42. Book Review: "The Twelve Words of the Gypsy" and "The King's Flute" by Kostas Palamas

 

THE TWELVE WORDS OF THE GYPSY 
By Kostas Palamas. Translated with an introduction by Frederic Will. 
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964. xxi, 205 pp. 

THE KING’S FLUTE
By Kostas Palamas. Translated with an introduction by Frederic Will. 
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1967. xxxviii, 226 pp. 

Books Reviewed by: Theophanis G. Stavrou, University of Minnesota
(Published in "Slavic Review", Vol. 30, No. 2 (Jun., 1971), pp. 449-451)

“Kostas Palamas is today Europe’s greatest poet,” remarked Romain Rolland in 1930, the year the French author nominated Palamas for the Nobel Prize. Two years later Marcel Brion described The Twelve Words of the Gypsy as the most original and the most powerful creation in contemporary Greek poetry. French critics were among the first to appreciate the contributions of modern Greek literature, and therefore they could not have overlooked Palamas (1859–1943), who for nearly half a century exercised a “literary dictatorship” over his generation, a dictatorship unequaled in the history of national literatures. His Greek contemporaries called him the teacher, the student of Greece, the theologian, the philosopher, the mystic, the hesychast, the artist of the word, the destroyer and the builder, the rebel, and so forth. Yet in Europe his audience was rather selective and in the United States he remained relatively unknown despite translation of some of his works as early as 1919. The translation of The Twelve Words of the Gypsy and The King’s Flute by Frederic Will, an American classicist, is in a way the first serious introduction of this significant literary figure to American readers, and congratulations are in order.