Iliópetra = Piedra de Sol ; Kóstas (To Poíima Gia Ton K. Papaioánnou = Kostas)

Athina: Gutenberg, 2015. second edition, expanded and corrected. 150 páginas; 21 cm. Fine; as new with faint edge-wear and tiny fold crease to bottom outer edge of a few mid-leaves. Paperback. ISBN: 9789600116700; 9600116709

Beautifully designed. Uncommon. Parallel text in Spanish and Greek. Modern Greek translation by the poet and essayist Kostas Koutsourelis of Octavio Paz’s 1957 long poem, a single circular sequence of 584 hendecasyllables whose length echoes the 584-day synodic cycle of Venus in the Aztec calendar. The Nobel laureate’s best-known work holds a place in Spanish-language letters comparable to Eliot’s The Waste Land in English, and Koutsourelis’s introduction places it alongside Solomos’s The Free Besieged and Palamas’s The Palm Tree as lyric poetry of ideas. Koutsourelis also supplies an afterword, and an appendix adds Paz’s elegy “Kostas,” written for his friend the Greek-born philosopher Kostas Papaioannou. Translated directly from the Spanish, this reissues the translation first published by Maistros in 2007. It was widely reviewed in the Greek press, including Bookpress, Efimerida ton Syntakton, and Diastixo.Poesía; poetry