David Connolly: “We believed we could change the world”

Events & Activities cultureliteratureTop News David Connolly: “We believed we could change the world” Connoly 3 Relevant News Things to do on Tuesday, June 9 9 June 2026 David Connolly: “We believed we could change the world” 9 June 2026 Cyprus Central Bank governor says common EU debt could unlock deeper integration 9 June 2026 Diana Aza 9 June 2026 FacebookXWhatsAppEmailPrintViber David Connolly, translator of Greece’s greatest modern poets has devoted his life to bringing Greek literature to the world. On the occasion of the International Academic Conference on Elytis held in Nicosia, where he delivered the opening address, we sat down with him to talk about his visits to the legendary poet’s flat on Skoufa Street, his childhood fascination with Greece, the glamour of a vanished era, and an age like ours — one that seems to lack great poets, great composers, and above all a vision for a better world. I was born in Sheffield, an industrial city in the north of England, to Irish roots. I’m proud of being Irish, and I think it’s one of the reasons I took to Greece so easily. I’m not the first to notice how much the two peoples have in common — in their music, literature, poetry, dance and folk song, but above all in the way they are: emotional, hospitable, with a streak of madness in their everyday lives. Greece became bound up with my sense of destiny, with my intellectual longings, from early adolescence. We’d visited as a family a few times, but I don’t think that was the decisive thing. I remember reading books by people who had left everything behind to settle in Greece — Lawrence Durrell, who also wrote Bitter Lemons about Cyprus, and Patrick Leigh Fermor, who had walked much of the country on foot. I was a very romantic young man, and the Greece of the sixties and seventies still had that special glow — life was wonderfully simple, and the whole atmosphere drew me in. In the end I moved there in 1978, fulfilling something I’d wanted since I was a child, and I’ve spent most of my adult and working life there. Twenty years in England, forty in Greece. A whole life, really! In those days there wasn’t much Greek literature available in English translation. There was the first translation of Cavafy by John Mavrokordatos, and Seferis by Keeley and Sherrard. But I remember having the luck to come across bilingual editions, and the Greek writing immediately caught my eye — the alphabet itself. I’d read the English text, but my gaze kept drifting back to the Greek, even though I didn’t understand a word. There was something magical about that language. It made me want to learn it, so that one day I could read all those poems in the original. I studied Ancient Greek and went on to read Medieval and Modern Greek Literature at Oxford. Through my Greek fellow students I discovered the music of the era — Markopoulos, Savvopoulos, Loizos — and Greek culture generally. At some point a friend gave me a book that was making quite a splash at the time: Nikos Dimos’s The Misery of Being Greek, full of sharp, witty observations about the Greek character. It captivated me. I started translating it into English, but found it enormously difficult and eventually gave up. The story has a happy ending, though. Years later, when I mentioned this in an interview, the author himself got in touch and encouraged me to finish it. And so I did. The book was published in English and went on to become the basis for translations into many other languages. I’d criss-crossed Greece! Every chance I got — at the end of each term and throughout the summer — I’d pick up my sleeping bag and go everywhere. To get to know the country better, and to learn the language. It was hard work, but I had a passion for it, a real passion. I read newspapers every day, read literature, watched television, kept well away from the English expat community in Athens — and so the language gradually became the one I use every day, to the point where I can now express myself more easily in Greek than in English. I came to translation entirely by accident. I didn’t know anyone, and I had no particular expectations. I got married, had children, and taught English at the British Council in Athens — work that didn’t especially satisfy me. At some point, once people realised I’d been born in England and had a strong command of the language, they started asking me to translate texts and plays. That’s how I gradually found my way deeper into the field. The first major literary figure I translated was Nikiforos Vrettakos. I feel a wave of emotion just thinking about him. I loved him dearly, and I believe he felt the same way about me. We saw each other often, in Athens and in Sparta, his home town, and we had a wonderful working relationship. His poetry, though some people dismiss it as simplistic, is in fact simple in expression but profound in meaning. And that is the great challenge of translating it: rendering that simplicity in English without making the poem feel slight. My collaboration with Elytis remains one of the most unforgettable experiences of my life. In 1991, The Elegies of Oxopetra was published — one of his most powerful collections, in my view, remarkable given that he was eighty at the time. Reading it, I kept telling myself this was a book I simply had to translate. Through a friend, the wonderful translator Paola Maria Minucci, I made contact with him for the first time. For two full years I visited him at his flat on Skoufa Street every Wednesday, from half past seven until nine in the evening. During those sessions we discussed almost every word of the collection. It was a genuine initiation — not only into his poetry, but into the art of poetry itself. The poems were the starting point, and our conversations ranged out into the broader questions of the poetic craft. He was always extraordinarily generous with me, sharing his knowledge and his thoughts without reserve. Mrs Iliopoulou was invariably there too, and I will be forever grateful to her