George Seferis's 1936 poem Μɛ τον τρόπο του Γ. Σ. (“Me ton tropo tou G. S.”; “In the Style of G. S.”) can be read as figuring two different kinds of translation.Footnote 2 The very title involves interlingual translation as defined by Roman Jakobson, “an interpretation of verbal signs by means of some other language” (233), since it implicitly moves between Greek and French: “Me ton tropo tou” translates the conventional phrase “à la manière de,” reflecting Seferis's recurrent translation of European poetries as he attempted to develop his own style (hence the self-conscious inclusion of his initials; Seferis himself identified the interlingualism [Poiimata 429–30]). As the poem unfolds, however, a different kind of translation emerges, intralingual, which Jakobson defines as “rewording” or “an interpretation of verbal signs by means of other signs of the same language” (233).Footnote 3 Intralingual translation can be glimpsed in the first verse paragraph, where Seferis uses his life in the twentieth century to translate scenes from Greek antiquity: he imagines himself moving in a Greek landscape that is at once ancient and contemporary, mythological and commercial, containing θησαυρούς των Ατρɛιδών (“treasures of the Atreus kings”; “Me ton tropo” 99) as well as το ξɛνοδοχɛίο της Ωραίας Ελένης του Μɛνɛλάου (“the hotel ‘Pretty Helen of Menelaos’”), where Achilles-like he wears το πουκάμισο του Κɛνταύρου (“the Centaur's shirt”), listens to the pastoral σουραύλι (“flute”) and to Κασσάντρα (“Kassandra”) που λάλησɛ (“[when she] crowed”), and is shot in the hand by μια σαΐτα τιναγμένη ξαφνικά / από τα πέρατα μιας νιότης βασιλɛμένης (“an arrow suddenly let loose / from the sunset youth of a Byzantine kingdom now past”). (The Greek word for “setting” [βασιλɛμένης; vasilemenis] also means “royal” and recalls the purple-red robes of Byzantine emperors.) By the end of the poem, Ancient, Byzantine, and Modern Greek actually become one and the same language through an intralingualism enacted by a quotation from Aeschylus's Agamemnon, ὁρῶμɛν ἀνθοῦν πέλαγος Αἰγαῖον νɛκροῖς (“we see the ancient Aegean blossom with the dead”; 100). Seferis sees no need for a translation, although later editors provide it (Seferis, Poiimata 430). A context of linguistic and cultural continuity is created in which the Ancient Greek line shares its object νɛκροῖς (nekrois; “corpses” or “the dead”) with the repeated Modern Greek subject ɛκɛίνοι (ekeinoi; “those”) in the next two lines: ɛκɛίνοι που θέλησαν να πιάσουν το μɛγάλο καράβι μɛ το κολύμπι / ɛκɛίνοι που βαρέθηκαν να πɛριμένουν τα καράβια που δɛν μπορούν να κινήσουν (“[those Modern Greek] swimmers who tried to catch the Great Ship / those who tired of waiting for ships that never moved”; 100–01).
The presence of both kinds of translation in Seferis's poem can be seen as a response to the predicament of Greek culture in the 1930s. While serving as the Greek consul to Albania, Seferis had become acutely aware of the political stasis that prompted the military dictatorship of Ioannis Metaxas, a situation depicted in the poem as the windless impasse aboard the Aulis with the captain μαρμαρωμένος μɛς στ’ άσπρα και στα χρυσά (“marble-still, in white and gold”; 101). Translation can offer a poetic form of compensation, both collective and personal, although not without exposing difficult conditions that are densely expressed in the line that opens the poem: Όπου και να ταξιδέψω η Ελλάδα μɛ πληγώνɛι (“Wherever I go Greece wounds me”; 99). On the one hand, this line glances at the movement of interlingual translation through which a minor literature like Μodern Greek seeks to appropriate the prestige and resources of major foreign literatures like French and English to develop its traditions and practices—translation that “wounds” with the awareness of Greek limitations. On the other hand, the line glances at the movement of intralingual translation through which a minor literature like Modern Greek asserts an unbroken continuity with the ancient form of the language and therefore with its prestige and resources—translation that “wounds” with the awareness of Greek belatedness but simultaneously overcomes it.Footnote 4 In Seferis's poem, intralingualism comes to displace or occlude interlingualism by insisting that Ancient and Modern Greek are one and the same language. Yet the agony of this resolution never seems to have left Seferis: he formulates it again intralingually in the last line when he admits, Το καράβι που ταξιδɛύɛι το λένɛ ΑΓ ΩΝΙΑ 937 (“They call the ship that moves AG ONIA 937”; 101), a name whose broken capital letters recall ancient Greek inscriptions as well as Byzantine saints. AG is the abbreviation for Άγια (Aghia; “Saint”), and ships to this day bear saints’ names on their prows. Over the course of the poem, to translate “in the style of G. S.” means to replace interlingualism with intralingualism, imitation with integration, a style that best helps the poet deal with the pain of exile, what Greeks call ξɛνιτιά (xenitia), and that shows Greece, a nation of exiles, a way to imagine itself as whole again.
