Anthony Hirst – författare

'a Greek gentleman in a straw hat, standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe' E. M. ForsterE. M. Forster's description of C. P. Cavafy (1863-1933) perfectly encapsulates the unique perspective Cavafy brought to bear on history and geography, sexuality and language in his poems. Cavafy writes about people on the periphery, whose religious, ethnic and cultural identities are blurred, and he was one of the pioneers in expressing a specifically homosexual sensibility. His poems present brief and vivid evocations of historical scenes and sensual moments, often infused with his distinctive sense of irony. They have established him as one of the most important poets of the twentieth century.This volume presents the most authentic Greek text of the 154 authorized poems ever published, together with a new English translation that conveys the accent and rhythm of Cavafy's individual tone of voice. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Alexandria, Real and Imagined offers a complex portrait of an extraordinary city, from its foundation in the fourth century BC up to the present day: a city notable for its history of ethnic diversity, for the legacies of its past imperial grandeur - Ottoman and Arab, Byzantine, Roman and Greek - and, not least, for the memorable images of 'Alexandria' constructed both by outsiders and by inhabitants of the city. In this volume of new essays, Alexandria and its many images - the real and the imagined - are illuminated from a rich variety of perspectives. These range from art history to epidemiology, from social and cultural analysis to re-readings of Cavafy and Callimachus, from the impressions of foreign visitors to the evidence of police records, from the constructions of Alexandria in Durrell and Forster to those in the twentieth-century Arabic novel.

A selection of the poems of Sappho and other Ancient Greek authors translated into English verse by Theodore Stephanides, with facing Greek texts from editions which correspond closely to the translations. There is a substantial introduction and extensive notes by the editor, Anthony Hirst.

Collected poems written between 1963 and 2020, most of them published here for the first time.

A collection of eleven short stories embodying the impact on the rural population of a mountainous district of nortwestern Greece of the events of the Second World War and the Greek Civil War that followed.

There is no doubt that this is, to a considerable extent, an autobiographical novel. It is also clear that parts of it are fictional, but it is not possible to define with any clarity the boundary between autobiography and fiction. The author did serve in the US Army in the Korean War as an underage soldier, though he was probably not quite so young as the narrator claims to have been. The author’s second name “Toteras” is his chosen nom-de-plume, formed from two Greek words “to” and “teras”, meaning “the monster”. The novel begins with the narrator’s return from Korea suffering from what we would now call post-traumatic distress syndrome, and finding himself unable to face his family again. He falls in with a young woman who looks after him. This narrative breaks off to be resumed only in the final chapter of the book, and there follow several chapters in which his early life in San Francisco's Greektown is recounted. Conflicting demands — of their families to be Greek and of their school to become Americans — drive him and his best friend to obtain fake birth certificates, enabling them to enlist, at the age of fourteen, in the US army. Between basic training and embarkation for the Far East they take a bizarre trip to Mexico, where they become involved with a rich American couple who need to involve others in their sex-life. The two teenage soldiers are sent to the Mariana Islands where they are occupied in dismantling a World-War-Two ammunition dump. After an explosion which kills some of their colleagues, they are granted leave, and go to Japan to meet up with a sergeant (also of Greek origin) whom they had made friends with in the training camp. Through a series of mishaps they end up being sent to Korea with the first scratch-force of US troops, following the news that the North Koreans had crossed the 38th Parallel, and they are involved in the first US battles of the Korean War, battles in which the US army was repeatedly defeated with immense loss of life. The battles of Osan, the Pyongtaek Bridge and Taejon are described in graphic and horrific detail, and several subsequent battles are referred to. The novel was completed in the early 1990s, but clearly not to the satisfaction of the author, who died in 2009, leaving it unpublished. The surviving typescripts were problematic, almost unpunctuated and full of errors. They have been painstakingly edited over a number of years and some of the material in the early (Greektown) chapters has had to be rearranged to create a coherent narrative and to remove repetition. The style undoubtedly owes something to Kerouac but the content is far beyond his scope, as it brings us face to face with the insanity and the horror of war and the nature of fear; but it is not without humour, and much of the humour has to do with sex. In this the narrator and his buddy are opposites: the narrator a romantic innocent, his buddy precocious and sex-mad. Although, as noted, the narrative of the weeks after his return alone from Korea is resumed in the concluding chapter, there is no conclusion, for we are left with a final moment of dramatic suspension, not knowing what exactly has just happened and with no clue as to what the narrator’s future will be.

