Hers (excerpt)
As she grows oldershe departs with greater ease. Perhaps even allure. She has nothing to say. She simply touches herself and watches herselfand wants While whole phrases pass by and she accepts them and she constantly faces great dangerstill the body she rememberedbut there was something she had never seen. Fine; even if sadsince until now it has never ceased beingleaning over her bodyand breathing with voices. Then she is alone;she trusts no one when she says I caress my bodyI caress my awkward body. Not that it matters;she hardly mindsbecause she dreamt herself lying down a golden deer in the valley.
Feature Date
- December 6, 2023
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- Translation
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Excerpt from HERS written by Maria Laina and translated by Karen Van Dyck.
Published by World Poetry Books on May 10, 2022.
Copyright © 2023 by Maria Laina.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Born in 1947 in Patras, Maria Laina is widely regarded as one of Greece’s most important living poets. Her work includes nine poetry collections, eleven plays, five books of prose, four critical studies, and an anthology of twentieth-century poetry in Greek translations. She is the recipient of several awards, including the Greek National Prize for Poetry (1994), the Maria Callas Award (1998), the Cavafy Award (2006), the Athens Academy Prize (2015) for her Collected Poems (1970-2012) and most recently the Greek National Prize for Literature (2022).
Karen Van Dyck is the Kimon A. Doukas Professor of Modern Greek Literature at Columbia University. Her translations include Margarita Liberaki’s novel Three Summers (2022); the anthology Austerity Measures: The New Greek Poetry, winner of the London Hellenic Prize (2016); Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke’s The Scattered Papers of Penelope: New and Selected Poems (2009) and The Rehearsal of Misunderstanding (1998) which includes poetry collections by Rhea Galanaki, Jenny Mastoraki and Maria Laina.
“In these still lifes of the interior, Maria is between worlds. Somewhere between the self and the mirror, the real and the invented, the dead and the living, etched in the color of charcoal. Who is sketching this life and who is watching it being sketched, and who is watching it being lived? These poems report back on what goes on in the spaces between. Sometimes the drawing goes outside the lines. Sometimes the beauty and simplicity of the movements is overwhelming in the most voluptuous way. A swarm of voices passes over you. You know everything and nothing. You 'gently chase the memory from [your] mouth.' Read these poems."
—Eleni Sikelianos
“One of the important voices of the 'Generation of the 70s,' a generation of Greek poets born into a war-ravaged Greece, and who came of literary age under the Junta (and a generation remarkable for prominent women poets) Maria Laina and her poetry remain under-appreciated and underrepresented in English. HERS is a book at once abstract and grounded, elusively cerebral and erotically charged, like flashes of images in splinters of a broken mirror, a minimalism that reflects and refracts. The surface simplicity of these poems arguably make them all the more difficult to render into English, but Karen Van Dyck has deftly brought them into a transparent idiom that lets their mystery shine through."
—A. E. Stallings
"Karen Van Dyck has rendered Maria Laina’s Greek into still, meditative moments reflecting the self-confidence of a woman on the early end of middle age."
—Tom Bowden, The Book Beat
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