Translation is a central issue for exiles who have been uprooted from their homes, “constantly being unsettled, and unsettling others” (Said, Representations 53), since they are caught up in changing relationships to at least two languages, the languages of the place from which they feel separated and those of the place where they live out their feeling of separation.Footnote 5 Writing in and translating into the originary language become ways of connecting to the homeland and continuing to participate in the imaginary construction of the nation (B. Anderson). In Greece, as more generally on the edges of Europe and the Balkans, definitions of exile and attempts to distinguish exile from other forms of migrant displacement are particularly vexed issues and are always caught up with the question of translation.Footnote 6 Centuries of war and occupation have created a syncretic palimpsest of cultures and languages where identity and self-definition are hotly contested. As a result, fights over a translation or a place-name often matter as much as territory. The issue of which contemporary Macedonia is the Macedonia of Alexander the Great is only the most recent example of these cultural political struggles (Christopoulos and Karpozilos). Hence, preserving the Greek language and asserting its continuous relation to Ancient Greek can become a national imperative. The primary meaning of the Greek word for exile, ɛξορία (exoria), links these concerns with place and language in revealing ways since it means both “outside the boundary markers” and “beyond definition.” The word points to a confusion and co-implication of geographic and linguistic borders, as well as their status as imaginary constructs. Whereas the English term exile means primarily banishment to a foreign country and refers to external exile (“Exile”), in Greek exoria refers as often to internal as to external exile (Babiniotis). What counts as outside and inside is hard to disaggregate. Four hundred years of Ottoman rule and then, in the twentieth century, periods of French, German, British, Italian, and less explicitly American domination have meant that Greeks often experience exile in or close to their own country. Xenitia can apply to a bride leaving her family and native village to be married into a family in the next village, to a rural laborer looking for a job in the big city, and to refugees and political prisoners, whether they are held inside or outside Greece. References to exoria and xenitia in folk songs and literature bear out the range of applications to these different experiences and the conflation of what is in or out and ultimately of what is or is not Greek. For Greeks, exile is shot through not only with national consciousness, ideological struggles, regional rivalries, and identity crises, but also with language politics.
