Borders Unbound: The Poetry of the Hellenic Diaspora and Beyond

This episode of our podcast series, Borders Unbound, was recorded live at the Engagement Lab at Emerson College on March 18, 2019. The event was co- coordinated and co-hosted by Vassiliki Rapti, founder of Citizen TALES Commons, and Ilana Freedman, from Harvard University.

In this podcast, Becky speaks about her journey from being a monolingual English speaker to becoming bilingual in Greek and English; the role Greek has played in her living and art; how words determine and color our lives, hearts and minds; how poetry needs delicate and cautious attention in the translation process; the challenges of translating her poetry from English to Greek, and the joys of collaborating with her translators.

Born and raised in New England, Becky Dennison Sakellariou lived and worked in Greece for many years. She says, “The influence of this part of the world on me is enormous, politically, visually, socially, etc. Many of my poems are a mixture of my heritages, my worlds.” Becky has worked with translator Alexandra Petrou on Greek renderings of her work, and has also worked extensively with translator María Laïná, an award-winning poet who lives and works in Athens.   Her collection Undressing the Earth contains poems that respond to and reflect the recent refugee and political situation in Europe, particularly in Greece.

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This podcast series, “Borders Unbound: The Poetry of the Hellenic Diaspora and Beyond,” was produced by Citizen TALES Commons, and is the recipient of a 2022 Modern Greek Studies Association Innovation Fund Grant. We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Modern Greek Studies Association and the members of the Citizen TALES Diaspora Studies Consortium: the Hellenic American Project at Queens College (part of the City University of New York); the Institute for Eastern Mediterranean Studies at Emmanuel College in Boston; and Citizen TALES Commons, a multidisciplinary collective of translators, artists, ludics learners, explorers, and storytellers, founded and directed by Vassiliki Rapti.

This podcast series, “Borders Unbound: The Poetry of the Hellenic Diaspora and Beyond,” was produced by Citizen TALES Commons, and is the recipient of a 2022 Modern Greek Studies Association Innovation Fund Grant. We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Modern Greek Studies Association and the members of the Citizen TALES Diaspora Studies Consortium: the Hellenic American Project at Queens College (part of the City University of New York); the Institute for Eastern Mediterranean Studies at Emmanuel College in Boston; and Citizen TALES Commons, a multidisciplinary collective of translators, artists, ludics learners, explorers, and storytellers, founded and directed by Vassiliki Rapti.

Edited from a Zoom chat recorded on Thursday, January 19, 2023, with hosts Vassiliki Rapti and Peter Bottéas.

This Diasporic Space: Creative Renderings, Critical Reflections

Yiorgos Anagnostou is a Professor and the Director of the Modern Greek Program at The Ohio State University. His research interests include modern Greek studies and American ethnic studies, with a focus on Greek America. His published research covers a broad range of subjects, including film, documentary, ethnography, folklore, literature, history, sociology, and public humanities. He is the author of Contours of White Ethnicity: Popular Ethnography and the Making of Usable Pasts in Greek America (Ohio University Press, 2009), and has published two collections of poetry. Since 2017, he has been the editor of the online journal Ergon: Greek/American Arts and Letters, which features Greek-American scholarship, poetry and essays (http://ergon.scienzine.com/), and he writes regularly for the Greek and Greek-American media.

Yiorgos’ work is primarily devoted to academic renderings of immigration and diaspora. He strives to explore and experiment with diasporic poetics as a space that is hospitable to bilingualism, the blurring of genres, word play, the creative subversion of norms, and immigrant subjectivity.

Today’s conversation, entitled “This Diasporic Space: Creative Renderings, Critical Reflections,” explores two genres of what the author refers to as “writing diasporas”: poetic and scholarly. Though they tend to be separated into different categories—one creative the other analytical—poetic and academic diasporic writings share a fundamental commonality: they produce knowledge about the diasporic space within which they operate, shaping the understanding of it through placing their authors’ position within it. He explores what diasporic writers could possibly gain by creating dialogue between poetic and scholarly work. He undertakes this reflection from his position as an immigrant/diasporic writer, as well as a scholar of diasporic expression, turning his own creative writing into an object of analytical commentary.
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This podcast series, “Borders Unbound: The Poetry of the Hellenic Diaspora and Beyond,” was produced by Citizen TALES Commons, and is the recipient of a 2022 Modern Greek Studies Association Innovation Fund Grant. We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Modern Greek Studies Association and the members of the Citizen TALES Diaspora Studies Consortium: the Hellenic American Project at Queens College (part of the City University of New York); the Institute for Eastern Mediterranean Studies at Emmanuel College in Boston; and Citizen TALES Commons, a multidisciplinary collective of translators, artists, ludics learners, explorers, and storytellers, founded and directed by Vassiliki Rapti.

Multilingual and multinational poet, translator, voice-over artist, teacher, dream analyst, and actor Hélène Cardona dialogues with Vassiliki Rapti and Peter Bottéas about her life’s path, her childhood and youth in Switzerland, France, Great Britain, and other places in Europe, her artistic pursuits and, especially, her poetry. Her connection with Greek culture through her mother, Spanish culture through her father, and her affinity for Native American spirituality and cultures through her travels in the Southwestern U.S. infuse her life and work, as do her roots in the French-speaking world.     

Hélène is a graduate of the Sorbonne in Paris and the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, and studied literature and translation in Great Britain. She is known for acting her roles in the films Chocolat; The Hundred-Foot Journey; and many others. Since the recording of this podcast in July 2022, she has received several awards for her role in the delightful film Caralique. In addition, is the recipient of a Hemingway Grant, two Independent Press awards, and various other literary honors. The seven books she's published include three bilingual poetry collections. In this podcast, she reads several of her poems, including excerpts from the bilingual collection Life in Suspension/La vie suspendue. American poet and literary critic John Ashbery writes the following about Life in Suspension: "Dappled with transparent imagery, like the Mediterranean sunlight she grew up with, Hélène Cardona's poems offer a vivid self-portrait as scholar, seer, and muse." And David Mason, poet laureate of Colorado, describes her work as "Liminal, mystical and other-worldly. This is a poet who writes in a rare light."
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This podcast series, “Borders Unbound: The Poetry of the Hellenic Diaspora and Beyond,” was produced by Citizen TALES Commons, and is the recipient of a 2022 Modern Greek Studies Association Innovation Fund Grant. We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Modern Greek Studies Association and the members of the Citizen TALES Diaspora Studies Consortium: the Hellenic American Project at Queens College (part of the City University of New York); the Institute for Eastern Mediterranean Studies at Emmanuel College in Boston; and Citizen TALES Commons, a multidisciplinary collective of translators, artists, ludics learners, explorers, and storytellers, founded and directed by Vassiliki Rapti.

This episode, hosted by Vassiliki Rapti and Peter Bottéas, features poet and professor George Kalogeris. This conversation traces the inspirations and roots of his work and explores the elements of storytelling and language that surrounded him in his Greek-American household in Winthrop, Massachusetts, and the poets whose cadences and rhythms influenced his own.