The arrival on my desk of yet another brand new anthology shows that international interest in Greek poetry continues to develop in several languages. Translations appear now regularly in magazines, books, festivals, performances, and other fora. They take the form of anthologies, compilations, special sections, or individual selections.

This broad dissemination, which has not happened to Greek poetry since the era of the 1970s, is treated unsurprisingly in Greece (only!) with (at best) silence or (at worst) scorn. In public and in private, in print and social media, journalists and scholars express their nervousness over this multilingual circulation, invoking one and the same predictable reason: Current global interest in Greek culture, they argue, can only be explained by the ongoing economic crisis, and therefore it has an exoticizing, if not colonizing, function; once the crisis recedes, it will evaporate. Yet this argument is little more than a defensive and isolationist…