France | Greece | Hybrid Fiction | Modern Greek
October, 2020“λ” (for λιβελούλα, “libellula” or dragonfly) is one of the 24 chapters of Insect Alphabet (Αλφαβητάρι Εντόμων), each corresponding to a letter of the Greek alphabet and the initial of the name of an insect. Originally published in Greek (Patakis Publishers, 2018), this work cuts across the genres of novel and short story, and provides a glimpse into Europe from the Second World War to the present time, exploring violence, isolation, and the challenge of European identity. Famous or anonymous, no matter whether placed in a picturesque Greek island or in the Calais Jungle, in Paris, Vienna, Jerusalem, or Edinburgh, each of the main characters has an important encounter with an insect. Homeric heroines, Sappho, Rimbaud, Alban Berg, Jung, Pasolini, as well as anthropological material (“telling the bees” when the beekeeper dies, or the presumed affiliation between snakes and dragonflies), children’s questions (“Why don’t insects live in the sea?”), medical discoveries, the story of the loss and the resurfacing of a pioneer lepidopterist’s work that curiously unites the United States and the Soviet Union, have jointly contributed to forming the cocoon of this entomological alphabet that is inspired by the many faces of Europe, those enchanting and those disenchanting, and those that are both at once.
I translated “λ” into English, along with a few other chapters, after the book was awarded two prizes in Greece: the 2019 State Literary Award and the 2019 Anagnostis literary prize.
- Dimitra Kolliakou
Fiction (excerpts) | Greece | Modern Greek
November, 2019Amanda Michalopoulou’s Baroque, the source of the three excerpts presented here, is a book centered around a simple narrative concept that has complex consequences for the translator. Baroque traces the arc of a life, and one that resembles its author’s in countless details, including the incorporation of family and personal photographs. Only this novel—memoir?—moves backwards, from year fifty to year zero, with a chapter corresponding to each age. Not only do characters’ experiences, obsessions, cultural and historical surrounds change as we move backwards in time, but so too does the language of the book, until we arrive at the interior monologue of a two-year-old whose doll, fallen in a goldfish pond, will no longer sing—“Lala heavy. Sit open eyes cling clang. Lessgo steet. Sun dry Lala.”—and even another step back to a baby on her first birthday, still mostly outside of language as a means of communication: “from the moment she opened the box she won’t let go of the doll. She called her Lala. And then she said, ‘Atiti, na, atiti,’ which we don’t know what it means.”
In reading the book, I was reminded of one of my favorite stories by Amanda, “Teef,” from the volume I’d Like, which I translated over a decade ago. A new mother has been confined to a psychiatric institution with a rare condition that involves a rapid regression, a shedding of years as she speeds headlong toward the experience of her infant, shedding language and even her teeth along the way. Baroque felt like a slow-motion, defictionalized version of this story. It also felt like a kind of bildungsroman in reverse, one that challenged the teleology of a narrative form in which change would implicitly figure as growth. As an experiment in autofiction, the book resonates with Amanda’s life, to be sure, but it also resonates with her body of fiction: the story told in the chapter titled “Earthquake,” included here, appears in other clothes in the novel Why I Killed My Best Friend. It is this novel that Amanda and I were working on together at the inaugural Translation Lab in fall of 2012, an experience that opened us to forms of collaboration and friendship—between us, and with other participants—that we hadn’t foreseen would emerge from that brief but formative week. It is with great pleasure that I share these latest fragments of Amanda’s work, and of our shared life in, before, and between languages.
- Karen Emmerich
Greece | Modern Greek | Poetry (excerpts)
November, 2018When I first learned that George Prevedourakis had written a take on Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” “America,” and “To Aunt Rose” set during the Greek financial crisis, I was taken aback. Not because it’s uncommon to find a contemporary Greek poet responding, in poetry, to iconic English-language poems (Elias Lagios’s 1984 Ereme Ge is a poetic synthesis of various versions of the “The Waste Land”). What struck me about Prevedourakis’ book-length poem was its inventiveness, its musical complexity—mixing theory with street urgencies and Joycean obscurities—in a way that defied, reconfigured, and retranslated Ginsberg’s poems into a faithful original.
