Broumas, who translated these poems, has an obvious devotion to her fellow countryman, Odysseas Elytis, whose voice she professes to recreate in English, "with an accent, idiosyncratic," as she states in her prefatory note. She does indeed give him a distinct voice in English, but the accent and the idiosyncrasies are so pronounced that the renditions are often incomprehensible. Elytis is a difficult poet in Greek, shunning punctuation, running words into one another in clusters with little syntactic joining, but one can catch the sense, and the music of his language is enchanting, the imagery limpid and luminous, reflecting the effulgence of the Greek air and the sparkling waves of the Aegean. The same cannot be said of the facing English translation. The music is gone, the images faded, the sense often lost altogether or mutilated beyond recognition. The first line of the first poem from "Sun the First" may serve as an illustration: "I don't know anymore the night terrible anonymity of death." Add a little rhythm and punctuation and the line begins to make sense: "I no longer know the night, death's terrible anonymity" (translation of Edmund Keeley in Voices of Modern Greece, ed. by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, 1981). The instances of outright errors of translation and infelicities mar every page. Broumas's heart was in the right place, but she should have made use of an English interpreter.