| This dissertation explores the importance of visual and material form to the interpretation and translation of poetry. It treats three major Greek poets active during the twentieth century---C. P. Cavafy (1863-1933), Miltos Sachtouris (1919-2005), and Eleni Vakalo (1921-2001)---whose sustained explorations of typographic and bibliographic form shaped later poets' (if not scholars') understandings of the aesthetic and political possibilities of the page. By examining the ways in which the visual and material aspects of these works affect our experiences and interpretations of them, I try to inject a new way of seeing into Modern Greek literary studies---which, in its traditional treatment of poetry as an essentially oral form, has long neglected issues of visuality and materiality. Rather than trace a chronological trajectory, this study moves from the smallest unit to the largest: from the visual arrangement of Sachtouris's poems on the page; to Vakalo's carefully designed, book-length poems; to Cavafy's methods of controlling not just the physical forms of his handmade books, but also the means of their circulation and even the makeup of his readership; and finally to the global context in which it is not only a particular author's oeuvre that circulates, but images of a "national literature!' As Greek literature, paradigmatically minor, reaches a wide audience only in translation, the final chapter of this dissertation uses examples from these three bodies of work to address broader questions about how translation straddles not just languages but texts and traditions of textuality. |
