Date: Sat 12 April

Time: 6.30pm for 7pm start

Venue: Gleebooks, 49 Glebe Point Rd, Glebe

Cost: Free entry

Bookings: 02 9750 0440

Language: English (with summaries in Greek)

In 1939, Nikos Kazantzakis published his long epic poem Odyssey of 33,333 verses. The poem caused a stir in Greek literature, and after its translation by Kimon Friar in 1956, throughout Western literary circles. This lecture examines briefly the “longest poem of the Western world” and explains its aesthetics, ideology and form.

Through readings of some of its crucial parts the lecture explores the function of such a work within the modernist and postmodernist literary culture. Is Kazantzakis’ poem an irrelevant fossil from the past or the “New Fifth Gospel” as the writer of Zorba the Greek wanted it to be?

The lecture discusses the literary and the non-literary character of the poem which remains an unresolved enigma in the tradition of European and American poetry.