06/11/2026
Tonight:
The Grolier Poetry Book Shop Lecture Series Talk 3 features Gary Whited and Maria Zervos delivering the lecture “Steps of Desire, Paths of Truth: Sappho and Parmenides in Translation” with an introduction by Fred Marchant on June 11, 2026 at 7 pm. Please join us in person or virtually. Please note in person is standing room only. Sign up via our website.
Gary Whited and Maria Zervos share a deep interest in translating ancient Greek poetry. In Whited’s work, Parmenides whispers to us across the epochs, while in Zervos’s translations, Sappho walks beside us in archaic steps.
For Whited, translating Parmenides began as a scholarly task during his doctoral work in philosophy, but soon the project expanded beyond traditional scholarship. He felt this ancient text calling on him to listen—to be in dialogue with Parmenides’ music and his poetry, not merely his concepts.
For Zervos, translating Sappho is a kind of ritual. As a visual artist whose work focuses on cultural memory, performance, and movement, she approaches translation as she does her art—blurring the boundaries between personal and political, ancient and modern.
While both writers strive for literal fidelity, staying close to the Greek, their translations emphasize the music and energy of the original texts. Following readings of both original poems and translations, Whited and Zervos will discuss methods of preserving these works and share new insights into what Parmenides and Sappho reveal about the nature of Being and the ethics of love.
Gary Whited is a poet, philosopher, psychotherapist and dancer. His first collection of poems titled, Having Listened, won the 2013 Homebound Publications Poetry Contest. In 2014 it received a Benjamin Franklin Silver Book Award, and in 2015 was translated into Russian and a bilingual edition was published. His new book, Being, There includes new poems along with his translation of the ancient Greek fragments of Parmenides from the 5th century BCE. This book dances between the poetic voice of Parmenides and the poetic remembrances of a young life on a prairie cattle ranch. His poems and essays have appeared in journals, including Salamander, Plainsongs, The Aurorean, Atlanta Review, Comstock Review, The Wayfarer, Poetry Daily, The Red Letters and in the Italian online journal, Kasparhauser.
Maria Zervos is a visual artist and poet working at the intersection of film, drawing, performance, and poetry. A former visiting fellow at Harvard University in Film and Visual Studies, she has studied Creative Writing at Emerson College and received her MFA from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. She is a Fulbright Scholar and has been awarded the NEON Organization artist grant and support from the J. F. Costopoulos Foundation to represent Greece at the International Studio & Curatorial Program in New York City. She has directed more than 30 video projects and exhibited internationally in solo and group shows. Her writing has appeared in Peripheries (Harvard University Press), Poeticanet, Salamander, and [φρμκ], among others. She is currently pursuing a PhD in the Department of Architecture at the National Technical University of Athens where her research bridges ancient Greek monuments with contemporary art and poetry.
