One of the most famous texts of recent years, a foundational poem of the 20th century in a bilingual edition, modern translation, and rich commentary that illuminates the content and highlights its significance for contemporary literature.

"The Waste Land" was published in 1922, the "miraculous year" of European literature, as it was called, since the same year also saw the publication of Joyce's Ulysses and Rilke's Duino Elegies. It had as much influence as any other poem that year. Its first reader, Ezra Pound, described it as "among the greatest pages ever written in the English language" and "a legitimization of the modernist demand." "The younger generations," as Takis Papachronis wrote, "saw in it the most faithful and formally the most perfect representation of a world that collapsed and decayed, a world that lost the meaning of every value and became alienated from any ideal."

Shortly after World War I, the world is presented as a wasteland "in which every experience is colored by the dominant feeling of living death," as Simeon Stamboulou writes, and where solace is sought only "in the shadows." With dozens of voices and numerous references to world literature, a blend of despair, satire, and prophecy, the five-part poem "resembles," as its translator continues, "a modernist montage in an era when cinema had not yet elevated the stitching of images into an art. If James Joyce visualizes the changes of consciousness within a day, or Paul Valéry within a night, Eliot stitches together in a notebook the great cracks and chasms of our aged continent over the past 2,000 years."