Selected and Edited by Peter Constantine, Peter Bien, Edmund Keeley and Karen Van Dyck

This unique bilingual anthology contains 456 poems by 109 Greek poets of the 20th century. Each poem in this 993-page volume is presented with its original Greek and English translation on opposite leaves. Many of the poems and their translations appear together here for the first time. Included are Kimon Friar's previously unpublished corrections and modifications to his original translations.

Most readers of poetry are aware that ancient Greece, the wellspring of Western culture, produced Homer, Sappho and Euripides. And although they have also probably some appreciation of contemporary Greece, they most likely have never heard of George Seferis and Odysseus Elytis, both Nobel laureates of the 20th century. With the exception of C. P. Cavafy, whose poetry earned him international renown, no Modern Greek poet has been able to attract more than limited readership. Yet Modern Greek poetry is neither marginal nor minor. It is a very important constituent of the literature of modern Europe. The 20th century poets in this anthology, including the two Nobel Prize winners, bring to light an immense body of work characterized by originality and vitality.

The scholar Constantine Trypanis refers to Greek poetry as having “the longest and perhaps noblest tradition in the Western world,” concluding that “greater and more original poetry has been written in Greek in the last one hundred years than in the fourteen centuries which preceded them.”