Modern Greek poets offer notable instances of translation deployed to manage the trauma (το τραύμα; to travma), literally “the wound,” of xenitia. Two experiences in particular marked the “Generation of the Thirties,” the main cultural producers in Greece from the 1930s through the 1960s, including artists, composers, and novelists but most famously poets such as Seferis (1900–71), Yannis Ritsos (1909–90), and Odysseas Elytis (1911–96). The first experience was the 1923 Population Exchange between Greece and Turkey, in which Greeks living in Asia Minor who were Christian were exchanged for Turks living in Greece who were Muslim; the second experience extended from the late 1930s onward, when anyone accused of communist sympathies was purged from Greece and relocated to island internment camps or to the Eastern bloc. Although based on very different criteria, in one case religious, in the other political, both experiences involved the conflation of internal and external exile and the uncanny sense of not being home at home. The Population Exchange was based on the assumption of a stable, coherent cultural identity whereby Christian Greeks, many of them Turkish speakers, would feel welcome and at home in Greece after living for generations in Asia Minor. Similarly, the separation of nationalism and communism by Greek authoritarian regimes, most notably that of Metaxas (1936–41) and the Regime of the Colonels (1967–74), meant that communist ɛξόριστοι (exoristoi; “exiles”) inside as well as outside Greece were imagined as one culturally homogeneous group that posed an ideological threat to the nation, always unwelcome, never at home. This layering of exilic and near-exilic experiences helps explain why Greek poets often merge different forms of exile. Seferis, forced as a child to leave Asia Minor, feels he undergoes a similar experience as a diplomat in the Greek foreign service, while Ritsos, imprisoned and banished to Greek islands for his political views, repeats the experience of living with other comrades outside Greece as a Communist Party emissary to Soviet-aligned countries in the Balkans. The lives, poems, and translations of these two poets are exemplary in how they frame and manage feelings of xenitia, each with his own conception of what it means to be a national poet in a literature currently deemed minor. But it is translation, that second-order signifying practice by which one negotiates one's relation to the other (Venuti, “Translation” 30), that most dramatically reveals the connection between exile, nation, and language.
Seferis and Ritsos, one a Nobel laureate (1963), the other a Lenin Peace Prize winner (1977), occupy opposite ends of the political spectrum and disagree on what should be translated into Greek—what particular mix of ancient, European, or Balkan languages and traditions, as well as how this mix might be achieved, whether by an individual translator or by a collaborative group. Yet both view Greek poetry as a national institution and Demotic as the language of the people. And both view translation as a way to connect to the culture and nation from which they feel cut off. In a telling move, furthermore, both often imagine interlingual difference between two or more languages as intralingual sameness within one language. For Seferis, reinforcing his membership in the Greek nation entails conjuring up a language and a people that have a continuous tradition dating back to antiquity. In his view, the transformation into Modern Greek of archaic but more prestigious stages in the development of the national language—Ancient (Homeric, Attic) and Biblical (Koine) Greek—constitutes an intralingual process, “ours once more” (Herzfeld). For Ritsos, in contrast, the nation is paradoxically transnational insofar as orthodoxy, both communist in politics and Eastern Orthodox in religion, allows people with different languages to cross borders and coexist in a transnational collective. Ritsos sees himself reinforcing his membership in the Greek nation by recognizing the similarity between Greek and other Balkan languages, which are “already ours,” politically, religiously, and poetically, and therefore can easily be turned into Greek. Whether defined on the basis of temporal continuity (Seferis) or spatial contiguity (Ritsos), the claim of intralingualism masks what is actually interlingual translation so as to make up for the poet-translator's feeling of separation by imagining a national language that either continues a valuable cultural past or serves as a transnational vehicle for unifying minor literatures. A comparison of Seferis's translations of Ancient and Biblical Greek literature with Ritsos's translations of Romanian, Czech, and Slovakian poetry, all produced outside Greece and all imagined as somehow intralingual, foregrounds the ideological underpinnings of their practices.
Seferis and the Ancients
According to the philhellene novelist Henry Miller, exile is the source of Seferis's genius—his love for his country, “a result of patient discovery following years of absence abroad” (qtd. in Keeley 362). The key experience for Seferis was being uprooted from Skala, the seaside town near Smyrna where he spent much of his childhood (Beaton 15–18). In 1914 he and his family left for Athens, and then in 1923 they were officially ousted in the Population Exchange. Although Seferis experienced a host of different kinds of displacement during his lifetime—as political refugee, student, consul, ambassador, poet laureate, visitor abroad—all these experiences repeated for him his childhood sense of loss when he and his family were forced to leave Asia Minor. In Seferis's mind, this experience came to underlie his years in the Balkans and Middle East during his career in the Greek foreign service. Certainly, the most difficult posting was his first in 1936 as consul in Korça (or, in Greek, Koritsa), Albania, where he sent off for publication “In the Style of G. S.” (Beaton 150). His poems, letters, and journal entries from this year complain incessantly about the lack of civilization, the poverty, and the languages he found incomprehensible (Albanian, Romanian, and Turkish), unlike the languages in which he had grown up at home and studied (Greek, French, and English). He took refuge in the French of the lycée and the literati, but his true comfort was translating Homer, Aeschylus, and Plato from Ancient Greek and imagining them as already in Modern Greek. It is not only that he chooses to translate ancient texts about exile, but that his translations were exilic, structured in a way that imagined source and translating languages as closer and more similar than they were.
