96 research outputs found
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Translating a Canonical Author: C. P. Cavafy
Translation, Walter Benjamin reminds us, involves the afterlife of the work, not the author’s life. Teaching canonical works with attention to the history of their survival enables students to move away from fixed notions of authorship and invention. Translation becomes a hermeneutic practice worthy of study in its own right, where learning how to interpret is indistinguishable from learning how to translate into different media. These points form the basic rationale of my course on C. P. Cavafy (1863–1933), a poet of the Greek diaspora who lived in Alexandria and profoundly influenced many prose writers, poets, and artists, from E. M. Forster and Marguerite Yourcenar to James Merrill and Duane Michals
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Literature Between Languages and Its Lessons for Translation
As I considered a lecture topic that would honor the translator and ambassador of Greek letters Kirnon Friar, I found myself pondering the collection of translations I was editing of Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke's poetry. Friar was Anghelaki-Rooke's first translator into English and a great supporter of hers, especially during the difficult years of censorship under the Colonels (1967-1974). Her poetry fit into the last category: Greek literature that isn't about America, but that somehow registers the pressure of English. Editing her work I was struck by how easily her Greek translated into English. At times it seemed as if her poetry had been thought-out in English. In honor of Friar I want to address the relation between Greek and English in Greek poetry, in particular the case of Anghelaki-Rooke. How might her poetry, situated at the edge of Greek and always in conversation with English, help us see the possibilities that multilingual literature has to offer translation
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Greek Poetry Elsewhere
This article is an examination of the work of two contemporary women writers, Olga Broumas and Irini Spanidou. By focusing on the issues of translation and immigration in their writing I can illustrate the importance of reading Greek, Greek American and American literature together as well as some of the ways in which Greek poetry haunts their texts both as fetish and as a resource for a highly innovative, multilingual poetics
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Tracing the Alphabet in Psycharis’s Journey
Yannis Psycharis left a large legacy of novels, scholarly essays, and personal lore in French and Greek. I will focus on his book My Journey, with some reference to his lecture "The Kiss" (1893), because it offers a window onto how Psycharis's experience as a writer of the Diaspora affects his views on language. Psycharis's My Journey, half literary travelogue, half diatribe, is most often read for its contribution to the "struggle" or "idea," to make demotic the national language of Greece, and by doing so give Greece her rightful place in Modern Europe. This is how Psycharis himself understood his project. Psycharis and the majority of critics who have written about his work view My Journey as national literature, not Diaspora literature, or, for that matter, a contribution to linguistics or translation theory. As we will see, however, this canonical text of monolingualism in the name of nation-building actually deals with many different forms of Greek as well as French, German, Italian, and Turkish and can be read as offering a vision of the Greek language as irremediably diasporic and multilingual. A closer look at how words are moved from one language or form of language to another in this text shows that translation, transliteration, etymology, and loan words are not just practical conventions in his writing, but conceptual models for grappling with cultural displacement. Along side the message of transparency and perfect substitution suggested by his oft-quoted aphorism "language and nation are one and the same," another tale of diasporic and linguistic disorientation unfolds
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Greek, Modern: Women Writers in English Translation
A discussion of Greek women's literature in translation
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Avant-garde translation: a conversation with Diamanda Galás
An interview with Diamanda Galás about her performances--embued with an intercultural and multilingual sensibility and informed by her Greek family's cultural heritage
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The Homophonic Imagination: On Translating Modern Greek Poetry
To focus on the sound of the source text is to run counter to the dominant translation strategy, which focuses on meaning. This is true more generally, but also in the case of Modern Greek poetry. Translations such as those by Edmund Keeley and Phillip Sherrard introduced the poetry of C. P. Cavafy, George Seferis, Odysseas Elytes and Yannis Ritsos in an idiom that reads easily in English and makes the living tradition of myth and history readily available to an Anglophone audience. The Greek tradition, with its notion that sound is meaning, complicates the picture. It is not that sound doesn't have meaning in British and American poetry. But in the Greek case, meter isn't imagined as additional information that situates the poem in a tradition and a culture; it is seen as the very stuff of political and historical consciousness. From the nineteenth-century national anthem of Dionysis Solomos to the prose poems of a contemporary poet such as Jenny Mastoraki, meter and rhyme are integrally related to the project of nation-making that began with the War of Independence in the 1820s and ended with the recent economic and political crisis
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Bruised necks and crumpled petticoats: What’s left of myth in contemporary Greek women’s poetry
For the most part contemporary Greek women poets seem suspicious of relying on classical myth. It is not that myth cannot be found in their poetry, but that by looking for it, by always trying to salvage myth, to uncover the submerged Homeric plot, we neglect to ask why it is so submerged, and what its disappearance makes room for. In such archaeological attempts to reconstruct what has been lost, we neglect to see how important the dismissal of myth and its unifying explanations may be
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Reading between Worlds: Contemporary Greek Women's Writing and Censorship
In this article I link the strength of Greek women's writing in recent decades to the authors' willingness to connect censorship under an authoritarian regime and under patriarchy. I focus on the ways in which women poets continued to deploy certain writing strategies that, although initiated in response to the dictator's press law, proved useful in articulating domestic power struggles. Drawing on the formative experience of writing under censorship, these writers in the 1980s forged a poetics based on a female relation to language and the literary tradition. I begin by outlining the cultural conditions under the dictatorship--in particular, the colonels' fear of linguistic and sexual undecidability--and show that the figure of woman (such as Lysistrata or Cassandra), used to represent this undecidability, becomes an important site of resistance. I then chart the shift from the allegorical use of the subversive woman in comic strips and novels written in the early 1970s to the linguistic attention women's poetry of the 1980s gives to mechanisms of censorship. The displacement of attention from the public enemy to the enemy at home in recent poetry by women has also led to the implication of their own writing in the power dynamics they analyze. Recognizing, as Cavafy observes, that "the barbarians"--whether colonels or men in general--are "a kind of solution," this poetry appears to move beyond substituting one enemy for another and to do so by admitting its discursive complicity in the enemy's operations
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Xenitia, the Nation, and Intralingual Translation
Modern Greek poets often imagine interlingual translation as intralingual—that is, as rewording within the same language when two distinct languages are involved. George Seferis and Yannis Ritsos provide two cases, Seferis in translating Ancient Greek poetry and Ritsos in translating Romanian, Czech, and Slovakian poetry. For these poet-translators on opposite sides of the political spectrum, the claim of intralingualism responds to different experiences of exile: Seferis as a refugee from Asia Minor and then as an overseas diplomat, Ritsos as a political prisoner and then as a Communist Party emissary. Intralingual translation assuages xenitia, the pain of not being able to go home, but it also masks interlingual differences that serve other cultural and political functions, whether imagining a national language that continues a valuable cultural past or serving as a transnational vehicle for unifying minor cultures
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