94-495: Dimitris Lyacos ( Greek : Δημήτρης Λυάκος ; born 19 October 1966) is a contemporary Greek writer. He is the author of the Poena Damni trilogy. Lyacos's work is characterised by its genre-defying form and the avant-garde combination of themes from literary tradition with elements from ritual, religion, philosophy and anthropology. The trilogy interchanges prose , drama and poetry in a fractured narrative that reflects some of
188-577: A basis for coinages: anthropology , photography , telephony , isomer , biomechanics , cinematography , etc. Together with Latin words , they form the foundation of international scientific and technical vocabulary ; for example, all words ending in -logy ('discourse'). There are many English words of Greek origin . Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European language family. The ancient language most closely related to it may be ancient Macedonian , which, by most accounts,
282-552: A celebration of common objects from the natural world, as in "The Broad Bean Sermon", or machines, as in "Machine Portraits with Pendant Spaceman". Always concerned with a "common reader", Murray's later poetry (for example, Dog Fox Field, 1990, Translations from the Natural World , 1992) recovers "populist" conventions of newspaper verse, singsong rhyme, and doggerel . American reviewer Albert Mobilio writes in his review of Learning Human: Selected Poems that Murray revived
376-473: A complex webwork of allusions and drifting free of referentiality, evading attempts to pin it down. The plot hinges on the story of a character resembling the Gerasene demoniac from St. Mark 's gospel, living in a cemetery, tormented by demons, and cutting himself with stones. He enters the tomb of his dead lover attempting to open the coffin in which she seems to lie in a state not affected by decomposition and
470-665: A distance from society as such, fugitives, like the narrator of Z213: Exit , outcasts in a dystopian hinterland like the characters in With the People from the Bridge , or marooned, like the protagonist of The First Death whose struggle for survival unfolds on a desert-like island. Poena Damni has been construed as an "allegory of unhappiness" together with works of authors such as Gabriel García Márquez and Thomas Pynchon , as well as Cormac McCarthy and has been acknowledged as an exponent of
564-558: A fairly stable set of consonantal contrasts . The main phonological changes occurred during the Hellenistic and Roman period (see Koine Greek phonology for details): In all its stages, the morphology of Greek shows an extensive set of productive derivational affixes , a limited but productive system of compounding and a rich inflectional system. Although its morphological categories have been fairly stable over time, morphological changes are present throughout, particularly in
658-560: A faster, more convenient cursive writing style with the use of ink and quill . The Greek alphabet consists of 24 letters, each with an uppercase ( majuscule ) and lowercase ( minuscule ) form. The letter sigma has an additional lowercase form (ς) used in the final position of a word: In addition to the letters, the Greek alphabet features a number of diacritical signs : three different accent marks ( acute , grave , and circumflex ), originally denoting different shapes of pitch accent on
752-540: A foreign language. It is also often stated that the historical changes have been relatively slight compared with some other languages. According to one estimation, " Homeric Greek is probably closer to Demotic than 12-century Middle English is to modern spoken English ". Greek is spoken today by at least 13 million people, principally in Greece and Cyprus along with a sizable Greek-speaking minority in Albania near
846-487: A future regeneration. In an interview with Lyacos for 3:AM Magazine , translator Andrew Barrett announced that he is in the process of translating the author's new work-in-project, titled Until the Victim Becomes our Own , which is conceived as the "zeroth" book that will convert Poena Damni into a tetralogy. According to Barrett, the new book explores bloodshed as the building-block in the formation of society and
940-425: A hidden dimension of the world. From that perspective, the work has been interpreted as a kind of surfiction whereby the world depicted within the trilogy allows an open space for the reader to contribute his own internalized version. Z213: Exit uses the device of the palimpsest to present a fictional tissue combining elements of both ancient and modern sources as well as the "dialogue" of its two protagonists. It
1034-410: A large variety of canonical texts of Western Literature. Most critics comment on the use of an intricate network of textual references and paraphrases of classical and biblical works, in tandem with the work's unconventional style and character. On a different note, one critic, pointed out that "despite it being beautifully written and heart-wrenching, the gruesome detail of some passages filled [her] with
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#17327722713221128-548: A leading poet. The Murray biographer Peter Alexander has written that "all Murray's volumes are uneven, though as Bruce Clunies Ross would remark, 'There's "less good" and "good", but it's very hard to find really inferior Murray'." When Murray was a student at the University of Sydney he was the editor of Hermes with Geoffrey Lehmann (1962). Murray edited the magazine Poetry Australia (1973–79). During his tenure as poetry editor for Angus & Robertson (1976–90) he