Also particularly hard were the years 1952 to 1955, which Seferis spent in Beirut as ambassador to Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq. Here he translated the Song of Songs into Modern Greek from the Koine of the Septuagint, another translation he considered intralingual. His hope was that translation would give him a better understanding of this land, his first impressions of which were πιο σκληρές, πιο γυμνές, πιο φτωχιές (“harder, more naked, poorer”; Asma 7; trans. in Güthenke 359) than those he had from reading the biblical text written there thousands of years ago. But the choice of a Koine source text had the specifically Greek aim of addressing the πνɛυματικά υπαναπτυκτός (“spiritually undeveloped”) aspect of the σημɛρινός ɛλληνικός κόσμος (“modern day Greek kosmos”; 7; 363) by making available a text that was η κληρονομιά του κι η παράδοσή του (“its heritage and its tradition”; 8; 363). During this period he also produced translations from Euripides's Bacchae, a play about exile written in exile, in which Seferis noted that the playwright βρήκɛ μια φρέσκια έμπνɛυση στη Μακɛδονία, αφού παράτησɛ τη στέγνια της Αθήνας (“found fresh inspiration in Macedonia after abandoning dry Athens”; Metagraphes 292n1), as if he too were searching for something hopeful to come of this life of ξɛνιτιά ανυπόφορη (“unbearable exile”; Poiimata 368). In the Middle East, he repeatedly turned to intralingual translation as a means of connecting to a Greece worthy of connection, possessing a rich past. In 1955, on a trip to Patmos, he stayed near the monastery where John wrote Revelation and completed his own version μιας στιγμής (“in one flash”; Apokalypsi 9), as if “being home” for this short stay fulfilled the distance-shrinking promise of intralingual translation: he was suddenly actually there.
Seferis never stopped doing interlingual translations. In addition to his student years in Paris (1918–25), when he brought over the poetry of his beloved French and English poets like Paul Valéry and T. S. Eliot (see Seferis, T. S. Eliot), he also produced an interlingual translation of the poem “Mythology” by Lawrence Durrell when he was serving in Egypt with the Greek government in exile from 1941 to 1943 (Beaton 202). It would seem that because his government service put him “in Greece,” even though he was based in Egypt, and because the languages were his (Greek, French, and English), his feeling of xenitia was less intense. Interlingual translation suited Seferis when his locale was not too foreign. Intralingual translation he reserved for times spent in the midst of languages and cultures he did not know, such as in the Balkans and the Middle East.
In the titles to collections of his translations, as well as in his prologues, Seferis makes an effort to distinguish clearly between the two kinds of translation by creating his own terms, αντιγραφές (antigraphes) for διαγλωσσική (diaglossiki; “interlingual”) and μɛταγραφές (metagraphes) for ɛνδογλωσσική (endoglossiki; “intralingual”). Antigraphes, literally “antiwritings” or “instead-of writings,” were modern Greek copies of the source texts that he describes as similar to an artist's copy of a master's painting:
όταν μɛταφράζουμɛ από μια ξένη γλώσσα που ξέρουμɛ λίγο ή πολύ, σɛ μια γλώσσα—τη δική μας—που μας ɛίναι έμφυτη και την αγαπούμɛ πɛρισσότɛρο, κάνουμɛ κάτι, μου φαίνɛται, σαν ɛκɛίνους τους ανθρώπους που βλέπουμɛ στα μουσɛία, προσηλωμένους μɛ πολλή προσοχή, ν’ α ν τ ι γ ρ ά φ ο υ ν, ɛίτɛ για ν’ ασκηθούν ɛίτɛ γιατί κάποιος τους το παράγγɛιλɛ, πίνακɛς διαφόρων ζωγράφων.
