Mirror for You: Collected Poems (1967-1999)
By Elias Petropoulos
Translated by John Taylor
Cycladic Press (2023)

Mirror for You collects nearly all of the poetry and poetic prose written by the Greek urban folklorist Elias Petropoulos (1928-2003). Featuring new translations by John Taylor, it is the first time that Petropoulos’s poetry has been made available in English.

As the author of some seventy books on topics ranging from prisons, brothels, graveyards, hats, moustaches and Turkish coffee to rebetic songs, folk architecture, homosexual slang and the plight of Greek Jews during the Second World War, Petropoulos was also and perhaps above all a poet.

He wrote his first long poetic sequence, Funeral Oration, when he was thirty-nine years old, just after the imposition of a military dictatorship (1967-1974) during which he was imprisoned three times for his controversial writings.

In the following decades, most of which were spent in exile in Paris, Petropoulos produced more poetry, often in spurts of highly concentrated energy. At turns melancholic, erotic and caustic, these poems form an uncomfortable self-portrait of the man behind the vast and groundbreaking oeuvre.

Elias Petropoulos (1928-2003) was the most controversial Greek writer of the twentieth century. Imprisoned three times during the Junta (1967-1974) and persecuted by Greek judges as late as the 1980s, this “urban folklorist” produced a vast and groundbreaking oeuvre that continues to provoke extreme reactions from readers. The author of some seventy books on topics ranging from prisons, brothels, graveyards, hats, moustaches, homosexual slang and Turkish coffee to rebetic songs, architecture and the plight of Greek Jews during the Second World War, Petropoulos was also and perhaps above all a poet. He wrote his first long poetic sequence, Funeral Oration, when he was thirty-nine years old, just after the Colonels had seized power. In the following decades, most of which were spent in exile in Paris (where he began living in 1975), Petropoulos produced more poetry, often in spurts of highly concentrated energy. He died in Paris on September 3, 2003.

John Taylor (b. 1952) is an American writer, translator and literary critic who has lived in France since 1977. In 2020, Cycladic Press published his memoir Harsh out of Tenderness, which details his experiences of working with Elias Petropoulos. Taylor has written essays on numerous European poets, and translated many key Greek, French, Swiss and Italian poets. He is also the author of several volumes of short prose and poetry.