In this article I examine the reception of Greek tragic myth in the work of Greek-Cypriot poet Kyriakos Charalambides (1940-). Classical literature, myth, and history are staples of Charalambides’ poetry. Especially from “Meta-History” (1995) onwards, (tragic) myth and history, now a dominant thematics, are used as instruments for exploring disquieting issues of destiny and identity, increasingly distanced from the specifics of Cyprus. In his most recent collections (“Desire”, 2012, and “In the Language of Weaving”, 2013) Charalambides puts myth and tragedy in the service of almost purely aesthetic and metaliterary concerns. In the second part of the article, by way of example, I offer close readings of a group of poems that concern the House of Atreus, the most populated group of tragedy-related poems in Charalambides. In chronological order, I discuss: from “Meta-History” (1995), “Ardana II”; from “Quince Apple” (2006), “Clytemnestra, Dreaming and Waking”; from “Desire” (2012), “Agamemnon”; and from “In the Language of Weaving” (2013), “Orestes”.