for the vital role she played in those exchanges. The flat — you know it, everyone knows it. It was the home of a man who had dedicated his entire life to poetry. There was nothing superfluous. The objects were few and carefully chosen; there were paintings by artist friends; and his library was, I would say, relatively small. At exactly eight o’clock Elytis would have a small whisky, with a little cheese. It was a ritual. I’d have one with him — I’m Irish, after all. I remember being slightly taken aback that he preferred Ballantine’s, which I didn’t consider a particularly distinguished whisky. One day I brought him a Jameson, an Irish one. I don’t think he was all that impressed, though… After getting to know Elytis and translating The Elegies of Oxopetra, I began to engage with his work on a scholarly level as well. I focused mainly on the later works — Diary of an Invisible April and West of Sorrow — and translated many of his essays, from In White and Open Papers. Immersing myself in his texts, ideas and studies helped me grasp his poetics at a much deeper level. The difficulties in translating Elytis? Where do I begin? One of the greatest obstacles, as you can imagine, is the cultural texture — particularly when there are no equivalent reference points for the foreign reader. Take The Axion Esti, whose structure is rooted in the Orthodox liturgy, which most English readers know nothing about. The same goes for the references to specific historical periods and events — the Civil War, the Albanian Campaign. In cases like that, you can only provide some essential context through footnotes. But I dislike footnotes in poetry, because they pull the reader’s attention away and break the spell the poem is trying to create. Then there are words and concepts that simply have no English equivalent — leventis, palikari, antidoro. How do you convey those accurately? You feel a sense of awe in the presence of such people. I consider myself very fortunate. Who was I? Someone who arrived from England as a nobody and managed, during the years he lived in Athens, to meet so many remarkable people. Poets like Vrettakos, Elytis and Dimoula, but also great composers. I visited Theodorakis at Filopappou, worked with Markopoulos, and very closely with Ilias Andriopoulos. I also got to know many of the poets of the so-called generation of the seventies and eighties — we were close friends, though sadly many of them are no longer with us. I think of Kondos, Varveris, Liontakis… We’d eat together, talk, and that human contact helped me enormously, because I was learning how they expressed themselves, their sense of humour. When I was translating their poems, I’d ask them to read the work aloud to me. That way I could hear where they placed the stress, where they paused, where they drew breath — and I’d try to carry all of that into the translation. The only poets I’ve translated without ever meeting are Cavafy, obviously, and Engonopoulos. Although we were in Athens at the same time, we never actually crossed paths. Apart from being a great painter, I consider him a great poet too, and I’ve translated many poems from his work. It’s a deeply solitary job. I’ve spent days — years, even — searching for the right word. You wake at three in the morning, it suddenly comes to you, and you get up at once to write it down before it’s gone. Your mind is constantly at work. But it becomes an addiction too — you can’t stop. “I am hetero-luminous, not self-luminous,” I said in an interview once, and I think that holds true. I’m strongly influenced by the poets I translate, because I immerse myself in their thinking and try to bring their voice into English. At the same time, I hear a voice of my own that wants to find expression. I’ve written poems and published some of them in literary journals, partly thanks to Vrettakos, but I’ve never felt like a poet. I feel that my artistic ambitions are fully met by translation. There was, in those years, a powerful belief that we could change the world. Elytis said that poetry won’t change the world, but it can change consciousness — and people whose consciousness has been changed can in turn influence the world. And Theodorakis’s music, as he himself used to say, was “music for the masses” — a dialogue, an attempt to elevate the awareness of the ordinary citizen. And there was a real response to it: that excitement, that hope that through music, poetry, and especially poetry set to music — which was a way of bringing demanding verse to a wider audience — some kind of change might come about. I can’t say with any certainty that the goal was achieved, though. I don’t know how far the average person listening to The Axion Esti in a taverna truly understood it, or whether anything shifted inside them. Has the age of the “great poets” come to an end? I’m very glad to have met some genuine giants in Greece. Today I don’t see those giants — nor the composers who existed in previous decades. And if they do exist, the world doesn’t know them, and doesn’t expect anything of them. There was a time, during the dictatorship years, when everyone was waiting for Seferis to speak. There was an expectation that intellectuals would step forward and say something. A tradition that stretched back to antiquity, to the age of the tragic poets, and that survived until relatively recently. Today, it seems to me, the great visions for a better world have gone missing. I have a sense that we are living through a period of decline, and I’m not optimistic about the immediate future. But I am optimistic about the longer term. I believe we will come through this phase and emerge wiser and stronger. The International Academic Conference on Odysseas Elytis was organised by the Department of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies at the University of Cyprus, the Deputy Ministry of Culture, and the Literature and Criticism Circle, as part of the Cultural Programme of the Cypriot Presidency of the Council of the EU. 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