1222-653: A lively, frequently polemic prose style he promotes republicanism, patronage, Gaelic bardic poetry, warrior virtu, mysticism, and Aboriginal models, and attacks modernism and feminism." In 1972, Murray and some other Sydney activists launched the Australian Commonwealth Party , and authored its unusually idealistic campaign manifesto. During the 1970s he opposed the New Poetry or "literary modernism" which emerged in Australia at that time, and
1316-413: A makeshift play performed under the arches of a derelict train station. The third book, The First Death ( Ο Πρώτος Θάνατος ) opens with a marooned man on a rocky island and details his struggle for survival as well as the disintegration of his body and the unrolling of its memory banks. The work is hard to classify since it crosses the usual boundaries of genre. Z213: Exit re-contextualizes elements from
1410-600: A poet. In 1957, Murray entered the University of Sydney in the Faculty of Arts and joined the Royal Australian Navy Reserve to obtain a small income. Speaking about this time to Clive James he said: "I was as soft-headed as you could imagine. I was actually hanging on to childhood because I hadn't had much teenage. My Mum died and my father collapsed. I had to look after him. So I was off
1504-500: A sense of dread at the turning of every page" and issued a content warning for readers. In the light of the COVID-19 pandemic , Poena Damni has attracted attention as "a vertiginous work that is at once archetypal, transcendent, and uniquely suited to this particular moment in time". The trilogy has given rise to scholarly criticism and is also part of various university curricula on postmodern fiction, while Lyacos has been mentioned for
1598-583: A series of paintings in 2002 in Vienna. In 2004, a sound and sculpture installation by sculptor Fritz Unegg and BBC producer Piers Burton-Page went on a European tour. In 2005 Austrian visual artist Gudrun Bielz presented a video-art work inspired by Nyctivoe. The Myia dance company performed a contemporary dance version of Nyctivoe in Greece from 2006 to 2009. A music/theatre version of Z213: Exit by Greek composers Maria Aloupi and Andreas Diktyopoulos, performed by Das Neue Ensemble and Greek actor Dimitris Lignadis
1692-576: A somewhat similar paradoxical assessment of Murray: "A skewer of polemic runs through his work. His brilliant manipulation of language, his ability to turn words into installations of reality, is often forced to hang on an embarrassing moral sharpness. The parts we love – the Donne-like baroque – live side by side with sentiments we don't: his increasingly automatic opposition to liberalism and intellectuality." Twelve years after Murray's induced birth, his mother miscarried another child. She died after
1786-804: Is also found in Bulgaria near the Greek-Bulgarian border. Greek is also spoken worldwide by the sizable Greek diaspora which has notable communities in the United States , Australia , Canada , South Africa , Chile , Brazil , Argentina , Russia , Ukraine , the United Kingdom , and throughout the European Union , especially in Germany . Historically, significant Greek-speaking communities and regions were found throughout
1880-479: Is an Indo-European language, but also includes a number of borrowings from the languages of the populations that inhabited Greece before the arrival of Proto-Greeks, some documented in Mycenaean texts ; they include a large number of Greek toponyms . The form and meaning of many words have changed. Loanwords (words of foreign origin) have entered the language, mainly from Latin, Venetian , and Turkish . During
1974-400: Is composed of a series of fragmented entries in a fictional diary recording the experiences of an unnamed protagonist during a train journey into an unknown land. The man has been released - or escaped - from some time of confinement elliptically described in his journal and reminiscent of a hospital, prison, ghetto or enclave of some sort. His subsequent wanderings among desolate landscapes on
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#17327722713222068-518: Is currently based in Berlin and Athens . In 1992, Lyacos set about writing a trilogy under the collective name Poena Damni , referring to the hardest trial the condemned souls in Hell have to endure, i.e. the loss of the vision of God. The trilogy has developed gradually as a work in progress in the course of thirty years. The third part ( The First Death ) appeared first in Greek (Ο πρώτος θάνατος) and
2162-466: Is matched only by the now-extinct Anatolian languages . The Greek language is conventionally divided into the following periods: In the modern era, the Greek language entered a state of diglossia : the coexistence of vernacular and archaizing written forms of the language. What came to be known as the Greek language question was a polarization between two competing varieties of Modern Greek: Dimotiki ,
2256-519: Is protected and promoted officially as a regional and minority language in Armenia, Hungary , Romania, and Ukraine. It is recognized as a minority language and protected in Turkey by the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne . The phonology , morphology , syntax , and vocabulary of the language show both conservative and innovative tendencies across the entire attestation of the language from the ancient to