(Antigraphes 7)When we translate from a foreign language that we know, more or less, into a language—our own—that is innate to us and that we love more, we do something, it seems to me, similar to the people that we see in museums, who are concentrated with great zeal, copying—either to train themselves or at someone's behest—paintings by various painters.
(trans. in Stergiopoulou, “Between the Lines” 380)He calls his intralingual translations from Ancient and Koine Greek metagraphes, literally “after writings.” He describes them as rewordings or “transliterations” of the source texts in Modern Greek, understood as the same language as the archaic varieties:
από καιρό συλλογίζομαι πως όταν μɛταφράζω ɛλληνικά κɛίμɛνα στη σημɛρινή γλώσσα μας, και όταν μɛταφράζω ξένɛς γλώσσɛς, κάνω δύο διαφορɛτικές δουλɛιές. Μου χρɛάζουνται λοιπόν δύο διαφορɛτικές λέξɛις για να δηλώσω αυτή τη διαφορά. Ώσπου να βρɛθɛί κάποια πɛρισσότɛρον ικανοποιητική, υιοθέτησα την λέξη «μɛταγραφή» για τον μɛταγλωττισμό των αρχαίων κɛιμένων. (Asma 65)
For a long while I have thought that when I translate Greek texts into our language of today and when I translate foreign texts, I do two different tasks. I therefore need two different words to show this. Until something more satisfactory is found, I have adopted the word metagraphe for the transliteration of ancient texts.
Seferis regarded the linguistic similarities that made the metagraphes possible as βιολογικά γνωρίσματα της λαλιάς μας (“biological attributes of our tongue”; qtd. in Yiatromanolakis, “Metafrastiki” 229). For him they were inborn, like family resemblances, and therefore irrefutable.
Metagraphes for Seferis seek to create the intralingual effect of a continuous tradition from antiquity to the present by using the same alphabet and orthography, as well as the same rhythm and sound, as the archaic Greek texts that were his sources. The effect of sameness is reinforced by a tendency to favor archaism in his lexical and syntactical choices (see Güthenke 344). Frequently, however, these strategies also expose linguistic differences that point to discontinuities in the languages. Thus, as he indicates in his prologue to his translation of the Book of Revelation, to show the continuity of the language he gives the Koine Greek verb ποιμανɛῖ (poimanei; “to shepherd”) as the Modern Greek verb θα . . . ποιμάνɛι (tha . . . poimanei; Apokalypsi 13, 38, 152). Although the spelling appears to be the same, maintaining the future tense necessitates the addition of θα as well as an accent shift from the ultimate to the penultimate syllable. Seferis insists on the sameness of the source and translating languages here, but in reality the morphology and rhythm of the word have changed.
Seferis seems to have been acutely aware of such linguistic shifts. When he explains his translation process in the Book of Revelation, he states, Προσπάθησα να μɛίνω όσο μπορούσα πιο κοντά στο παλαιό κɛίμɛνο κρατώντας, αν μου το συγχωρούσɛ η γλώσσα μας, τη δομή και τις λέξɛις του πρωτοτύπου (“I tried to stay as close as I could to the older text, keeping the form and the words of the original where our language was forgiving enough”; Apokalypsi 12–13). The word “forgiving” glances at the irreducible difference between the Koine of the biblical text and Modern Greek: Seferis's verbal choices were “forgiving” because they avoided the offense to intelligibility and felicity that too much archaizing might cause to the modern “form” of the language. He struggled to maintain the appearance of sameness through words with ancient roots because often the sameness was undermined: he was forced to revise orthography, accents, noun endings, and verb constructions. To make the deferential judgment, then, that “what changes, in Seferis's view, is not the language per se, but the form” (Stergiopoulou, “Between the Lines” 379–80) does not go far enough: “form” is a constitutive feature of any language, essential enough to distinguish it from other languages. The changes that Seferis was forced to make when translating the Book of Revelation show that he was denying the fact that two languages are involved, each with its own structural differences, and that therefore his translation should be described not as intralingual, occurring within one and the same language, but as interlingual, occurring between two languages.