The Usurpers, Willa Muir's fourth novel, was written in the early 1950s and was based on the diaries she kept in Prague in the period 1945-1948, when her husband the poet Edwin Muir was the Director the British Institute in Prague, the lecturing and teaching arm of the British Council there. Under the guise of Utopians in Slavomania, The Usurpers offers acute, humorous and sometimes acerbic observations on relations among the British themselves in Prague (the city is never named) and between them and their Czech friends and those in the Czechoslovak establishment who were suspicious of the British presence, and depicts, largely through the actions and conversation of its characters, a deteriorating political environment in which the lives of many Slavomanians and even some of the Utopians are increasingly under threat in the lead-up to the Communist coup of February 1948. The Usupers was ready for publication in 1952 and was submitted to a number of major UK publishers under the pen-name Alexander Cory. The publishers were nervous. There was some concern about libel suits and perhaps also about the political sensitivity of the contents. Then, when she was publicly revealed to be the author, Willa Muir withdrew it. The typescript, from which this edition has been prepared, has long been in the care of the Library of the University of St Andrews and over the years a number of critics and Willa Muir enthusiasts have read it, among them Jim Potts, who brought it to the attention of Colenso Books and who has provided the Introduction. The non-publication of the The Usurpers in the 1950s may have been partly due to political pressure, at a time when the UK government’s grant-in-aid to the British Council was being called in question.

Poems on the craft, the risks and the subversive power of poetry, selected by the translator in conjunction with the author from the the Greek Collected Edition of Andonis Fostieris’ poems published in 2021 (Apanta ta Poiimata 1970–2020). A bilingual edition with the Greek text from that edition and facing English translations by Irene Loulakaki-Moore. In her Introduction the translator writes:- If Fostieris draws the reader’s attention to the alphabet, its sounds and the processes of syllabification, reading and writing, in other words to the “materiality of the text” and the “mechanisms of writing”, it is because, like many poets of his generation, he is suspicious of the ways in which vocabularies create descriptions of the world and ourselves, instead of adequately or inadequately expressing them. The socio-political, economic and intellectual developments in Greece and elsewhere in the 1970s rendered obsolete previous generations’ search for the “lost centre” and the grand narratives that validate it. Unlike the Modernist poet-authority, Fostieris, does not stand in the centre of his creation, like a unique owner of truth and sole creator of meaning… Fostieris’ poetics surpasses Modernism and marks a turn towards the Post-modern, constituting a new approach to the role and function of contemporary poetry, while it also proposes a coherent conceptualization of the role of language and its relation to the truth… One could say that Fostieris and the poets of his Generation attempted what Surrealism (another avant-garde movement which met with a great deal of resistance in Greece) had attempted: the secularization of inspiration… The transformation of inspiration after the Surrealists made available for everyone what had been the privilege of the poet-initiate, in line with Lautréamont’s injunction: “Poetry should be made by everyone. Not just by one.” With his “prolonged hesitation between sound and meaning” (Paul Valéry) Fostieris wants to bring the written word closer to the mental experience, the feeling or the thing in itself. He does not deny the referential function of language, he only exhibits his suspiciousness towards the authority that says, “my language is true”. By doing so he cleverly abstains from imposing on the readers his version of meaning, inviting them instead to join in the game of signification.

An extremely varied collection of poetry mostly written in the period May 2021 to October 2023. The second part of the title, "at the road side" is, according to the Introduction, “a metaphor for where an ageing man feels himself to be in relation to the deteriorating world situation”. Included are several poems responding to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and towards the end of the book to the Israeli bombardment of Gaza. There are autobiographical sketches from the distant past, humorous and even silly poems, accounts of several dreams and their connection to reality, some anti-Christian poems, and as an appendix a nine-page piece of literary criticism in verse attacking Wordsworth's Ode on "The Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood". Many poems use constrained verse forms such as tanka and haiku and the 23-syllable 4-line stanza that Hirst has been using since the 1990s.

In this fourth volume of poetry by Anthony Hirst, the 46 poems, written in the fourteen-month period from October 2023 to November 2024, are all dated and arranged in chronological order. They include political themes – responses to the wars in Gaza and the Ukraine and to the destruction of our environment – reflections on personal experiences in the UK, France and Greece, accounts of dreams, and reflections on old age and death; a few poems are humorous or nonsensical.