Cirrus@Austlit

'I was sent a copy of the recording of this interview by my friend Anna Couani around the time Antigone Kefala was awarded The Patrick White Literary Award on 24 November 2022, shortly before her death on 3 December 2022. The timing of the award was bittersweet, for her many fans and admirers. The interview was recorded in her home in Annandale and is more of a conversation between Antigone Kefala, Vrasidas Karalis and Anna Couani. It is Antigone Kefala’s last interview. She had given an interview in March 2022, one month prior, to her publisher and friend Ivor Indyk of Giramondo Publishing. I had the good fortune to meet Antigone Kefala and the author Yota Krili at an afternoon tea at Anna Couani’s house in December 2021.' (Introduction)          

'Two men, Robert and Vras, met in 1993 and formed a committed relationship until Robert's death of leukemia in May, 2022. This short book is a farewell letter to Robert, a long lamentation and a threnody, exploring the nature of their friendship, their own transformation over time and finally the unexpected event of death. In the letter, Vras unfolds the expression of grief and loss after their pledge to 'grow old together' didn't eventuate.

'He recollects their shared experiences and encounters while presenting a relationship which brought together affection, intimacy, eros and friendship. Without idealisation or escapism, this confessional letter pays homage to the power of human emotions and the destiny formed by the will of lovers to be together, until death tore them apart and, perhaps, beyond death.' (Publication summary)

'Admiration for Patrick White inspired Vrasidas Karalis to translate the Nobel Laureate’s work into his native Greek. In the years following the writer’s death in 1990, Karalis came to know White’s long-term partner Manoly Lascaris. An enigmatic friendship developed'  (Introduction)

'The collection of stories is the imaginative recreation of the experience of living on Glebe Point Road, in Sydney for over thirty years. Through the encounters of the unidentified writer with actual individuals, the author evokes unsuspected episodes and quirky moments from the lives of countless ordinary or sometimes extraordinary people.

'The book is structured around such fleeting snapshots depicting moments of compassion, despair, love, as well as death, evil and despair.

'The narrative is in both prose and poetry as ‘the two zones of being’ are fused: the everyday and the common leads to the transcendental and the outlandish.

'The book transforms Glebe Point Road into a universal landscape of fall, transfiguration and redemption, in which a respectable professor from Sydney University, a larrikin book-seller, a Belgian coffee maker, a British back-packer, a Greek expatriate, an eminent religious leader, a Vietnam veteran, a suicidal poet, a religious trans-sexual, an Iraqi-Jewish doctor, a failed politician, a child of the stolen generation, a visionary museum-curator, a window-cleaner, a renegade scholar, a self-indulgent young poet, a ferocious old Nazi, a lonely British woman, an unrepented Catholic mother, a New Zealand bushido fighter, an artist, his wife, a transgender assassin, a dying poet, a Chinese dry-cleaner and many more wrestle simultaneously with their angels and demons and are all defeated. Out of the actualities of their life, the writer wants to extract the myths that all these characters unconsciously embody. The Road itself takes active part in their existence. Finally, they all ‘get the blues’ a cosmic melancholy which the poems in the book, a hybrid genre of psalms and odes, desire to articulate.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'I should have sent you this letter years ago, my most subtle, sagacious and reclusive friend David. Probably early in the years around the new millennium when unexpectedly an invitation of yours arrived asking if I would participate in a joint course on translation. I was taken aback. I was alarmed. The hermeneutics of suspicion took over the best of me. Why? What could I say? Can I do it? It was the first time that a colleague from a mainstream big department had asked another from a small and marginal to work together. That was the beginning of my iniquities. I accepted and I started working frantically on preparing the course. It was frightening and exciting. It gave me the opportunity to discuss and, to use an unfriendly term, problematise, my own experience of translating Patrick White. It was also a unique moment to develop a deeper bond with you and our university, a strange place of perpetual parallel monologues, and submerged creative tensions.'  (Publication abstract)

'Beyond its rather unsettling theme, the book reflects my engagement with Earnest Hemingway. His early staccato, succinct, self-ironic style a style that knows of its limitations and boundaries and makes the most by restricting itself to an absolutely essential vocabulary.' (Introduction)

'The death of Dimitris Tsaloumas (1921-2016) invites us to revisit and re-evaluate his poetry without the critical anxiety to place him within the historical taxonomies of Australian literature or the hermeneutical suspicion about its belonging. The task of situating his poetry will take time as the canon of Australian literature is still fluid and its main parameters are not yet finalised. After his death however his work becomes a space in which we can detect both patterns and particularities; it is transformed simultaneously into a social text and to an individual testimony. Furthermore, beyond the politics of cultural memory or the ideologies of literary traditions, now there is a unique opportunity to study the compositional qualities of his work and explore its constitutive poetics, without reducing it to its social circumstances or attributing it to the emotional upheavals of his biography. The death of the poet liberates his work from the particulars of his life: with time, biographical information becomes significant only if and when ambiguities eventuate while the interpretation of his work is not exhausted by simplistically corresponding his verses to events in the life of the individual.' (Introduction)

'The narrator of the books starts a journey of discovery around the meaning of home, in a diary form, with a trip to Athens in the midst of the economic and social implosion of the country. He fuses fiction, reportage and autobiography in an attempt to illustrate the social collapse of Greece after 2009 and its subsequent lack of creative imagination. The book consists of brief snapshots based on episodes that take place in Athens, ranging from people eating rotten food in garbage bins, to contemporary political discussions at the Greek Parliament and the representation of the struggle of ordinary people to make their liviing. Demons of Athens belongs to the hybrid trans-generic literature which found its best expression in books such as Robert Byron's The Road to Oxiana, Bruce Chatwin's The Songlines and Jonathon Raban's Coasting.' (Publication summary)

'The central principle of Kefala's poetics is that of ellipsis: its structuration is based on the intentional omission of any verbal element that could refract or obscure the intensity of the experience implied by her words.' (255)

'Antigone Kefala: a writer’s journey is edited and introduced by Vrasidas Karalis and Helen Nickas. It includes a selection of interviews, reviews and essays on the life and works of Australian poet and prose writer Antigone Kefala, as well as an illuminating autobiographical piece by the poet herself.

'This diverse biographical and critical material included in a single volume gives a fascinating insight into this writer – a Greek from Romania – who has been living in Sydney since 1960 and has made Australia her home. Prominent literary critics contributing to this volume include Sneja Gunew, Ivor Indyk, Judith Brett, Nikos Papastergiadis, Judith Rodriguez, Dmetri Kakmi, Anna Couani, Paul Kane, Gail Holst-Warhaft and many others from Australia and elsewhere in the world. There is also a section on translation of her works into four European languages, reflecting Kefala’s origins. ' (Publication summary)