WINNERS!

The Post-Apollo Press' very own MARIBOR won the 2011 Northern California Book Award (NCBA) for best Poetry Translation this Sunday!!!

The Northern California Book Awards were established by NCBR (formerly the Bay Area Book Reviewers Association, or BABRA) in 1981 to honor the work of northern California writers and recognize exceptional service in the field of literature here in northern California. They are co-sponsored by Poetry Flash, the Center for the Art of Translation, the San Francisco Public Library, the Friends of the SF Library, the Mechanics Institute, and PEN West. The awards recognize excellence in newly published fiction, non-fiction, poetry, translation, and children's literature. The Translation Awards are sponsored by the Center for the Art of Translation.


Heartfelt CONGRATULATIONS to Maribor's translators, John Sakkis & Angelos Sakkis. This award represents much deserved recognition of their refreshing and contemporary approach to their work with poet Demosthenes Agrafiotis.

You can read more about Maribor here at our website.

You can order your own copy of Maribor, directly from us by by:
email : postapollo@earthlink.net
phone : (415) 332-1458
fax : (415) 332-8045
mail : 35 Marie St., Sausalito, CA 94965

Or online via our fantastic distributor, Small Press Distribution.

Demosthenes Agrafiotis reads in New York!

Contemporary Greek poet, Demosthenes Agrafiotis, author of Post-Apollo's "Maribor" will be giving a reading at Poet's House in New York to celebrate the release of his newest book "Chinese Notebook", which was also translated by John & Angelos Sakkis. We hope to get him out to the West Coast for a Bay Area reading soon!

Here's what Demosethenes has to say (swiped from translator John Sakkis' blog)

***

Dear friends
from Demothenes...

"The Ugly Duckling Press will publish my book "Chinese notebook" in september 2010.
We are going to celebrate the publication with a poetry action in the POETS HOUSE in NY
(see site below),on 6th of October ,at 07.00 pm.
John Sakkis (one of the translators -the other translator is Angelos Sakkis) will be present.
The event includes :video projections,readings in greek,english,french,performance,debate..
I will be happy to invite you for this <>.
If you distribute this information to your friends and collegues,I will be extremely grateful.
I will be in NY from the 2nd until the 10th of October .
I will stay in Brooklyn .
Thanks in advance for your attention.
all the best
da"

Post-Apollo + Books & Bookshelves = Reading and Book Release Party

Hear ye! Hear ye!

Exciting news: Please join The Post-Apollo Press in celebrating the release of our 2010 titles, Maribor by Demosthenes Agrafiotis, translated by John Sakkis and Angelos Sakkis and The New Make Believe (out this week!) by Denise Newman, for a reading and book release party at Books and Bookshelves on Wednesday,May 26th at 7:30pm.

The three newest additions to Post-Apollo's cadre of wonderfully talented poets and translators, Denise Newman, John Sakkis and Angelos Sakkis will be reading together from their respective books. Both The New Make Believe and Maribor will be available for purchase and there will be wine and snacks!

The Details:


Who:
Denise Newman-author of the newest book of poetry in our Small Series, "The New Make Believe" (out this week!). She is also the author of Human Forest and Wild Goods (both published by Apogee Press), and the translator of The Painted Room (Random House, UK) and Azorno, (New Directions)—two novels by the Danish poet Inger Christensen. She teaches at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco where she lives with her husband and daughter.

John Sakkis and Angelos Sakkis- translators of Post-Apollo's newest translation, "Maribor" by Greek poet, Demosthenes Agrafiotis. John Sakkis’ is a poet and translator living in San Francisco. He is the author of the book Rude Girl (Blaze Vox 2009). Angelos Sakkis is a translator and painter living in Oakland, California.

What: A reading and book release party!