2350-492: Is radically original". His poetry is rich and diverse, while also exhibiting "an obvious unity and wholeness" based on "his consistent commitment to the ideals and values of what he sees as the real Australia". While admiring Murray's linguistic skill and poetic achievement, poet John Tranter , in 1977, also expressed uneasiness about some aspects of his work. Tranter praises Murray's "good humour" and concludes that "For all my disagreements, and many of them are profound, I found
2444-585: Is regarded as "the leading Australian poet of his generation". He was rated in 1997 by the National Trust of Australia as one of the 100 Australian Living Treasures . Les Murray was born in Nabiac , New South Wales, and grew up in nearby Bunyah. He attended primary and early high school in Nabiac and then Taree High School . At age 18, while watching mayflies along the river, Murray decided to become
2538-877: Is sometimes called aljamiado , as when Romance languages are written in the Arabic alphabet. Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Greek: Transcription of the example text into Latin alphabet : Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in English: Proto-Greek Mycenaean Ancient Koine Medieval Modern Les Murray (poet) Leslie Allan Murray AO (17 October 1938 – 29 April 2019)
2632-763: Is still used internationally for the writing of Ancient Greek . In Greek, the question mark is written as the English semicolon, while the functions of the colon and semicolon are performed by a raised point (•), known as the ano teleia ( άνω τελεία ). In Greek the comma also functions as a silent letter in a handful of Greek words, principally distinguishing ό,τι ( ó,ti , 'whatever') from ότι ( óti , 'that'). Ancient Greek texts often used scriptio continua ('continuous writing'), which means that ancient authors and scribes would write word after word with no spaces or punctuation between words to differentiate or mark boundaries. Boustrophedon , or bi-directional text,
2726-542: The Australian National University (where he was employed from 1963 to 1967). During his studies he met other poets and writers such as Geoffrey Lehmann , Bob Ellis , Clive James and Lex Banning , as well as future political journalists Laurie Oakes and Mungo McCallum Jr . Between times, he hitch-hiked around Australia. Murray lived for several months at a Sydney Push household at Milsons Point , where he read Virgil 's Eclogues at
2820-674: The Balkans , Caucasus , the Black Sea coast, Asia Minor , and the Eastern Mediterranean . It has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning at least 3,400 years of written records. Its writing system is the Greek alphabet , which has been used for approximately 2,800 years; previously, Greek was recorded in writing systems such as Linear B and the Cypriot syllabary . The alphabet arose from
2914-624: The Byzantine Empire and developed into Medieval Greek . In its modern form , Greek is the official language of Greece and Cyprus and one of the 24 official languages of the European Union . It is spoken by at least 13.5 million people today in Greece, Cyprus, Italy, Albania, Turkey , and the many other countries of the Greek diaspora . Greek roots have been widely used for centuries and continue to be widely used to coin new words in other languages; Greek and Latin are
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3008-627: The Christian Bible was also originally written in Greek. Together with the Latin texts and traditions of the Roman world , the Greek texts and Greek societies of antiquity constitute the objects of study of the discipline of Classics . During antiquity , Greek was by far the most widely spoken lingua franca in the Mediterranean world . It eventually became the official language of
3102-495: The Eastern Mediterranean , in what are today Southern Italy , Turkey , Cyprus , Syria , Lebanon , Israel , Palestine , Egypt , and Libya ; in the area of the Black Sea , in what are today Turkey, Bulgaria , Romania , Ukraine , Russia , Georgia , Armenia , and Azerbaijan ; and, to a lesser extent, in the Western Mediterranean in and around colonies such as Massalia , Monoikos , and Mainake . It
3196-516: The Indo-Iranian languages (see Graeco-Aryan ), but little definitive evidence has been found. In addition, Albanian has also been considered somewhat related to Greek and Armenian, and it has been proposed that they all form a higher-order subgroup along with other extinct languages of the ancient Balkans; this higher-order subgroup is usually termed Palaeo-Balkan , and Greek has a central position in it. Linear B , attested as early as
3290-696: The Nobel Prize in Literature . Greek language Greek ( Modern Greek : Ελληνικά , romanized : Elliniká , [eliniˈka] ; Ancient Greek : Ἑλληνική , romanized : Hellēnikḗ ) is an Indo-European language, constituting an independent Hellenic branch within the Indo-European language family. It is native to Greece , Cyprus , Italy (in Calabria and Salento ), southern Albania , and other regions of
3384-657: The Phoenician script and was in turn the basis of the Latin , Cyrillic , Coptic , Gothic , and many other writing systems. The Greek language holds a very important place in the history of the Western world. Beginning with the epics of Homer , ancient Greek literature includes many works of lasting importance in the European canon . Greek is also the language in which many of the foundational texts in science and philosophy were originally composed. The New Testament of
