Paul Valéry) Fostieris wants to bring the written word closer to the mental experience, the feeling or the thing in itself. He does not deny the referential function of language, he only exhibits his suspiciousness towards the authority that says, “my language is true”. By doing so he cleverly abstains from imposing on the readers his version of meaning, inviting them instead to join in the game of signification.

ANDONIS FOSTIERIS was born in Athens, Greece, in 1953. He studied Law at the University of Athens and History of Law at the Sorbonne. One of the younger poets of the Generation of the Seventies, Fostieris made his first appearance in 1971 at the age of eighteen with his collection The Great Journey. He was, already by 1975, the editor of The New Poetry, one of Greece’s first new post-dictatorship journals. For thirty years (1981–2010) he was the co-editor and director of the esteemed literary journal Η Λέξη (The Word). He has published ten collections, now all gathered together in Complete Poems 1970–2020 which appeared in 2021. After decades of the stifling domination of Modernism in Greece, Greek poetry, with Andonis Fostieris, returns to the ancient sources in order to move forward to the Post-modern — developing from, while surpassing Modernism. His poetics marks a change of direction and constitutes a new understanding of the role and function of contemporary poetry and its relationship to philosophy and tradition, while putting forward a coherent conceptualization of the function of language and its relation to truth. Fostieris has been extensively translated into many languages, often by acclaimed translators. He has received many awards, most notably, in 2004, the Greek State Poetry prize for his 2003 collection Precious Oblivion, and in December 2010 the prestigious Ouranis Foundation Award of the Academy of Athens for his entire poetic oeuvre at that date.