Edmund Keeley

My problem is that our relationship was too solid, on the whole, to be anecdotal. She was, for a while, my first reader, both for my translations and novels I was working on, and her commentary was both generous and professional, never really anecdotal. And whenever we met, talk was more that of brother and sister than anything else, full of talk of ourselves and of mutual friends—or even of enemies. I do remember one occasion on the pebble beach in front of Limni, Evia, when she read my favorite Ritsos translation, "Penelope's Despair," and Carolyn told me in a firm voice that a crucial line wasn't right. In the poem, when Penelope finally recognizes her disguised husband and greets him, my original line (as originally published) was as follows: " . . . And she said 'Welcome" to him /hearing her voice sound foreign, distant . . ." Carolyn: "You don't need 'to him.' It changes the tone and the rhythm of the line. Please get rid of it." And of course I did in subsequent publications.