| IRENE NOEL-BAKER | Poet Translator of Greek literary works Psychologist |
Translation of Modern Greek Literature - Christina Zempi: Stone and Honey
Christina Zempi, Stone and Honey (Arcadia Books, London, 2016)
Translated into English by Irene Noel-Baker
Stone and Honey is a novel redolent of modern Greece, by a local author who is truly alive to all the scents, the flavours, and winds of the Mani, a wild and beautiful landscape with a history of heroism, brutality and exile, and strong traditions in music and song.
Odysseas Anastasakos was forced to flee his homeland and has spent the past seventeen years living in Boston, forced to make his own way in a culture quite different from his own. He returns to Greece, seeking his way back through memory, and through a passionate and conflicted love that questions all he stands for. Modern Athens, an exile's life in America, a return to the Mani and the essence of home, this novel offers us a deep experience of Greece as it has been and is now.