Where: Books and Bookshelves @ 99 Sanchez Street in San Francisco

When: Wednesday, May 26th @ 7:30pm

How a Collaborative Translation Duo Came to Be : The Sakkis Story

We asked the translators of "Maribor"(our newest collection of poetry by Greek poet Demosthenes Agrafiotis) John and Angelos Sakkis, to tell us a bit about how their unique collaborative began. Angelos had this to say in response:
Photo by Andrew Kenower


So my nephew John calls and says can you help me with some Greek words I say shoot he gives me a list of words most of them no problem on some of them I have to ask for context a few are really difficult technical terms from disciplines I am not familiar with I have to look them up in my dictionary dictionaries then some time later days weeks months there is another list no problem a breeze next time I see him I tell him when is the next list coming hurry up I like doing this then he sends me a thick manila envelope full of copied pages of a whole book I think this is more like it jump to it do the whole thing like in days a first gloss with a number of different alternatives for the critical words John likes that we talk about the different versions and he forms in his head the overview of the whole thing later on that becomes the pattern of our collaboration after he finishes with Siarita’s book I ask him what is next he says take a look at Demosthene’s book his had been the most exciting presentation at the Paros Symposium last summer so I take a look and I am completely nonplused perplexed bewildered not the kind of thing I usually read by choice still the specificity of the language keeps me hooked I struggle with it word by word line by line all the while thinking hey I can read Greek but what is this guy saying here where is he going with this the ellipticity of it the first book we tackle is the Chinese Notebook I am thinking pretty much this is Chinese to me the Greek version of an American’s this is Greek to me sometime later we meet with John and talk about it through our conversations I start to see the sense of the whole thing the logic of it feel the delight of the language sometimes we are stumped by its sudden turns taking us to unexpected directions we work at it revising and revising until we are fairly confident of having arrived at a good equivalent of the original in the translation the next two of Demosthenes books we work on Maribor and Now1/3 are relatively easier both of us more familiar by now with his work the operative word being relatively we go through many many revisions burnishing and polishing the language to get to something approaching the sparseness of the Greek original I usually do the first draft on which we work until John is satisfied with the English text in this sense I am the junior partner fine by me I get plenty out of it.

Our Newest Title

Maribor
by Demosthenes Agrafiotis
Translated by John Sakkis and Angelos Sakkis

Poetry 86 pgs $15.00 ISBN: 978-0942996-70-8

“who assigns names? // the name itself” Demosthenes Agrafiotis’s name assigned him a superb origin myth. He was born in the Agrafa, a region historically so remote its inhabitants eluded conquest and were thus undocumented or “unwritten” in the records of the empire, a place that consequently became a refuge for forbidden Greek literacy. Agrafiotis translates the paradox of his inheritances into poetry that collaborates brilliantly with the autonomy of the sign, animating its multiple lives and orchestrating the resonances of its indeterminacy. Mining the opaque strata between “epigrams on the gray marble” and what is “written with chalk…/ on the banks of subterranean cause”, Maribor gives us both artifact—of the ephemera of communication, institutions, power—as well as blueprint for imagining an “alphabet of the future.” A master of the contemporary hermetic, Agrafiotis can bring to light in one stroke both the evanescence and endurance of the writing on the wall, the play between these inherent to reading. John Sakkis and Angelos Sakkis have performed a great service to English readers with this precise, dynamic translation of one of the most important experimentalists working today. --Eleni Stecopoulos


As a North American I can only nod in awe at the dark mystery these poems offer, and the chastening, steel-eyed precision of European thought. In the hands of a master poet like Demosthenes Agrafiotis—“how many images can the species endure”—an old world emerges that is both bone-tired and on the cusp of renewal. The Europe of cafés, fashionable clothing, insane nationalist wars, & razor-edged critical thought is crisply present; while beneath it all beats a spiritual pulse as archaic as the Magdalenian caves. Into the tiny fractures of modern economy, philosophy, personality, and history, leak the structures of myth. Maribor is Slovenia’s second largest city, riddled with beauty & tragedy, & one site of the ethnic conflicts of the twentieth century. It is also a city that sits at a spiritual center—a center this poem, composed during the tumult of the 1990s, managed to reach. John and Angelos Sakkis are to be congratulated for having brought us a living poem in American-English. They manage to navigate not just contemporary Greek, but French, Italian, Latin, German, and such stunning lines as “the sparrow comes and perches / on the chair and leaves a dropping / all words are available / and suitable.” --Andrew Schelling