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...in editing and translating the poems in Shipwrecks/Shelters, you considered, among other things, Maurice Scève’s idea that ‘translation, like love or music, involves being apart together’. Could you elaborate on that?

I was inspired by the essay ‘Ensemble Discord’ by translator Richard Sieburth. The quote in its entirety is, ‘translation like love or music involves being apart together, mutually ingathered by an interval or caesura that…renders us ensembles discords’. ...

​...Translation itself also embodies this motion from separateness to unity and inhabits the caesura between two independent spaces.  In the meantime, the very act of translating is analogous to eros and desire. The translator tries to get under the skin of the object, translate the poem/poet into something recognizable, reflect, surrender. As essayist Eliot Weinberger argues, translation is an act of self-abnegation, subordination; of the putting aside of ego. 
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Now available in Athens ​at Little Tree Books (Kavalloti 2, Koukaki) and Lemoni Books (Iraklidon 22, Thissio)!

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Press on Shipwrecks/Shelters

Musicality aside, it seems there is a vital political imperative to deliver these translations in this trembling world....These are poems of disruption, fragmentation, dystopia, departure, maternal folds. I am moved by them. I can’t make head nor tail of the Greek but the poems catch in my throat. Politics infuse each line, you have to look it straight in the eye, and yet there are other rewards. Each poem takes me by surprise. There is light and there is hope. This is a very lovely book, essential.

- Paula Green, Poetry Shelf

Wellington publisher Seraph Press is launching [has launched] a series of translation chapbooks, beginning with Shipwrecks/Shelters: Six Contemporary Greek Poets, edited and translated by Vana Manasiadis, and Observations: Poems, by Claudio Pasi, translated by Tim Smith with Marco Sonzogni. Both collections end with a poem translated into te reo Māori – by Hemi Kelly in Shipwrecks/Shelters and one by Te Ataahia Hurihanganui in Observations – which the translators wanted to include as an acknowledgement of the indigenous language of New Zealand.  Of the series, Seraph publisher Helen Rickerby says: “The idea came from my co-series editor Vana Manasiadis, whose first poetry collection, Ithaca Island Bay Leaves: A Mythistorima, I published in 2009. She has spent many years living in Greece, and when she came back a couple of years ago she felt the loss of literature from other languages, as we don't read much poetry in translation here. We had talked about publishing a single chapbook of her translations from Greek, but then I introduced her to Marco Sonzogni (who teaches Italian and literary translation at Victoria University) and she suggested to me the idea of an ongoing series.”

​- Sarah Jane Barnett, The Pantograph Punch