Early Works

Traces of the storyteller cling to the story the way the handprints of the potter cling to the clay vessel, Walter Benjamin once observed. In Valtinos’s stories, a master prose strategist manipulates form, texture, and momentum into a voice that bears witness to the deepest tracks of a turbulent Greek experience. Recognizing and confronting this image in the present is a heart-rending and urgent experience.
— Vangelis Calotychos

No one matches Thanassis Valtinos’s ability to capture Greece’s twentieth-century experience in all its complexity and breadth—and this collection brings together wonderful translations of some of his best works.
— Stathis Kalyvas

Jane Assimakopoulos and Stavros Deligiorgis’s translations rise deftly to the many challenges presented by these four important works by Thanassis Valtinos, with their range of tones, registers, and narrative styles. The writing is, like Valtinos’s, spare and strong, with rare lyrical flashes, and a force and forward momentum that keep you turning the pages until the very end.
— Karen Emmerich

O Little One

There’s a little child in us who doesn’t just shake with fear . . . but also cries and exults . . . This little one mingles his voice with ours . . . and remains fixed in his ancient serene state of wonder . . . He is the one who talks to the animals, to the trees, to the stones, to the clouds, to the stars, who populates the shade with ghosts and heaven with gods . . . He is the Adam who names all that he sees and feels . . . You are primordial, O Little One, and the world which you see anew is the primordial one.

John Martone offers anglophone readers an essential Pascoli.
— Maria Rosa Truglio

Martone matches Pascoli’s erudition and intelligent ordering. He brings us a clarity from the limpid and sometimes conflicting apparent simplicity of Pascoli’s work.
— Gerry Loose

Of John Martone: He remains throughout our greatest living miniaturist – his art a scaled-down work of nearly epic dimensions.
— Jerome Rothenberg

Clearing the Ground conveys the texture of Cavafy’s written life through the course of a near decade — the threads of preoccupation, the unfolding elucidations, the occurrence of the poems in their shining clarity. What appears is an active and intimate image of Cavafy, the poet and the man.

Laertes is proud to begin its list with the translations of Martin McKinsey, whose work is striking proof of literary translation as an art in its own right.