Author: Athanasios Koutoupas
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Greco-Persian
I find the proposition that people should learn Modern Greek because this will improve their English vaguely amusing. Granted there do exist an extremely large number of Greek loanwords and Greek-derived neologisms in the English language but more often than not, English speaking Greeks tend to learn the Greek word AFTER they have discovered its…
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Political Cavafy
Constantine Cavafy is the pre-eminent poet of the Greek diaspora. His poetry seems unchanged by the time. His work, though small compared to that of other fellow artists, is huge in terms of importance and the development it launched in Hellenic poetic events. His poetry was an explosion that precipitated the old poetry, released his…
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Constantine Cavafy: The Poet of the Diaspora
I am from Constantinople by descent but was born in Alexandria in a house on Sheriff Street. I was very young when I left for England where I spent much of my childhood. I returned to that place when I was older but only after having lived in France for a spell and after passing…
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Cavafy’s Cultural Politics and the Poetics of Liminality
Probing the work of C. P. Cavafy has been intriguing for me, not only because he is one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century European aesthetic culture, but also for another reason: as Cavafy records in his diary of his first trip to Greece in 1901 (written in English), he was positively predisposed toward…