Kleftiko (Panoptikon Editions, 2013) is over 40 pages long, and has been adapted for two different theatre productions in Greece. The name "Kleftiko" a syllabic rhyme of “Ourliachto” (Howl) in Modern Greek, yet as a body of work, Kleftiko also sustains a structural rhyme with Ginsberg. In an inversion of the syntax of the iconic opening line of “Howl,” Prevedourakis begins: “I saw the best generations of my mind / destroyed by frivolous logic / hysterical, naked, and in debt / left to crawl the Balkan streets at dawn, searching / for ways to pay a necessary fix.” It’s clear from the beginning that this isn’t simply a re-staging, the way a production company might re-stage Twelfth Night as a non-binary post-apocalyptic Western. Everything is different, and what might seem familiar or recognizably Ginsberg—a sequence of repetitions or fragment of litany—is made unmistakably new.
My challenge then, as an American poet translating a Greek poem cast on an iconic American poem, has been to negotiate Prevedourakis’ original voice with that of the Ginsberg I know from my native English, and the Ginsberg I gradually recognize, through layers of filtration and synthesis, in Prevedourakis’ Greek. It is a translation of a radical translation and, I hope, in its own particular way, a faithful original.
- Brian Sneeden
Greece | Modern Greek | Poetry
March, 2018My translations of Yannis Ritsos’s postwar “Exercises 1950-60” chronologically follow Edmund Keeley and Karen Emmerich’s translations of Ritsos’s Diaries of Exile—a collection of poems written while Ritsos was a political prisoner during the Greek Civil War. Echoes of war, torture, and detention also litter “Exercises.” In this work, however, the references to atrocity are less immediate. Details like a sailor’s bobbing cap expose the essence of war in the everyday, rather than documenting the experience of detention, as the poems in Diaries of Exile do. Keeley and Emmerich note that Ritsos’s “I” withered during detention, his pronouns grew ever more collective, and his lines shrank. Formally, his “Exercises” are similarly impersonal and many are still short in line length. The difference in their construction is primarily conceptual, in that Ritsos, when writing these later poems, was consumed with what to say about atrocity.
Scholar and translator Minas Savvas once asked Ritsos whether writing, for him, was a means of survival. “It is a refuge and it is power,” Ritsos replied. “Power, moral, and intellectual power—that’s what good, fulfilling writing is, the power to shape words that open up new realities in the mind. That’s what has sustained me.” Martin McKinsey argues, in the introduction to his translations of Ritsos’s Late into the Night, that more than anything else a Marxist hope kept Ritsos alive, sustaining him through years of imprisonment and torture. Both writing and politics, then, ultimately determined Ritsos’s literary response to war. Like Paul Celan and George Oppen, Ritsos also struggled with how to respond, but unlike his contemporaries, Ritsos didn’t nearly sever the social contract with his readers. A Communist and leftist to the bone, Ritsos wrote instead toward revolution.
In “Exercises,” Ritsos’s voice is at once sodden and airy. Rocks are pensive, agency is limited, a star does not believe the man looking it in the eye, and one gets used to others “finding endless evidence against” him. These poems, however, remain hopeful.
Ritsos refuses to submit solely to the ills of war; rather, he infuses his poems with the smell of the sea, the sound of coffee being ground, the fluffiness of a woman’s smile. What shimmers throughout these micro-narratives is what I might label the celebration of simply living after torture and war. As bodies wash up on dark coasts in these poems, Ritsos does not forget to celebrate the meaning of life in the sparsest of gestures.
Seven years after writing these “Exercises,” Ritsos was again imprisoned for his political ideals. He kept writing. Although his poetry was often banned during his lifetime, today his writing is still sung by the left at protests, and it is this staying power that I turn to in his poems. As I read and translate Ritsos into the global unrest of the present, I find his refusal to turn away from the most horrifying and the most beautiful is exactly what makes his voice so necessary now.
