SOURCE: "Poetry with an Accent," in American Book Review, Vol. 9, No. 1, January-February, 1987, pp. 22-3.

In the review below, Malkoff examines Olga Broumas's literal translations in the collection What I Love: Selected Poems of Odysseus Elytis, and concludes that the translations, though problematic and inconsistent at times, are still "interesting" and of some value.

New translations of poems (which, like most of those selected by Olga Broumas for What I Love, have been recently rendered into English by more than competent translators) promise something new. In this respect, Olga Broumas, for better and for worse, does not disappoint. She informs us at the outset that she intends to preserve the strangeness, the foreignness of Elýtis's texts. It ought to be, she asserts, "English with an accent."

This raises basic questions. In the very first poem, "Sun the First," a critical sentence is translated: "I don't know anymore the...