Time Stitches: a Poet Converses with her Translator

Eleni Kefala and Peter Constantine

with Elodie Laügt

in collaboration with Byre World

20 September 2023, 6.30pm – Byre Theatre

Time Stitches by Eleni Kefala is a poetry book about roots and uprooting, personal and collective history in a broken time, and the power of poetry to stitch together the threads of our past and future. Peter Constantine offers a “stunning, powerful, and important” translation of “an exquisite set of linked poems that center around British colonial Cyprus, but radiate out into other eras, more distant in the past and more recent”.

A 2022 New York Times Globetrotting pick, the Greek original won the State Prize for Poetry in Cyprus in 2014, while the translation received the 2022 Elizabeth Constantinides Translation Prize. Eleni, who teaches at the University of St Andrews, and Peter, a New York based, multi-award-winning literary translator and director of the Literary Translation Programme at the University of Connecticut, will talk about Time Stitches and share their thoughts on writing and what is lost and gained in translation.