Peter Bien focuses on Kazantzakis' obsession with the demotic, the language "on the lips of the people," showing how it governed his writing, his ambition, and his involvement in Greek politics and educational reform. Kazantzakis' obsession worked against him in his Odyssey and found its natural vehicle only in his translation of Homer's Iliad and his novels, Zorba the Greek, The Last Temptation of Christ, and The Greek Passion.
Originally published in 1972.
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Peter Bien has devoted his academic life to the study of the writers of modern Greece, translating and commenting on their work, in both literary and popular periodicals. He has translated three of Kazantzakis's major novels, The Last Temptation of Christ; Saint Francis, and Report to Greco, and Myrivilis's Life in the Tomb. Most recently, he is the author of YANNIS RITSOS: COLLECTED STUDIES & TRANSLATIONS (Red Dragonfly Press, 2011).
