![]() Everything was a code, as I found out in conversations with Savva Kulish, the filmmaker, who became a good friend. (It is probably as my bones are getting older that I like being in the heat more.) I started going to Russia in 1986 for the Moscow film festival, when I was Director of the Cork Film Festival, and I was fascinated by how coded all the language was. And then, I began to travel a lot I have been travelling to Greece for the last thirty years or more, and I feel more and more at home there. These poets found each a particular voice, a voice for private reflection in a public idiom. I have always been drawn to the tensions of poetry and politics I cannot ignore politics. What I liked about Pasternak, Tsvetayeva, Akhmatova and Mandelstam was that they each navigated, in different ways, between a personal sensibility and a sense of what was happening in the world. I think it was probably my interest in politics as much as poetry that pulled me towards Russia for a while. I was always a dreaming child I was always dreaming myself “other where”. Theo Dorgan: My fascination with Russia and Greece has to do with my fascination with the “other place”. The poetic voices which seem to resound more powerfully are those of Constantine Cavafy, George Seferis and Katerina Anghelaki Rooke, among others. Later, modern Greek poetry is more clearly present from Sappho’s Daughter (2001) 3 onwards. ![]() Russian poets such as Pushkin, Mandelstam, and Akhmatova are in the background of many of your poems in The Ordinary House of Love (1990) 1 and Rosa Mundi (1995) 2. Similarly, this seems to be the case of literary influences. Your initial collections draw more on Russian landscapes your more recent work on Greece. Pilar Villar-Argáiz: There seems to be an evolution in your work.
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