PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
Program in Hellenic Studies

Peter Constantine's most recent translations are The Complete Works of Isaac Babel (W.W. Norton), Con Brio (Harvill) by Brina Svil, Within Four Walls: The Correspondence Between Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blucher, 1936-1968 (Harcourt Brace), and Elegy For Kosovo (Arcade Books) by Ismail Kadare. His translation of Six Early Stories (Sun and Moon Press) by Thomas Mann was awarded the PEN/Book-of-the-Month-Club Translation Prize, and The Undiscovered Chekhov: Thirty-Eight New Stories (Seven Stories Press) received the National Translation Award. Translations forthcoming in early 2003 are Taras Bulba, by Nikolai Gogol, and Eminans, by Felix Morisseau Leroy.

Peter Constantine will work on an annotated translation of an extensive selection of Alexandros Papadiamantis' novellas and short stories. He intends to gather these translations into a book of approximately 750 pages with the object of bringing Papadiamantis to a wide English-speaking readership in the US and Britain. He will also work on an upcoming project, Greek Poetry: Ancient, Byzantine, and Modern, which is an anthology of about 800 pages that W.W. Norton will bring out in the Fall of 2004. In the anthology, Mr. Constantine will gather published and unpublished translations from the major translators of Classical and Modern Greek poetry.

Nicholas Fokas was born in Athens. Educated at Athens College, he graduated from the University of Athens with a degree in History and Archaeology. From 1961-1971, he worked in London at the Overseas Services of the BBC. Back to Greece in 1974, he took a job as a high school teacher. In 1981, he participated in the International Writers Program at the University of Iowa. He has published 13 books of poetry, a fairy tale for adults, and two books of essays on literary and linguistic subjects. He has translated Robert Frost, Kay Cicellis, and Charles Baudelaire (Greek National State Prize for Translation, 1994) into Greek and his own poems have been translated into several languages. In 1997 he received the "Diavazo" annual award for poetry.

Nikos Fokas, in collaboration with Writer-In-Residence, Don Schofield, will translate into English a selection of his own poems with the aim to publish them. He will also study the works of some of the major post World War poets such as Allen Ginsberg and John Ashbery. Meanwhile, Mr. Fokas intends to deepen his knowledge of older American poets including Robert Frost.

Don Schofield attended California State University, Sacramento, where he earned a B.A. in Social Science (1975), a B.A. in English (1976), and an M.A. in English (1978). In 1980, he graduated the University of Montana with an M.F.A. in creative writing. Since 1980 Mr. Schofield has lived in Greece, teaching at the University of La Verne, Athens Campus, while traveling extensively in the Eastern Mediterranean and writing poetry. In the past five years he has also been translating contemporary Greek poets into English, most notably Nikos Fokas, Sakelliou-Schultz and Kiki Dimoula. In addition, he has worked on various projects connected to the community of American writers living in Greece. These projects include a recent article in the American Periodicals & Writers, and still in progress, an anthology of poems by American poets who have lived in Greece. His latest book is Approximately Paradise (University Press of Florida). He is the recipient of the Ann Stanford Poetry Prize (Honorable Mention, 2000, University of Southern California).

Don Schofield will work with the contemporary Greek poet and Writer In Residence, Nikos Fokas, on translating a volume of poems into English. More precisely, Mr. Fokas and he will review each of the 13 collections Mr. Fokas has published to date, choosing 60-70 poems that represent various aspects of his writing style, themes, and stages of development. They will also select poems with an eye (and ear) for what seems possible to be rendered into English. As they have done with previous translations, they will be looking to make poems in English that clearly and accurately reflect the originals, but which also work well in the target language.

Last updated 3/24/08