3478-552: The Vernacular Republic full of rich and complex poetry." Bourke writes that: Murray's strength is the dramatization of general ideas and the description of animals, machines, or landscape. At times his immense self-confidence produces garrulity and sweeping, dismissive prescriptions. The most attractive poems show enormous powers of invention, lively play with language, and command of rhythm and idiom. In these poems Murray invariably explores social questions through
3572-492: The nominal and verbal systems. The major change in the nominal morphology since the classical stage was the disuse of the dative case (its functions being largely taken over by the genitive ). The verbal system has lost the infinitive , the synthetically -formed future, and perfect tenses and the optative mood . Many have been replaced by periphrastic ( analytical ) forms. Pronouns show distinctions in person (1st, 2nd, and 3rd), number (singular, dual , and plural in
3666-538: The postmodern sublime and as one of the notable anti- utopian works of the 21st century. Dimitris Lyacos is internationally considered as the best-known contemporary Greek author and the country's most likely candidate for a Nobel Prize in Literature and an entrant in Who’s Who, the database of the most prominent individuals across all fields of human activity. Lyacos's works are published exclusively in translation. As of 2024, his trilogy as well as its prequel Until
3760-470: The Country", "Cowyard Gates" and "The Last Hellos". Sydney Morning Herald reviewer Paul Byrnes concludes his review with: The film is stunningly beautiful at times, and wildly ambitious, an attempt to be both wordless and wordy, to get to the hypnotic state that poetry and music can induce while saying something meaningful about black and white attitudes to land and love. This last part, as I read Murray,
3854-486: The Greek alphabet since approximately the 9th century BC. It was created by modifying the Phoenician alphabet , with the innovation of adopting certain letters to represent the vowels. The variant of the alphabet in use today is essentially the late Ionic variant, introduced for writing classical Attic in 403 BC. In classical Greek, as in classical Latin, only upper-case letters existed. The lower-case Greek letters were developed much later by medieval scribes to permit
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3948-495: The Greek language was the Cypriot syllabary (also a descendant of Linear A via the intermediate Cypro-Minoan syllabary ), which is closely related to Linear B but uses somewhat different syllabic conventions to represent phoneme sequences. The Cypriot syllabary is attested in Cyprus from the 11th century BC until its gradual abandonment in the late Classical period, in favor of the standard Greek alphabet. Greek has been written in
4042-629: The Greek verb have likewise remained largely the same over the course of the language's history but with significant changes in the number of distinctions within each category and their morphological expression. Greek verbs have synthetic inflectional forms for: Many aspects of the syntax of Greek have remained constant: verbs agree with their subject only, the use of the surviving cases is largely intact (nominative for subjects and predicates, accusative for objects of most verbs and many prepositions, genitive for possessors), articles precede nouns, adpositions are largely prepositional, relative clauses follow
4136-685: The Greek-Albanian border. A significant percentage of Albania's population has knowledge of the Greek language due in part to the Albanian wave of immigration to Greece in the 1980s and '90s and the Greek community in the country. Prior to the Greco-Turkish War and the resulting population exchange in 1923 a very large population of Greek-speakers also existed in Turkey , though very few remain today. A small Greek-speaking community
4230-485: The High Modernist tradition of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf The first of the three pieces, Z213: Exit ( Z213: ΕΞΟΔΟΣ ), accounts a man's escape from a guarded city and his journey through dreamlike, sometimes nightmarish, lands. In the second book, With the People from the Bridge ( Με Τους Ανθρώπους Από Τη Γέφυρα ) the protagonist of Z213: Exit becomes a first-degree Narrator appearing as one spectator in
4324-459: The Paper, had claimed to be the daughter of a Ukrainian immigrant, though her parents were in fact English migrants. Murray said of Darville that "She was a young girl, and her book mightn't have been the best in the world, but it was pretty damn good for a girl of her age [20 when she wrote it]. And her marketing strategy of pretending to be a Ukrainian might have been unwise, but it sure did expose
4418-543: The Victim Becomes our Own have not appeared in the Greek original. Lyacos was born and raised in Athens , where he studied law. From 1988 to 1991 he lived in Venice . In 1992 he moved to London. He studied philosophy at University College London with analytical philosophers Ted Honderich and Tim Crane focusing on Epistemology and Metaphysics , Ancient Greek philosophy and Wittgenstein . In 2005 he moved to Berlin. He
