“Poetry, like art in general, may not give answers to humanity’s problems, but it poses the right questions.”

If childhood is a foreign country, we have little choice but to live our adult life abroad. Αs my favourite author, Jorge Luis Borges, would say, far from that dizzying country and its beloved customs our adult selves think with some bewilderment of our foreignness. I’ve always believed that writing is a way to come to terms with foreignness.

Growing up in the 1980s in a rural corner of a Mediterranean island meant exploration but also relative lack of cultural life, which was compensated by reading fairly everything, from Mickey Mouse and Popeye to the great classics. At fourteen I took home a Christmas assignment on Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus and spent a good part of the school break composing an unsolicited epic poem on the terrifying fire-bringer Titan. The poem was set in iambic fifteen-syllable verse, which in Greek we call politikos stichos, or political verse, dating from the Middle Ages. At fifteen I was writing my first and only novel on Roman Cyprus. My handwriting must have been barely legible because I faintly remember my aunt Maroulla transcribing it before my father could take it to a professional typist in Nicosia. I never published that novel, which was punctuated with excessive lyricisms, but having it produced on a typewriter gave it an aura of authority.

By the time I finished school in 1993, I knew I wanted to become a writer. I studied Byzantine and modern Greek literature in Cyprus before reading Hispanic and comparative literature at Cambridge, first as an MPhil student and subsequently as a doctoral researcher in the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages. Coming from a family with a modest income and of immigrant and refugee background, I was fortunate to receive financial support from the Cambridge Commonwealth and Overseas Trust, and the A. G. Leventis and Onassis Foundations, as well as a Spanish Gibson Scholarship. At the time of applying, I didn’t choose a college but made an open application. Thankfully, Lucy chose me! Joining Cambridge can be as exciting as it can be daunting, especially if you are an international student moving abroad for the first time. Lucy’s welcoming atmosphere, where Oxbridge formalities came second to a friendly and progressive community, was exactly what I needed, while its diversity was a window to the world. Opening that window meant getting to know people of different languages, cultures, and worldviews and forging lifelong friendships.

Cambridge gave me the tools to question and probe. Since graduating, I’ve published three academic monographs, edited a volume of essays, and authored three poetry books. As a researcher, I explore modernity across languages, periods, cultures, and disciplines, drawing on postcolonial and decolonial thought, memory studies, intellectual history, and environmental humanities. As a comparatist moving between Latin American, Pre-Columbian, Byzantine, and Modern Greek studies, I look for new research paths with transcultural projects which, as one reviewer has noted, could make “the strange familiar and the familiar strange”. Peripheral (Post) Modernity: The Syncretist Aesthetics of Borges, Piglia, Kalokyris, and Kyriakidis (2007) examined, for the first time, crosscurrents in Greek and Argentine modernisms, while The Conquered: Byzantium and America on the Cusp of Modernity (2021) analysed Greek and Nahuatl laments for the fall of Byzantine Constantinople (1453) and Aztec Tenochtitlan (1521). The book, which bridges Byzantine, Pre-Columbian, and Early Modern studies never before considered comparatively, received the 2022 Edmund Keeley Prize of the Modern Greek Studies Association. According to the prize committee, “The Conquered is a work of truly original scholarship, bold in the experiment it ventures–an extended comparison between Byzantine Greek and indigenous American culture and society–and deeply grounded in literary, linguistic, and historical research… Through this comparison, Kefala shows how the ‘premodern’ and the ‘nonmodern’, figured respectively as Byzantium and pre-Columbian America in Enlightenment and colonial representations, played a crucial role in the constitution of modernity itself. A richly illustrated, gorgeously written and gripping read, this book reimagines the field of Modern Greek Studies in a fresh and persuasive way”.

The unusual comparison of The Conquered emerged from my interdisciplinary, AHRC-funded project on urban modernity in 1920s and 1930s Argentina, when toward the end I undertook research on modernity’s “others”, among them Byzantium and pre-Columbian America. On the one hand, the project on modern urban space resulted in the publication of my third monograph, Buenos Aires across the Arts: Five and One Theses on Modernity, 1921-1939 (2022), which examines representations of Argentina’s capital city in poetry, prose, painting, photography, and cinema, focusing on a time of profound change in the country. On the other hand, my research on modernity’s “others” has led to my forthcoming monograph, Earth Beyond Modernity, a polemical work which studies together Byzantium, preconquest America, and the current ecological crisis from a decolonial perspective. Decolonial thinking also informs my edited volume, Negotiating Difference in the Hispanic World: From Conquest to Globalisation (2011), which investigates issues of cultural identity in the Spanish-speaking world since 1492.

I’ve always thought of my academic and creative writings as communicating vessels.  Cultural identity, history, colonialism, migration, and the margins are key themes in both. As a poet, I have a preference for complex, multi-layered structures because they invite multiple readings. In my work, poems stand independently while at the same time, they form part of a greater whole, which allows them to acquire new meanings when read together. My debut poetry book Memory and Variations (2007) borrows the structure of Greek tragedy as defined by Aristotle and understands literature as a single text with variations. Time Stitches (2013) and Direct Orient (forthcoming in 2023) are books with interconnected and mutually transforming storylines. I guess you could say that I am a poet with a taste for brevity who, paradoxically, writes like a novelist (that early novel that I’ve long disowned has taken its revenge!). All three books are also meditations on the nature and role of poetry and language. Time Stitches and Direct Orient in particular centre on colonialism, migration, and family history, while the latter book also zooms in on women’s role in history, literature, and art. Meanwhile, Direct Orient reworks the Epic of Gilgamesh through detective fiction, Greek folk songs, and Cypriot and Cretan Renaissance poetry, among others.

While in my academic writing, I enjoy the benefits of two international languages (English and Spanish), Greek is the language I reserve for poetry. Obviously, writing from the linguistic margins is restrictive, but it can also be empowering. I see it as an act of resistance against monolingualism in the era of globalisation. Besides, non-international languages carry their own semantic, historical, and cultural load, which can (and must) play an important role in world literature. For this to happen, we need those cultural brokers that we call translators, whose work has a far-reaching significance that can never be overestimated.

Time Stitches, which received the State Prize for Poetry in Cyprus in 2014, was published in English by Deep Vellum in November 2022. Peter Constantine’s stunning translation won the Elizabeth Constantinides Prize of the Modern Greek Studies Association. According to the award citation, “Time Stitches comprises an exquisite set of linked poems that centres around British colonial Cyprus, but radiates out into other eras, more distant in the past and more recent… By gracefully accounting for a variety of linguistic registers as well as playfulness with white space on the page, the translation of Time Stitches is a monumental accomplishment that does a great service to Greek and Cypriot letters by making these important poems available to readers of the Anglophone world”. The book is a New York Times Globetrotting Pick.

Writing is a way to come to terms with our foreignness and for this reason we can call it home. Literature in particular serves that role. In an age when the field of literary studies seems so devalued, it’s worth remembering that poetry, like art in general, may not give answers to humanity’s problems, but it poses the right questions.

About Dr Eleni Kefala

Eleni (Modern and Medieval Languages, 1997) is Senior Lecturer in Latin American Literature at the University of St Andrews. She holds an MPhil and a PhD from the University of Cambridge, and a BA from the University of Cyprus. She has been Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania, Early Career Fellow of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) in the UK, and Dumbarton Oaks Fellow at Harvard. Her monograph The Conquered won the 2022 Edmund Keeley Prize. She is also the recipient of the State Prize for Poetry in her home country for the book Time Stitches (forthcoming in English, translated by Peter Constantine, from Deep Vellum) and served on the jury of the 2022 Neustadt International Prize for Literature.