2023 Poetry

I Burned to the Ground

Anghelaki-Rooke, Katerina; Van Dyck, Karen

Note from the translator: "This summer of wildfires in Canada lent an urgency to my translating a poem Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke sent me in 2007 after a summer of wildfires in Greece. Great portions of the Peloponnese across from the island of Aegina where she lived were destroyed. The poem called out for a translation that would reckon with this destruction that keeps repeating itself. While the poem connects the scorched plains in the Peloponnese to the blackened ridge of Psara in Dionysios Solomos’s famous poem about the Greek Revolution in 1825, my translation would add the 20 million acres of boreal forest burning now. Just publishing it in 2023 would call attention to how climate change has upped the ante." ....