4512-404: The acute during the late 20th century, and it has only been retained in typography . After the writing reform of 1982, most diacritics are no longer used. Since then, Greek has been written mostly in the simplified monotonic orthography (or monotonic system), which employs only the acute accent and the diaeresis. The traditional system, now called the polytonic orthography (or polytonic system),
4606-402: The ancient language; singular and plural alone in later stages), and gender (masculine, feminine, and neuter), and decline for case (from six cases in the earliest forms attested to four in the modern language). Nouns, articles, and adjectives show all the distinctions except for a person. Both attributive and predicative adjectives agree with the noun. The inflectional categories of
4700-673: The arts. These interviews have appeared on an annual basis in outlets including the Michigan Quarterly Review ( Flowing from an absent source - 2024), The Common ( Violence and its Other - 2024), World Literature Today ( A World to Be Repaired - 2021), 3:AM Magazine (Entangled Narratives and Dionysian Frenzy - 2020), Los Angeles Review of Books (Neighboring Yet Alien - 2019), BOMB (A Dissociated Locus - 2018), Berfrois ( Controlled Experience - 2018), Gulf Coast (An Interview with Dimitris Lyacos - 2018) and The Bitter Oleander (2016). Poena Damni is, arguably, one of
4794-477: The chain at last, I was in Sydney and I didn't quite know how to do adulthood or teenage. I was being coltish and foolish and childlike. I received the least distinguished degree Sydney ever issued. I don't think anyone's ever matched it." In 1961 The Bulletin published one of Murray's poems. He developed an interest in ancient and modern languages, and eventually qualified to become a professional translator at
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#17327722713224888-613: The doctor failed to call an ambulance. Literary critic Lawrence Bourke writes that "Murray, linking his birth to her death, traces his poetic vocation from these traumatic events, seeing in them the relegation of the rural poor by urban élites. Dispossession, relegation, and independence become major preoccupations of his poetry". Beyond this, though, his poetry is generally seen to have a nationalistic bent. The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature writes that: The continuing themes of much of his poetry are those inherent in that traditional nationalistic identity – respect, even reverence, for
4982-644: The eventual place of the individual in a world "permeated by institutionalized violence." Chapter G from the book in English translation appeared in Mayday Magazine in March 2023 and chapter D in Image in March 2024. Lyacos's literary output is complemented by a series of interviews that aim to function as a conceptual companion to his work and, at the same time, informally expand on a variety of literature-related subjects as well as philosophy, religion, cinema and
5076-420: The grave. The action is enveloped in a context reminiscent of a festival for the dead as well as that of a vampire epidemic. There are clear references to Christian tradition and eschatology and the piece results in a joint contemplation of collective salvation which is ultimately left unresolved after a final narrative twist. In The First Death a place is denied to the mutilated body which grinds against
5170-485: The greater Greek canon – including the escaped hero and the devote wanderer. It often takes narrative form, mixing poetry and prose. The trilogy moves into dramatic representation of character and situation in With the People from the Bridge , and subsequently to a hard lyrical kind of poetry used to depict the break-up and eventual apotheosis of the body in The First Death . The possibilities of divergence between
5264-439: The infinitive entirely (employing a raft of new periphrastic constructions instead) and uses participles more restrictively. The loss of the dative led to a rise of prepositional indirect objects (and the use of the genitive to directly mark these as well). Ancient Greek tended to be verb-final, but neutral word order in the modern language is VSO or SVO. Modern Greek inherits most of its vocabulary from Ancient Greek, which in turn
5358-467: The late 15th century BC, was the first script used to write Greek. It is basically a syllabary , which was finally deciphered by Michael Ventris and John Chadwick in the 1950s (its precursor, Linear A , has not been deciphered and most likely encodes a non-Greek language). The language of the Linear B texts, Mycenaean Greek , is the earliest known form of Greek. Another similar system used to write
5452-422: The lost family home in 1975 and to visit there intermittently until 1985 when he and his family returned to live there permanently. Murray died on 29 April 2019 at a Taree, New South Wales , nursing home at the age of 80. Murray had a long career in poetry and literary journalism in Australia. When he was 38 years old, his Selected Poems was published by Angus & Robertson , signifying his emergence as
5546-509: The medal of the Order of Lenin . In 2005, The Widower , a short film based on five poems by Murray, was released. It was directed by Kevin Lucas and written by singer and festival director Lyndon Terracini , with music by Elena Kats-Chernin . Its cast included Chris Haywood and Frances Rings . The five poems used for the film are "Evening Alone at Bunyah", "Noonday Axeman", "The Widower in
