The International Greek Language Day was celebrated by a unique experiment – two Romanian poets and two Greek poets participated with a selection of 15 poems each, reproduced both in their mother tongue and translated into Greek or Romanian. If so far 15 anthologies of Greek lyric poetry were published in Romania (starting with the anthology of the Cluj classicist Stefan Bezdechi in 1939), and in Greece a notable number of anthologies of Romanian poetry (among which we notice the one composed by Yannis Ritsos) were published, it is for the first time when creations signed by Romanian poets and Greek poets are hosted by the pages of the same book.

The Greek-Romanian poetic tetralogy is the initiative of the Embassy of the Hellenic Republic in Bucharest, to mark the International Greek Language Day. It is celebrated on February 9 at international level since 2018, also in Romania since 2019.

The book was launched on Wednesday, February 9, in the auditorium of the Romanian Academy, during an event organized in collaboration with the Embassy of the Hellenic Republic and the Romanian Academy.

The Romanian poets are Ana Blandiana and Ion Pop, corresponding members of the Romanian Academy, both introduced in the foreword signed by

Academician Eugen Simion, Head of the Philology and Literature Department.

If Ana Blandiana’s poems appeared in an anthology of lyric poetry by Romanian women published in Athens in 2007, for Ion Pop it is for the first time when his creations are translated into Greek.

The Greek poets included in the Tetralogy have, in turn, an impressive visiting card – both of them won an Athens Academy Award – Antonis Fostieris in 2010, Spyros Kokkinakis in 2021. Extensive selections from their work appeared in Romanian in 2020 (Antonis Fostieris, “The Immortality of Every Day”) and 2021 (Spyros Kokkinakis, “In an Age of Challenges”).

In her opening remarks, Sofia Grammata, Ambassador of Greece to Romania, states: “With special joy I greet, as Ambassador of Greece, the Greek-Romanian poetic tetralogy, which gives us the opportunity to enjoy the creations of four distinguished contemporary poets, two Greeks, Mr. Spyros Kokkinakis and Mr. Antonis Fostieris, and two Romanians, Mrs. Ana Blandiana and Mr. Ion Pop, in a plastic painting, where four different and vigorous brushes are nuanced in all the touches from the palette of Greek and Romanian words”. And she continues: “February 9, the commemoration of the death of the Greek national poet, Dionysios Solomos, is the day when, since 2018, the Greek language is celebrated internationally. A language that is being written for three and a half millennia, with lyricism or Doric sobriety, in which works have been created and left an indelible mark on the universal culture and especially on the European culture. The living and dynamic Greek language of the antiquity, with the epics of Homer, the works of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides or Thucydides, the language of the Gospels, of the Byzantine laws, was further cultivated by Papadiamantis, Kazantzakis, Palamas, Kavafis, Ritsos, as well as by the two Nobel Prize-winning Greek poets, Seferis and Elytis. It is the language whose colored pebbles Antonis Fostieris and Spyros Kokkinakis ingeniously place in the mosaic of their poems”.

The book was published in collaboration with the Neo-Greek Division of the Department of Romanic Languages and Literatures, Classical Philology and Neo-Greek within the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures of the University of Bucharest.

The edition was published with the support of the Romanian-Hellenic Bilateral Chamber of Commerce.

Happy anniversary to the Greek language!

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