DIRECTOR’S BOOKSHELF
An Agora of Ideas
Seeger Center Director Dimitri Gondicas in conversation with Pria Louka
The Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies supports more than a dozen fellows each year who conduct intensive research at Princeton. Former Seeger fellows have published hundreds of books with leading publishers and thousands of articles. Their scholarship reflects the broad, interdisciplinary nature of Hellenic studies, spanning fields from history to religion to literature and periods from antiquity to the present.
In the December 12, 2024, edition of Director’s Bookshelf, Seeger Center Director Dimitri Gondicas speaks with Pria Louka about “Abyss and Song,” her translation of poems by George Sarantaris, which was published by World Poetry Books in 2023.
Louka earned an A.B. in chemistry and a certificate in Hellenic Studies at Princeton in 2020. She is now an Ertegun Scholar in the Humanities at the University of Oxford, studying for an MSt in Modern Languages. She writes and translates (Greek poetry) and is the author of “The Courage to Walk and Write” (2015).
As an undergraduate student at the Seeger Center, you worked on a translation of poems by George Sarantaris from Modern Greek to English, earning the 2020 Hellenic Studies Senior Project Prize. How did this project begin?
I discovered the poet in Firestone Library, working late one night. I leafed through the pages: alluring poems of just a few lines, enigmatic like delicate, incomplete puzzles begging for completion. I completed the translation over the course of two years, spending many nights in Firestone followed by walks through the Institute Woods, translating poems from memory. This endeavor culminated in the final project for my senior creative writing translation workshop, led by Jhumpa Lahiri (who co-advised the project), and my Hellenic Studies certificate project, which you supervised as my second co-advisor.
Please share some highlights from your experience as a literary translator at Princeton and the Seeger Center.
Translation at Princeton is embraced as a great art. As a literary translator at Princeton and within the Program in Hellenic Studies, I had many opportunities to explore translation. Importantly, for translators of Modern Greek poetry, the Seeger Center’s translation workshop provides an opportunity to receive feedback from leading translators and scholars Peter Constantine and Karen Emmerich, who specialize in Modern Greek literature. The academic community at the Seeger Center—including visiting scholars and graduate students—teems with amateur and professional translators, situated between disciplines and departments, who engage in translation as a labor of love.
Your translation was published by World Poetry in 2023. Please tell us about your path to publication after graduating from Princeton.
You provided invaluable guidance and support in crystallizing the final form, suggesting World Poetry Books as a good fit for publication. Peter Constantine is the publisher of World Poetry, which produces beautiful books of poetry translated into English from a wide range of languages by both emerging and established translators. I was thrilled when World Poetry agreed to publish the Sarantaris collection—especially since no bilingual edition or English collection of his poetry had existed. Furthermore, World Poetry Books offers a remarkable series of Greek literature in translation, and it is an absolute joy and honor to see “Abyss and Song” as a part of this series.
What would you like your readers to learn or discover from this collection?
What I want readers to take away from Sarantaris is that simplicity can produce the effect of profundity—few words, few images on a page … that silence. You can be a child again through Sarantaris and receive the generosity of nature through his breathtaking, seemingly effortlessly rendered body of work. He wrote thousands of poems, but he couldn’t give much of his poetry to the world as he died so young, at age 32. I feel blessed to have inhabited his voice and to share it with readers today.
A transformative journey to Greece inspired Stanley J. Seeger to found Hellenic Studies programs at Princeton. Please tell us about a journey that expanded your intellectual horizons or influenced your research.
My transformative journey to Greece is not one but a chain of journeys, each leading into another. As a Princeton sophomore majoring in chemistry, I took an undergraduate language course in Modern Greek, where fascinating lessons filled with stories, poetry, film, and social and political explorations of the modern landscape inspired deeper study. I ventured to Greece through the Seeger Center’s Mount Menoikeion Seminar, staying at a monastery in northern Greece for ten days. That experience inspired me to participate in a Municipality of Athens internship program, spending a year in Greece conducting interviews with shop owners in a historic commercial district to garner local support for its preservation.
After graduating from Princeton, I received a Fulbright grant to conduct literary research in Crete. In Crete, my fluency gained enormous momentum, leading me to complete a master’s degree in Modern Greek Literature at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. This engagement with Greek language and literature is one of continuous learning and expanding memory, where the object of learning eventually converges with the self—leading to an ultimate learning/knowing of thyself.
Photo of Dimitri Gondicas by Sameer A. Khan/Fotobuddy. Photo of Pria Louka by Maria Kouroumali.