5640-576: The membership of Greece and Cyprus in the European Union, Greek is one of the organization's 24 official languages . Greek is recognized as a minority language in Albania, and used co-officially in some of its municipalities, in the districts of Gjirokastër and Sarandë . It is also an official minority language in the regions of Apulia and Calabria in Italy. In the framework of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages , Greek
5734-450: The metaphysical but is also reminiscent of an L.A. private eye in a 1940s detective novel closing upon an extraordinary discovery. Z213: Exit ends with a description of a sacrifice where the protagonist and a "hungry band feasting" roast a lamb on a spit, cutting and skinning its still bleating body and removing its entrails as if observing a sacred rite. With the People from the Bridge is fragmentary, hallucinatory, at once firmly rooted in
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#17327722713225828-441: The modern period. The division into conventional periods is, as with all such periodizations, relatively arbitrary, especially because, in all periods, Ancient Greek has enjoyed high prestige, and the literate borrowed heavily from it. Across its history, the syllabic structure of Greek has varied little: Greek shows a mixed syllable structure, permitting complex syllabic onsets but very restricted codas. It has only oral vowels and
5922-415: The most widely and best reviewed work of contemporary Greek literature in translation with its various editions having received 84 international reviews until summer 2023, and mentioned as "one of the most-discussed and most-lauded pieces of contemporary European literature". It has been noted for creatively surpassing the distinction between modernism and postmodernism while, at the same time, being founded on
6016-399: The noun they modify and relative pronouns are clause-initial. However, the morphological changes also have their counterparts in the syntax, and there are also significant differences between the syntax of the ancient and that of the modern form of the language . Ancient Greek made great use of participial constructions and of constructions involving the infinitive, and the modern variety lacks
6110-706: The older periods of Greek, loanwords into Greek acquired Greek inflections, thus leaving only a foreign root word. Modern borrowings (from the 20th century on), especially from French and English, are typically not inflected; other modern borrowings are derived from Albanian , South Slavic ( Macedonian / Bulgarian ) and Eastern Romance languages ( Aromanian and Megleno-Romanian ). Greek words have been widely borrowed into other languages, including English. Example words include: mathematics , physics , astronomy , democracy , philosophy , athletics , theatre, rhetoric , baptism , evangelist , etc. Moreover, Greek words and word elements continue to be productive as
6204-432: The perceived and the objective outside world are exploited; the reader follows the irregular flow of internal monologues stemming from events in the external world but ultimately viewed as reflected onto the thinking and feeling surfaces of the protagonist's mind. On the other hand, an alien setting and the unfolding, dreamlike occurrences are presented with impressive solidity, pointing to an alternative reality, or, unveiling
6298-525: The pioneers; the importance of the land and its shaping influence on the Australian character, down-to-earth, laconic ... and based on such Bush-bred qualities as egalitarianism , practicality, straight-forwardness and independence; special respect for that Australian character in action in wartime ... and a brook-no-argument preference for the rural life over the sterile and corrupting urban environment. Of his literary journalism, Bourke writes that "In
6392-541: The predominant sources of international scientific vocabulary . Greek has been spoken in the Balkan peninsula since around the 3rd millennium BC, or possibly earlier. The earliest written evidence is a Linear B clay tablet found in Messenia that dates to between 1450 and 1350 BC, making Greek the world's oldest recorded living language . Among the Indo-European languages, its date of earliest written attestation
6486-491: The pretensions of the multicultural industry". Biographer Alexander writes that in his poem "A Deployment of Fashion", Murray linked "the attack on Darville with the wider phenomenon of attacks on those judged outcasts (from Lindy Chamberlain to Pauline Hanson ) by society’s fashion police, the journalists, academics and others who form opinion. In 1996, Murray became involved in a controversy about whether Australian historian Manning Clark had received and regularly worn
6580-527: The principal motifs of the Western Canon . Despite its length - the overall text counts no more than two hundred and fifty pages - the work took over a period of thirty years to complete, with the individual books revised and republished in different editions during this period and arranged around a cluster of concepts including the scapegoat, the quest, the return of the dead, redemption, physical suffering, mental illness. Lyacos's characters are always at
6674-400: The rocks and suffers continuing degradation, physical and mental, as even the mechanisms of memory are dislocated. Yet the bond between person and body that ensures life still persists, and, "at that point without substance/ where the world collides and takes off", the mechanical instincts of the cosmos rumble into action and sling this irreducible substance again into space - prompting, perhaps,
