With two Nobel laureates in recent years - George Seferis and Odysseus Elytis - modern Greece has an extraordinarily intense and dynamic poetic tradition. Translations of all of the following are excellent.

 

C.P. Cavafy   Collected Poems (Chatto & Windus; Princeton UP). The complete works, translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, of perhaps the most accessible modern Greek poet, resident for most of his life in Alexandria. For some, The Complete Poems of Cavafy (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich), translated by Rae Dalven, or The Poems of C. P. Cavafy by John Mavrogordato (Chatto & Windus, UK) are superior versions.

Odysseus Elytis   The Axion Esti (Anvil Press; Pittsburgh UP); Selected Poems (Anvil Press; Viking Penguin, o/p); The Sovereign Sun (Bloodaxe Books; Temple UP, o/p). The major works in good English versions. Easier to find is Collected Poems (Johns Hopkins UP), which includes virtually everything except The Axion Esti .

Modern Greek Poetry (Efstathiadis, Athens). Despite the publisher's reputation for shoddy work, this in fact is a decent anthology of translations, predominantly of Seferis and Elytis.

Yannis Ritsos   Exile and Return, Selected Poems 1967-1974 (Anvil Press; Ecco Press). A fine volume of Greece's foremost Leftist poet, from the junta era when he was internally exiled on Sámos.

George Seferis   Collected Poems, 1924-1955 (Anvil Press, o/p; Princeton UP, o/p). Virtually the complete works of the Nobel laureate, with Greek and English verses on facing pages. More recent, but lacking the parallel Greek text, is Complete Poems (Anvil Press; Princeton UP).