Interview of the month – Keith Taylor

Interview of the month – Keith Taylor
(Professor at University of Michigan – writer – translator)

 Please scroll down to read the interview in Greek.

Tell us a bit about yourself. When and how did your relationship with literature and poetry start? What is your main occupation today?

I was bitten by poetry early on, maybe at age 11 or 12. I think it provided an alternative to the very conservative religious background I grew up in. Of course, once I began reading seriously, very shortly after, the world of art opened up to me, and I set off to explore that world. I left North America entirely when I was only 19, and lived for a few years in France, working illegally to keep myself alive, learning the language and reading everything in both French and English I could find. I was writing all the time, and even started publishing a little in small obscure journals.

Now I teach at the University of Michigan, where I coordinate the undergraduate program in creative writing and work as Associate Editor of Michigan Quarterly Review. I also Direct the summer writers’ conference associated with the University – the Bear River Writers’ Conference.

How did you first learn Greek and what do you find most interesting about this language?

My father’s undergraduate degree was in Greek. He was a minister and a church administrator in Western Canada, and he wanted to read the New Testament in the original. The Greek Bible, Greek dictionaries and grammars were always around our house. Of course, I was rebellious and didn’t learn any Greek from him. I regret that now.

But in my adolescence – I must have been 15 or 16 – someone recommended Zorba the Greek to me, and it was the very book I needed at that time in my life. I exoticized everything Greek, and tried to make myself Greek (mostly by drinking grape juice and eating pistachios). I read everything by Kazantzakis. Just a few years later, after learning French, I read Yourcenaur’s extraordinary translations of Cavafy. Those are all in prose, and they come across like tiny stories or parables. I was also reading Borges for the first time, and I put those two together. Later I spent a good deal of time with Ritsos, then Seferis. But all in translation.

A good friend, William Reader, was going to Greece all the time then, and would take classes. My wife and I visited him in 1983, our first trip to Greece. A friend of Bill’s read me some Cavafy in Greek, the first time I had heard it in the original, and it was clear I was missing a lot of the poetry. At one point Bill asked me if I knew the work of Karyotakis. I had never heard of him, and I thought I had a pretty good knowledge of modern Greek letters by that time. It was a reminder of the limitations imposed on someone who reads only in translation.

Bill and I began working on those poems. And I began studying the language. The University of Michigan had just started its Modern Greek Program then, and I asked if I could sit in on the classes. I worked with Vassilis Lambropoulos and Artemis Leontis. I worked through the whole sequence of classes, although I didn’t do very well in the upper levels. I just couldn’t give the time necessary. Still I learned to navigate the language a bit better.

What is most interesting the language? I hate to be so predicable, but for me it is clearly the weight of the history behind the language. The history that comes with the words, that connects us to so much of the past. Although I’ve only studied Modern Greek, I like little else than sitting down with some Greek epigraphy and trying to figure out what I can, even though I know I mispronounce everything!

And then there is the literary history! The whole line is so rich and varied. I could spend another life time exploring all of that.

You have translated poems and prose by Kostas Karyotakis, one of the most famous and beloved Greek poets. What were the main challenges you faced in this translation? Did your own experience as a poet help you overcome the difficulties?

By far the biggest challenge with Karyotakis was trying to get a sense of the formal perfection of his poems. Like many before us, I think we failed. I think this is why KK doesn’t have much of a reputation in English – it is simply so difficult to get some of that music into a language that doesn’t rhyme as easily. I think only a few of our versions even get close to hinting at his “ear.” This has been the problem with most of the translations, although Rachel Hadas gets closer than most in a few of her translations.

Professionally, my translation partner, Bill Reader, was a New Testament scholar. He is committed to a very rigid translation of the sense, where I was always arguing for stretching that to capture something of the music. We argued about this for most of 10 years. It’s amazing that our friendship survived.

There were many times when I felt my experience at making poems helped me understand a poem much more quickly than Bill did, even though his Greek is so much better than mine. As we spent more and more time with Karyotakis, I felt I could move around in his brain, imagine how he imagined, even predict where some poems were going. I’ve never had that feeling with any other poet I have worked with. It was exhilarating.

You have also published a book on Kavafy, another great Greek poet. Would you like to tell us a bit about his poetry and how you interpret it?

Cavafy is so widely translated and so well known, that I don’t feel I have much to add to the discussion. In the excellent new translations by Daniel Mendelsohn, the translator has articulated something I have felt for decades about Cavafy. There is no separation between his historical poems and his erotic poems. He eroticizes history! When we move into those poems, we are in a deeply passionate imagination that really could transcend the temporal jail we are usually locked in.

Could you tell us which modern Greek authors have influenced and/or inspired you the most?

Other than Karyotakis and Cavafy, I’ve spent a good deal of time with Ritsos. I admire his engagement with history and his commitment to his people. Of course, I love Elytis – how can you not! Even if he’s a bit expected from time to time. Again, when I was a young person, the expansiveness of Kazantzakis saved me from a limited environment, although I have a hard time returning to him now. Lately I’m finally reading Katarina Anghelaki-Rooke closely and am often carried away in her work. I slow down to engage her in the original, and then use some of the really fine contemporary translations of her poems to pull me further in. But I fear I’m not using my Greek enough now, and, since I was middle-aged before I began studying in, it escapes so easily.