About Me

Archontoula Alexandropoulou,
Greece
Archontoula Alexandropoulou was born in Patras in 1976. She received a BA degree in English Language and Literature by the Kapodistrian University of Athens and an MA in Translation Theory. She has published poetry, prose and papers on literary theory, psychology and Ilian poetry.
 
NOTES FROM THE KLANDESTINI PROJECT IN MALTA (2004)
The Klandestini multilateral creative writing project is run by Inizjamed and the British Council with the support of the St. James Cavalier Centre for Creativity.

 
"At the beginning there is the island. You walk around, talk to the people, tell them you write, get invited to lectures, poetry evenings, discuss with other poets from nearby islands. Cities are like islands. Klandestini drew a bridge between each writer's insular dwelling place and the next, introducing us to new tastes and fragrances. During the past months I feel I have been allowed into a vast playground of words and images and left there to feed my senses."

Another speaker on Saturday morning will be the Greek writer from Pyrgos, Arcontoula Alexandropoulou. Her presentation is called, "Translation and Poetry as Cooking on Notes and Dressing on Watercolours." When Tchaikovski composed his Manfred Symphony, he was practically translating Byron’s poetic work in hundreds of different languages all at once creating a new “poem” of his own. And Bruegel’s Fall of Ikarus was Auden’s poem translated into hues, shades, brush strokes and light.

 

“Translation is art,” writes Arcontoula Alexandropoulou, tends to become a cliché. Translation of poetry and literature, though, is painting, and the composition of melodies, it is essentially the cooking of a dish on somebody else’s recipe, mixing familiar tastes, herbs and spices. Experienced poets advise young ones to translate poetry from other languages into their own, to delve into the sounds, the rhythm, the internal system and vibrant structure of the original, and through this initiation, to mix and cook, to pick and choose their own unique ingredients.

 

"Soon enough one realizes that they improvise, that writing poetry is doing one’s own cooking, guessing which chromatic background best fits the presentation of their dish, translating tastes, smells, melodies, silence into words, commas, poems, meaningful white spaces. And if the chef poet puts his hands on the ingredients of two different languages as Greek and English then he or she mixes and separates and often finds out that not all of his/ her recipes can always be written and executed in both languages, so the poet sits back and lets the translator worry about the dressing."