Time & Date
A symposium for poets from New York, Egypt and Greece will be held at Columbia University and led by professors Stathis Gourgouris (Columbia) and Karen Emmerich (Princeton), both members of the Cavafy Academic Committee that advised on the digitization of Cavafy’s archive. The title, "Days of 2023", references Cavafy’s many works named “Days of,” with the year of their writing, or a date of reflection.
The Columbia Hellenic Studies department will host a two-part event on May 1, 2023. A morning workshop will feature invited poets Orfeas Apergis, Yiannis Doukas, Phoebe Giannisi, Katerina Iliopoulou (Greece); Haytham al-Wardani, Iman Mersal (Egypt); Janlori Goldman, Robin Coste Lewis, Brenda Shaughnessy (US), as well as translators Susan Bernofsky, and Karen Emmerich, who will conduct roundtable conversations on the multiple ramifications of C. P. Cavafy as a 21st-century phenomenon. The titles of the roundtables are: “History and Politics of the Interstitial”; “Translation as a Poetic Act”; “Erotics and Poetics of the Undisclosed”.
That evening, in the Miller Theater at Columbia University, a free event will feature the poets performing either Cavafy poems in Greek and/or Arabic or new writing prepared for the occasion, paired with music by Sofía Avramidou, Marcos Balter, Zosha di Castri, Stylianos Dimou, Dimitri Mitropoulos, Lena Platonos, and Georgios Poniridis, which will be performed by the National Sawdust Ensemble under the music direction of Jeffrey Zeigler, with Greek guest musicians Yiannis Palamidas (voice) and Stergios Tsirliagos (synths).
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