- Spring Ulmer
Greece | Modern Greek | Short Fiction
December, 2017This short story is one of thirteen that appear in Konstantinos Poulis’ acclaimed fiction debut Ὁ Θερμοστάτης [Thermostat] (Melani Editions, 2014). Poulis and I met on the remote Aegean island of Icaria in the heady Greek summer of 2015—the summer of the “Greferendum” and capital controls, when the fate of Europe seemed to hang in the hands of a tiny nation on the continent’s margins. When I passed through Athens on the way back to the United States, I made a point of stopping by Poulis’ favorite bookstore, Politeia, to pick up a copy of Ὁ Θερμοστάτης. On the plane ride home I read “The Leonardo DiCaprio of Exarcheia” and quickly realized that, without knowing it, I had just met one of the country’s most unique new creative voices.
Today Greece is best known for an illustrious antiquity and ongoing financial crisis. Traces of both appear in the stories collected in Ὁ Θερμοστάτης, yet in oblique and unexpected ways. In «Θρίαμβος» [“Triumph”], the narrator recounts a memory of how one teacher, a philologist, handled an awkward classroom moment by asking a student to read out loud from a piece of pornography—pornography written in the most elevated Greek literary style. In «Νά πῶς μὲ λὲν ἐμένα!» [“That’s what my name is!”], a man frustrated by his inability to understand conversations about the economy sets out to educate himself through impenetrable financial news articles—only to find true satisfaction between the covers of a poetry anthology.
But while these stories were written during the Greek crisis, they are not motivated by or about the crisis. They are stories, above all, about imagination, in the broadest, most thrilling and even perilous (as in the case of “The Leonardo DiCaprio of Exarcheia”) sense of the word. Throughout the collection, Poulis himself also imaginatively experiments with literary form: «Ἑνάμισι τετραγωνικὸ μέτρο» [“One and a half square meters”] is as short as the space it describes is small. In both architecture and dialogue, the stories also bear signs of their author’s decades spent as a theater practitioner: fresh from his degree (and to his mother’s dismay) Poulis first earned money by putting on impromptu performances in front of Athens’ Monastiraki metro station.
As the first piece in the collection, “The Leonardo DiCaprio in Exarcheia” is in many ways programmatic. Its main character, Takis, is a boy with a dream. But it is a wild, insistent dream that soon takes a life of its own—and Takis’ life along with it. The story steadily transforms into its own kind of dreamscape, its contours shaped by a narrator who, through digressive anecdotes and first- and second-person interjections, lures the reader into a contract of complicity in Takis’ fate. For unlike Takis, who is at first exhilarated, then baffled and imprisoned by, his dream, both narrator and reader know from the start that “this is just how dreams are—a land where 1 + 1 = 5 and dogs recite Milton.”
- Johanna Hanink
Greece | Modern Greek | Novella (excerpt)
July, 2017This is a self-standing excerpt of my first book, the novella Karyotype, which was published by Kichli in November 2014 in Greece. The book is a third-person narration of the years a Greek immigrant biologist spent in Oxford, UK. It describes, in a low-temperature, low-pace, melodic prose, how the protagonist uses his work to address questions about himself and the ties to his family and past. Gradually, he becomes his own “guinea pig,” isolating himself from all social activities, but struggling to find any answer whatsoever. Still, in his pursuit of answers, fears and agonies common to all people of his generation (born in the late ‘70s-early ‘80s) are revealed and revisited. The book was very warmly received by both readers and literary critics. According to one of the reviews: "Papantonis drives [the protagonist's] ego to its limits while simultaneously putting in play its interaction with the smoldering metal of History in the most ingenious way" (To Vima, January 2015). According to another: "This first book is not a cosmopolitan one, because it is not, in its essence, Greek. It is European. Papantonis writes based on his British experience without any filters, like someone who has lost his Greek identity. His protagonist does not compare "here" to "there," as only "there" exists" (The Books’ Journal, January 2016). Hence, this excerpt, that finishes with an emotional and empathetic monologue from the protagonist's sister, is a timely read, given the large sociopolitical changes on both sides of the Atlantic.
The excerpt featured here was translated by me, the author, and edited by Dr. Cornelia Cook, a Senior Lecturer of English Literature at the Queen Mary University of London, UK.
