Harvard Library joins Harvard Center for Hellenic Studies and the Department of the Classics to celebrate the birthday of Greek poet Nikos Gatsos and the launch of the Gatsos Translation Project.
Harvard Library’s 2018 acquisition of the archive of avant-garde Greek poet and lyricist Nikos Gatsos (1911–1992) has been widely celebrated by the Harvard community and beyond, with concerts in Cambridge and Washington D.C., lectures, panel presentations, and receptions. On December 8th at 12 PM EST, Harvard Library will join the Harvard Center for Hellenic Studies and the Department of the Classics to celebrate the 110th birthday and legacy of this great twentieth century icon of Greek culture and to acknowledge both his songmaking and his work as a translator.
The celebratory event will introduce the Nikos Gatsos Archive online platform developed by Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies. This electronic resource will serve primarily as a tool to discover and access the poet’s rich collection of manuscripts, typescripts, notebooks, correspondence, photographs, and musical recordings held at the Houghton Library, once these materials have been digitized. It will also connect users to research and teaching activities relating to the poet. We hope that this unique resource will promote the work of Gatsos across borders and encourage transformative uses of the Library’s archive.
One such innovative use provides a second occasion, in addition to the poet’s birthday, for next week’s celebration: the initial release of the Gatsos Translation Project, which is the first segment of the online platform to be completed. The Translation Project offers the text of all the songs of Nikos Gatsos and invites the user to engage with the Greek language through the medium of these lyrics. It will provide a forum for students and lovers of Greek music alike to translate the verses into their own language. The songs on this site can also be used by teachers of modern Greek as source texts in their classrooms.
Internationally acclaimed singer Nana Mouskouri, close friend and collaborator of Gatsos, will be the guest of honor among the panel of distinguished speakers. Mouskouri will talk about her experience musically interpreting Gatsos’s lyrics. Professor Panagiotis Roilos, Harvard’s George Seferis Professor of Modern Greek Studies, will speak on the significance of Gatsos himself. Professor Johanna Hanink (Brown University) and Dr. Nicolas Prevelakis (Harvard Social Studies and Center for Hellenic Studies), will talk with Agathi Dimitrouka, the poet’s literary executor and a translator and lyricist in her own right, on translation and the Greek language.
This event will take place online via Zoom and will be live streamed to the CHS YouTube Channel.
For more information, visit chs.harvard.edu/gatsos-celebration