AustLit

Since 1982 the 'In Their Own Image: Greek-Australians' National Project has been researching the historical and contemporary Greek-Australian presence in both Australia and overseas. It has gathered a considerable oral, literary and visual archive, produced various publications, created major socio-cultural history exhibitions that have toured nationally and internationally, undertaken film documentaries and multimedia presentations, and assisted in nourishing the next generation of Australian historians and sociologists by providing resources for both university teaching and research.

'The House with the Eucalypts, first published in 1975, constitutes a collection of poems in Greek by Dimitris Tsaloumas. In a bid to transmit these poems to a wider, always appreciative English speaking readership of this writer's creative output, and as a means of extending the parameters of the Tsaloumas canon, I decided to translate them into English. Though a daunting task, the process also proved singularly productive in that it afforded me a profound level of affinity with each word, nuance and silence within a framework of biculturalism and bilingualism. The island of Leros is the unifying image that binds the threads of the collection together. Sight, smell and touch all revolve around metaphors radiating the specificity of that particular spot that the poet perceived as his particular home (land) - his topos: a place that belongs to him and that he belongs to in terms of primordial birthright. Although the atmosphere is that of journeying back through the mists of time, Tsaloumas' evocation is neither nostalgic nor romantic, but very lucid in its portrayal of island life in the 1940s. Memory reaches an apotheosis of form in this collection, fortified by the desire to attain a mosaic of antithetical facets as encompassed within physical and metaphorical boundaries.' -- Author's abstract