6768-407: The same time. It explores the deep structure of tragedy instead of its formal characteristics, having thus been called a post-tragic work. Homer , Aeschylus and Dante as well as the darker aspects of romantic poetry together with symbolism, expressionism, and an intense religious and philosophical interest permeate the work. Poena Damni has thus been related, despite its postmodern traits, more to
6862-437: The stressed vowel; the so-called breathing marks ( rough and smooth breathing ), originally used to signal presence or absence of word-initial /h/; and the diaeresis , used to mark the full syllabic value of a vowel that would otherwise be read as part of a diphthong. These marks were introduced during the course of the Hellenistic period. Actual usage of the grave in handwriting saw a rapid decline in favor of uniform usage of
6956-513: The suggestion of his host, Brian Jenkins. Murray returned to undergraduate studies in the 1960s. He converted to Roman Catholicism when he married Budapest -born fellow-student Valerie Morelli in 1962. His poetry frequently refers to Catholic themes. The couple lived in Wales and Scotland and travelled in Europe for over a year in the late 1960s. They had five children together. Their son Alexander
7050-450: The traditional ballad form . He goes on to comment on Murray's conservatism and his humour: "Because his conservatism is imbued with an angular, self-mocking wit, which very nearly belies the down-home values being expressed, he catches readers up in the joke. We end up delighted by his dexterity, if a bit doubtful about the end to which it's been put." In 2003, Australian poet Peter Porter , reviewing Murray's New Collected Poems , makes
7144-418: The urgency of his desire reanimates her body whose passage back to life is described. The grave becomes a "fine and private place" for lovers still capable of embracing. The story recounts a multiperspectival narrative based on the theme of the revenant through the first-person embedded accounts of four characters: a man possessed by demons attempts to resurrect the body of his lover but ends in joining her in
7238-447: The various stages of the Greek language are often emphasized. Although Greek has undergone morphological and phonological changes comparable to those seen in other languages, never since classical antiquity has its cultural, literary, and orthographic tradition been interrupted to the extent that one can speak of a new language emerging. Greek speakers today still tend to regard literary works of ancient Greek as part of their own rather than
7332-411: The verge of reality are set in a closely detailed, and somehow Kafkaesque , atmosphere, underlining the point that the most dreamlike occurrences are also the realest. Along the way, the protagonist delves deeper in what seems like a quasi-religious quest while, at the same time, his growing impression of being stalked introduces an element of suspense and a film noir-like quality. Thus, the text hinges on
7426-529: The vernacular form of Modern Greek proper, and Katharevousa , meaning 'purified', a compromise between Dimotiki and Ancient Greek developed in the early 19th century that was used for literary and official purposes in the newly formed Greek state. In 1976, Dimotiki was declared the official language of Greece, after having incorporated features of Katharevousa and thus giving birth to Standard Modern Greek , used today for all official purposes and in education . The historical unity and continuing identity between
7520-429: Was "now routinely mentioned among the three or four leading English-language poets". Murray was talked of as a possible winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature . Murray retired as literary editor of Quadrant in late 2018 for health reasons. Murray published around 30 volumes of poetry and is often called Australia's bush- bard . The academic David McCooey described Murray in 2002 as "a traditional poet whose work
7614-788: Was Writer in Residence at the International Writing Program , University of Iowa. He is one of the most recent Greek authors to have achieved international recognition, Poena Damni being the most widely reviewed Greek literary work of the recent decades and Z213: Exit , arguably, the best-selling book of contemporary Greek poetry. Lyacos appearances in literary festivals include International Literature Festival of Tbilisi in 2017, Transpoesie Festival, Brussels ., International Literary Festival of Pristina , Bucharest International Poetry Festival., Ritratti di Poesia, Rome and Campania Libri, Napoli Until autumn 2022 Lyacos's work
7708-574: Was a distinct dialect of Greek itself. Aside from the Macedonian question, current consensus regards Phrygian as the closest relative of Greek, since they share a number of phonological, morphological and lexical isoglosses , with some being exclusive between them. Scholars have proposed a Graeco-Phrygian subgroup out of which Greek and Phrygian originated. Among living languages, some Indo-Europeanists suggest that Greek may be most closely related to Armenian (see Graeco-Armenian ) or
