Christodoulos Makris

A 5-minute home video made last October for the project & exhibition 'Transcapes / The Halted Traveler' in which I read from Muses Walk under fading light.

A little over a year ago I received a request for permission to have some poems from Spitting Out the Mother Tongue translated into Croatian, which I happily granted. These poems are to be included in an anthology of contemporary European poetry to be published in Zagreb (Croatian Writers Society) in celebration of Croatia's recent entry to the EU. I'm grateful to the redoubtable Damir Šodan for selecting my work for the anthology, and for having a go at translating my poems - I remember him suggesting to me after a reading that he could hear them very clearly in Croatian. And it's great to be joining the likes of Raymond Carver, Allen Ginsberg and Leonard Cohen in having work rendered into Croatian by Damir! Part of a taster for this ambitious anthology - which features some really exciting young/younger poets hailing from Europe (Elisa Biagini, Valzhyna Mort, Ilya Kaminsky) alongside one or two luminaries (Tranströmer, Zagajewski, Armitage) and is due to appear in t...

Though I have written a smattering of poems in Greek from first principles, these occasions are extremely rare simply because it's ceased long ago to be the language I live in. My knowledge of it at mother tongue level, atrophied though it is, does enter what I write; and I have made use of it in conceptual/experimental ways. But writing directly into Greek and/or its Cypriot dialect seems more like an archaeological venture than a current, vital one. So when Dimitra Xidous asked me to translate her poem 'Onions' from her debut collection Keeping Bees , just out from Doire Press, I initially had some reservations. But I decided to take the task on: Dimitra wanted to speak the poem in Greek at the book's launch (which took place quite successfully in Dublin last Saturday) and I thought that would be an interesting exercise given her own removal from all things Greek in linguistic, generational and geographical terms. Below is 'Onions' as rendered by me into ...