Paschalis Nikolaou (Greece)

On the Quality of Light in Cambridge

Chance encounters sometimes turn out to be truly consequential: few, I think, equal my being introduced to Richard Berengarten in the winter of 2004. I travelled from Norwich – where I was finishing my doctoral thesis at UEA – to London for the launch of the latest issue of The London Magazine, at the invitation of Sebastian Barker, the late poet and LM’s editor at the time. That issue featured my translation of ‘An Oral Self-Portrait’, a short prose memoir by Odysseus Elytis. The launch took place in a function room adorned with some exquisite paintings, in the same building that housed Christie’s auction house. I was certainly happy to meet Barker in person, a gracious host who would publish a couple of book reviews by me in later issues of the magazine (a great show of confidence to a doctoral student tentatively accumulating his first publications). Then, at the end of the evening, Barker walked me to ‘someone you should probably know, given your shared interests’. At the time going by Richard Burns, the man gave me his card as we parted ways. We soon started exchanging emails, discussing translation, exchanging thoughts about Anglophone and Greek poetry. A few weeks later he asked me if I knew Nasos Vayenas, his old friend from the 1970s – when the latter was completing his own thesis in Cambridge.

That meeting above Christie’s has resulted in one of my most cherished and deepest friendships, continuing after my return to Greece, where I took up a position at the Ionian University. And of course, there has been a host of publications: in 2010, a few years after I did meet Richard’s friend from the 1970s, we co-edited Vayenas’s Selected Poems for Anvil Press. This project also ushered in a period of collaboration that included some of the most satisfying moments of my professional life, with several Greek poets appearing in translation in literary magazines, as well as in the 2015 chapbook, 12 Greek Poems after Cavafy. That same year, a co-edited volume appeared as well –Richard Berengarten: A Poet in Inter-Views; and just this summer, a companion volume to his major long poem Changing is coming out – all from Shearsman Books, Richard’s publisher for more than a decade.

It has been a prolific partnership, and thousands of emails attest to the fact. Yet what stays with me are moments with, and kind acts from Richard over the years – and in a period that took me from an impressionable PhD candidate to a middle-aged academic: my early visits with him in Cambridge, being driven or walked around the city; or afternoons discussing poetry and translation and secrets of academic writing at Argyle St, with Richard and Melanie having me stay for dinner before I took one of the last trains back to Norwich; the impromptu party they threw for me soon after I passed my viva, Richard ordering online for me that evening a hundred business cards stating ‘Dr.’; my invitation, at his behest, to the 2013 Poetry Festival in Belgrade and our sojourns in that city; more recently Richard and Melanie’s visit in Corfu: the tavernas there reminded him of his very first stays in Greece, decades earlier.

Throughout the years, Richard has given feedback on my academic work and patiently humoured me when I emailed him – often interrupting his own writing – to suggest yet another translation we could embark on together. Others will also attest to this generosity, and the magnanimity of the man, how deeply he cares for his friends: it is no accident that so many of them, and from such disparate parts of the globe, feel very close to a certain house in Cambridge – and often join forces.

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