Episode: Phaedrus (247c6-8) by Yorgos Kentrotis, translated and introduced by Paschalis Nikolaou

Abstract

Yorgos Kentrotis was born in 1958 in Laconia, the Peloponnese. Following studies in Law at Greek and German universities, he was eventually won over by literature and translation. He is currently Professor in Translation Theory at the Ionian University in Corfu. Since the early 1980s he has steadily produced translations from ancient Greek, Latin, German and Russian–of works by, among others, Plato, Cicero, Robert Musil, Pablo Neruda, Vladimir Mayakovsky and Bertolt Brecht. His essays and monographs on comparative literature, poetics and translation are widely recognized. A first collection of his poems appeared in 2006; Kentrotis has published five collections since. In 2014, he put out a collection of no less than 500 of Brecht’s poems in Greek translation, as well as a selection of epigrams from the Palatine Anthology. A similar edition of Paz’s poetry is forthcoming. Most recently in 2015, he published the long-awaited Greek translation of Giambattista Vico’s (1668–1744) La Scienza Nuova (1725)