The great poet and translator, Jeni Mastoraki, breathed her last at the age of 75 on Tuesday night (30.07.2024).
Jenny Mastorakis was the sister of Nikos Mastorakis, who announced her death with a touching post on Facebook. She was one of the most important poets of her generation.
“Jenny left us. She breathed her last difficult breath today. My little sister, important poet, mother, grandmother and sister who loved us very much and we loved her very much, we love her and we will love her.
Please, instead of condolences, give your love to those you hold dear in your life,” Nikos Mastorakis wrote in his message.
A little later, in memory of Jenis Mastorakis, he uploaded a photo of the two of them from when he was a teenager and she was a little girl.
Who was Jenny Mastoraki?
Jeni Mastoraki was born in 1949 and studied Byzantine and medieval literature in Athens.
It appeared in letters in 1971 with the poems “The synaxari of holy youth”, which were published in the “Poetic Anti-anthology” of Dimitris Iatropoulos.
In the following years he published the collections “Tolls” (1972), “To Soi” (1978), “Stories for the Deep” (1983) and “With a Wreath of Light” (1989), as well as poems in various publications.
In addition to poetry, she also left behind an important work in translation. Knowing English, German, Spanish and Italian, Jeni Mastoraki translated literary and theatrical works, essays, poetry.
He translated into Greek in a unique way the works of Tz. D. Salinger (“The Catcher in the Rye”), Elias Canetti, Edgar Allan Poe, Harold Pinter, Lewis Carroll, Heinrich Bell, Federico Garcia Lorca (“Germa”) and Cervantes.
In 1989, Columbia University in New York City awarded him the Thornton Niven Wilder Award, while in 1992 he was awarded by the International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY) for the translation of the children’s book “The Dawn Traveler”.
In 2020 she received the Grand Prize for Letters for her overall contribution which “shows the inextricable relationship between writing and reading and her experiential engagement with language, history and literature”.
#Sadness #loss #poet #Jeni #Mastoraki
