Every year around this time, I read only books from one country. The past two years my planned book reading was interrupted by my decision to focus on novels from two countries who were victims of brutal attacks by another country – Ukraine and Palestine. I did think of doing Lebanon and this year , yes, I can just about manage twenty Lebanese novels but opted instead to return to my original schedule.
I suppose for most of us, when we think of Greek literature, we think of classical Greek literature – playwrights such as Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles, historians such as Herodotus and Thucydides, philosophers such as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, poets such as Sappho and Pindar and, of course the great Homer.
Modern Greek literature is far less well known. Indeed, I suspect, for many English-speaking readers it is limited to Nikos Kazantzakis. Often he is known only because two famous films were made from his books: Βιος και Πολιτεία του Αλέξη Ζορμπά (Zorba the Greek) and Ο. Τελευταίος Πειρασμός (UK: The Last Temptation; US: The Last Temptation of Christ).
I had nine writers on my Greek pagebefore this project Excluding Kazantakis, of the remaining eight three are in print, four are out of print and one is only available in Spanish translation. Of the ones I shall be reading in this project quite a few are out of print, though all but one have been translated into English. One of the books, I noticed Amazon has a used copy for sale for a mere £355.
We have many wonderful small publishers in the UK and US, publishing many interesting and worthwhile novels in translation. However they have published relatively few translations from the Greek. There have been a few but not many.
In the pre-Internet days it was particularly difficult to find Greek novels in English translation. If you went to Athens you could find a bookshop run by the Greek publishers Kedros. They sold English translations of quite a few Greek novels. These books did not seem to be available in the UK and are now long out of print. There were two Greek bookshops in London, one on the corner of Charing Cross Road and Denmark Street, opposite Foyles and one just round the corner in Denmark Street. They were allegedly two brothers who had fallen out. However neither sold Greek novels in English, though I did foolishly buy a Greek novel in Greek, which I shall be reading (in English translation) in this project. Both have long since gone though one seems to have relocated.
As far as I am aware, New York, or more specifically Manhattan did not have a Greek bookshop either though there now seem to be two in New York: this one and this one.
I have managed to find enough Greek novels to read and, as always, the decision has been both what to include and what to exclude. I suspect there may well be many more worthwhile Greek novels that have not been translated. This link suggests a few. Some have been translated into other languages such as French, German and Spanish.
I shall not be giving a potted history of modern Greek literature, not least because I am not competent to do so. However if you check my my Greek homepage, you will find links to useful sources.