Abstract
The important questions any project on translation history may ask can be distilled into three basic queries: Where can change be observed? Which intermediaries are involved? What materials are relevant? This article focuses on a moment when such a change occurred, namely, the move from preventive censorship to ostensible freedom of expression in Greece in 1970. New publishing houses appeared at this point and sought to make up for lost ground. The article discusses the role of selected intermediaries who can be credited with the first ‘resistance’ anthologies during this transitional period, two anthologies of Brecht’s poetry. As is shown, principles of selection, arrangement and presentation for this previously neglected genre of Brecht’s oeuvre can be seen against the backdrop of a habitus of cultural ambassadorship that was just emerging. A critical overview of information gleaned from translation catalogues, interviews, memoirs and the translated texts themselves, shows that the two anthologies indeed constituted a whole that was greater than the sum of its parts.