- Akis Papantonis
Greece | Modern Greek | Short Fiction
September, 2014Originally published in ViMagazino, the magazine supplement to one of Greece's largest and most popular Sunday newspapers, "The Black Box" is a wry allegory about the economic crisis that has devastated Greek society. Like Asteriou's fiction in general, the story makes use of biting humor, a playful pastiche of genres, and provocative references from popular culture to creatively defy the hopelessness and cynicism of prevailing political discussions. His work has been described as "terrifyingly topical," as well as "multidimensional" and "masterfully crafted." These attributes are evident in the story, which is narrated in the voice of a weary, ineffectual police detective, who is frustrated at every turn by the missing suspect. Drawing from crime procedurals, folktales, and the lurking uncanniness of the Gothic ghost story, Asteriou weaves together a neo-magical realist fable with precision, economy, and an enviably light touch. As in most magical realist fiction, his characters are theatricalized types: the traveling American magician Balthazar, also known as Shirkgood or Lawrence, after Lawrence of Arabia, is but the most blatant embodiment of this idea of identity as multilayered performance. And it is precisely this playfully performative aspect of the story that remains with us at the end. What happened to Akis Konstantellos? To Balthazar? We are left without answers to these questions. Yet our frustration is perhaps outweighed by our wonderment: there is certainly something satisfying in the fact that the steadily increasing number of missing persons in the story are, to the end, able to defy the institutional mandates of discipline, reason, confession, and resolution.
- Patricia Felisa Barbeito
Greece | Modern Greek | Short Fiction
August, 2012Something Will Happen, You'll See, the 2010 short fiction collection by Christos Ikonomou from which "The Steadfast Tin Soldier" is taken, is a wrenching yet optimistic elegy to Greece's working classes. It won the prestigious Best Short Story Collection State Award and was the most-reviewed Greek book of 2011.
Ikonomou takes us to the heart of the western suburbs of the port of Piraeus and builds sixteen luminous stories around characters such as pensioners, protesters, laborers, and the unemployed. The author's greatest strength lies in his ability to convey silences, to interpret gestures and the unseen, and translate them into images both vivid and haunting.
Something Will Happen, You'll See has been translated into Italian (Editori Riuniti, 2012), and the Italian newspaper La Repubblica described Christos Ikonomou as "the Greek Faulkner." A German edition (C.H. Beck) is forthcoming.
Greece | Modern Greek | Novel (excerpt)
August, 2012George Pavlopoulos' second novel evokes the ideological crisis of Europe, its ambivalence about its glorious past, and its mounting crisis of identity. The author takes us into the heart of a fragile Europe plagued by the death of -isms and the struggle between collectivism and individualism. Why do Europeans seem to be steeped in melancholy? What does the future hold for the next generation?
The story unfolds in a nameless city of unspecified locale, which in turns evokes Paris, London, and Berlin. It all starts at the historic cinema Steam, which is about to close down in order to be replaced by a contemporary museum: the brainchild of ruthless plutocrat Max Plinkie. At the core of the heterogeneous group that decides to spend the last night at the cinema as an act of protest is a group of close friends, former children of the wild '60s. That night will turn out to be a unique opportunity for them to reminisce on the past and redefine their position in an ever-changing present. For young Lis, who stands as their natural successor, that night will serve as the impetus for a peculiar quest into her own identity. Armed with her camera, she will try to keep alive the images of a gradually vanishing world by embarking on a lonely and evocative journey whose path will be irrevocably marked by the presence of legendary artist, Flogenis.
Drama (Excerpts) | Greece | Modern Greek
July, 2007A Mother and Father, a Man and a Woman, a Doctor and a Nurse, and an unfortunate victim all cross paths in a hospital and become intertwined in ways that push all boundaries of the appropriate and expected. Exploring the deeper comic underbellies of violence, sexuality, and caretaking, the playwright seeks to unburden the audience, to help them diminish their fear about moral issues, illness, and death.
(Alexi Kaye Campbell)
The Brooklyn Rail welcomes you to our web-exclusive section InTranslation, where we feature unpublished translations of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and dramatic writing. Published since April 2007, InTranslation is a venue for outstanding work in translation and a resource for translators, authors, editors, and publishers seeking to collaborate.
We seek exceptional unpublished English translations from all languages.
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