Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke was a Greek poet, translator and lecturer.
Life
She was born in Athens, the daughter of Eleni from Patras and Yannis Anghelakis from Asia Minor. Her godfather was the Cretan writer Nikos Kazantzakis, a close friend of her parents. She married Rodney Rooke in 1963. While a very young child she contracted a bacterial infection that ate affected her bones and left her with a severe limp and a stunted arm. She attended primary and secondary school in Athens. She followed courses at the Universities of Athens and Nice, completing her studies with a degree in translation and interpretation at the University of Geneva. As well as working as a translator, she produced pistachio nuts at her orchard on the island of Aegina, where her parents had bought an old house in the 1920s and planted pistachio trees. She spent most of her time in a rented flat in Athens, but it was in Aegina that she felt most at home. She published her first poem in the magazine Καινούργια εποχή in 1956. The themes of her poetry include the close relation between the human being and the natural world; a constant meditation on death; the experience of being a woman in a society that has traditionally circumscribed women’s activities; the indispensable contribution of sex and passionate love to the fulfilment of the self; the often tragic but at times triumphant dependency of the self on the body; and the aspiration to transcend the limitations of the body by means of the body itself. A deeply philosophical as well as a sensual poet, two of her last books consist of self-analyses in the form of monologues and dialogues between different aspects of herself. She became one of the best known and best loved poets in Greece. In 1985 she received the second State Poetry Prize, in 2000 the Kostas and Eleni Ourani Prize from the Academy of Athens, and in 2014 she was awarded the Grand State Prize for Literature for the totality of her work. Her poetry has been published in at least eleven languages. Her literary translations were done chiefly from English and from Russian. The authors she translated from English include Saul Bellow, Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney, Sylvia Plath, Dylan Thomas, Derek Walcott. The Russian authors she translated include Leonid Andreyev, Vasily Grossman, Mikhail Lermontov, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Alexander Pushkin, Varlam Shalamov, Andrei Voznesensky.