7802-610: Was a major contributor to what is known in Australian poetry circles as "the poetry wars". "One of his complaints against post-modernism was that it removed poetry from widespread, popular readership, leaving it the domain of a small intellectual clique." As American reviewer Albert Mobilio describes it, Murray "waged a campaign for accessibility". In 1995, Murray became involved in the Demidenko/Darville affair. Helen Darville , an Australian writer who had won several major literary awards for her novel The Hand That Signed
7896-568: Was also used as the official language of government and religion in the Christian Nubian kingdoms , for most of their history. Greek, in its modern form, is the official language of Greece, where it is spoken by almost the entire population. It is also the official language of Cyprus (nominally alongside Turkish ) and the British Overseas Territory of Akrotiri and Dhekelia (alongside English ). Because of
7990-557: Was also used in Ancient Greek. Greek has occasionally been written in the Latin script , especially in areas under Venetian rule or by Greek Catholics . The term Frankolevantinika / Φραγκολεβαντίνικα applies when the Latin script is used to write Greek in the cultural ambit of Catholicism (because Frankos / Φράγκος is an older Greek term for West-European dating to when most of (Roman Catholic Christian) West Europe
8084-408: Was an Australian poet , anthologist and critic . His career spanned over 40 years and he published nearly 30 volumes of poetry as well as two verse novels and collections of his prose writings. Translations of Murray's poetry have been published in 11 languages: French, German, Italian, Catalan, Spanish, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Hindi, Russian, and Dutch. Murray's poetry won many awards and he
8178-511: Was diagnosed with autism , which prompted Murray to discover traits of the condition in himself. In an interview with Image , Murray described himself as "a high-performing Asperger ". In 1971, Murray resigned from his "respectable cover occupations" of translator and public servant in Canberra (1970) to write poetry full-time. The family returned to Sydney, but Murray, planning to return to his home at Bunyah, managed to buy back part of
8272-399: Was later translated into English, Spanish and German. The second part under the title "Nyctivoe" was initially published in 2001 in Greek and German, and came out in English in 2005. This work was substituted in 2014 by a new version under the title With the People from the Bridge . Various artists have brought Lyacos' work in different artistic media. Austrian artist Sylvie Proidl presented
8366-558: Was most recently reissued in 1996. Murray described himself, perhaps half-jokingly, as the last of the " Jindyworobaks ", an Australian literary movement whose white members sought to promote indigenous Australian ideas and customs , particularly in poetry. Though not a member, he was influenced by their work, something that is frequently discussed by Murray critics and scholars in relation to his themes and sensibilities. In 2007, Dan Chiasson wrote in The New Yorker that Murray
8460-650: Was presented in 2013. Two contemporary classical music compositions inspired by the trilogy, "Night and Day in the Tombs"and "The Un-nailing of our Childhood Years", by The Asinine Goat were released in February and June 2022 respectively. Dimitris Lyacos was Guest International Poet with Les Murray in 1998 Poetryfest International Poetry Festival, Aberystwyth , Wales. Henceforth he has conducted readings and has lectured on his work at various universities worldwide, including Oxford, Trieste, Hong Kong and Nottingham. In 2012 he
8554-604: Was responsible for publishing the first book of poetry by Philip Hodgins . In March 1990, Murray became literary editor of Quadrant . He edited several anthologies, including the Anthology of Australian Religious Poetry . First published in 1986, a second edition was published in 1991. It interprets religion loosely and includes the work of many of poets such A. D. Hope , Judith Wright, Rosemary Dobson , Kevin Hart, Bruce Dawe and himself. The New Oxford Book of Australian Verse
8648-446: Was translated in 21 languages with the full trilogy having appeared in 7 languages, being thus the most extensively translated work of contemporary Greek Literature in the new millennium. The Italian version of the trilogy was voted by Indiscreto Journal among the ten most important poetry books published in Italy in 2022. The trilogy would appear to belong to a context of tragic poetry and epic drama, albeit distinctly postmodern at
8742-580: Was under the control of the Frankish Empire ). Frankochiotika / Φραγκοχιώτικα (meaning 'Catholic Chiot') alludes to the significant presence of Catholic missionaries based on the island of Chios . Additionally, the term Greeklish is often used when the Greek language is written in a Latin script in online communications. The Latin script is nowadays used by the Greek-speaking communities of Southern Italy . The Yevanic dialect
8836-673: Was written by Romaniote and Constantinopolitan Karaite Jews using the Hebrew Alphabet . In a tradition, that in modern time, has come to be known as Greek Aljamiado , some Greek Muslims from Crete wrote their Cretan Greek in the Arabic alphabet . The same happened among Epirote Muslims in Ioannina . This also happened among Arabic-speaking Byzantine rite Christians in the Levant ( Lebanon , Palestine, and Syria ). This usage
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