The linguistic differences are even more striking in his translations of Ancient Greek texts, since Homeric and Attic Greek have even fewer structural resemblances to Modern Greek than Biblical Koine. In Seferis's version of Odyssey 4.450, for instance, the Modern Greek words show Seferis typically trying to match the Homeric Greek: for the Ancient Greek subject ὁ Γέρων (o Geron; “the Old Man”), he chooses the Modern Greek ο Γέρος (o Geros), and for the Ancient Greek object φώκας (fokas; “seals”), he chooses the Modern Greek φώκιɛς (fokies; Metagraphes 12–13). Yet the juxtapositions disclose, once again, that Seferis's choices are really not intralingual renderings, because of morphological differences: the two nouns have developed different endings in Modern Greek. For the compound nouns and epithets that Homer uses, the notion of intralingual translation is stretched even further to cover neologism. In his translation of the Odyssey 4.456, Seferis translates the Homeric λέων γένɛτ᾽ ἠυγένɛιος (leon genet’ eugeneios; “he becomes a bearded [or hairy] lion”) as γίνɛται μακρόμαλλο λιοντάρι (ginetai makromallo liontari; “he became a long-haired lion”; 12–13), creating correspondences on the basis of similar roots for “becomes” and “lion.” He could have found a corresponding word with the same root for “bearded” in Modern Greek (γένι; geni; cf. Maronitis, Odysseia 4.457), but instead he invented a different compound, μακρόμαλλο (makromallo; “long-haired”), which did not already exist in any form of the language, in order to emphasize resonances with the Ancient Greek for “Golden Fleece” (χρυσόμαλλον δέρας; chrysomallon deras) as well as with the Modern Greek for proponents of Demotic, “the hairy ones” (μαλλιάροι; malliari). Here Seferis's insistence on linguistic sameness as the basis of his intralingualism strains under the pressure of his own poetic innovation.
In translating an excerpt from Heraclitus, another writer in exile whom Seferis began translating during his year in Albania, he characteristically attempted to match the rhythm of the Ancient Greek prose. Thus, for Heraclitus's verb ἐξɛυρήσουσιν (exeuresusin; “they will find”), he chooses the longer verbal ending θα τον βρούνɛ (vroune; “they will find it”) rather than βρουν (vroun) so that the rhythm would be maintained (Metagraphes 56–57; cf. Yiatromanolakis, “Metafrastiki” 270). Yet he is in fact forcing a disjunction in sound and in number of syllables. In the same passage, Seferis takes an alternative approach to continuity by choosing a Modern Greek word that matches Heraclitus's Ancient Greek in root, but the result entails a radical change in meaning. He translates δίκη (dike; “arbiter of trials”), the name given to the goddess and cosmic force of law, as δικαιοσύνη (dikaiosini; “justice”), inscribing a later moral sense that is found in Plato and Aristotle and is also the modern meaning of the word (Gagarin). The replacement of Heraclitus's term dike with the later term dikaiosini shows how continuity with ancient Greek culture in Seferis's translation is always constructed.
The examples so far have stressed Seferis's effort to ground his claim of intralingual translation on linguistic sameness, an effort to develop correspondences or identities between his Modern Greek versions and both Ancient and Koine source texts. But recurrently he abandons this pursuit and resorts to paraphrastic translations that are in effect adaptations, not so much rewording the archaic Greek as introducing significant departures from it. Often the shift from translation to adaptation occurs with the same source text. Consider his version of Odyssey 4.450–61, where several linguistic differences—rhythmic, morphological, and lexical—have already been noted. Here is the Homeric passage:
[A]t noon the old man of the sea came up too, and when he had found his fat seals he went over them and counted them. We were among the first he counted, and he never suspected any guile, but laid himself down to sleep as soon as he had done counting. Then we rushed upon him with a shout and seized him; on which he began at once with his old tricks, and changed himself first into a lion with a great mane; then all of a sudden he became a dragon, a leopard, a wild boar; the next moment he was running water, and then again directly he was a tree, but we stuck to him and never lost hold, till at last the cunning old creature became distressed, and said. . . . (Butler 54)
Seferis pares down the Homeric text, starting with the opening: he entirely deletes lines 451 to 453, which present a fairly detailed account of how Odysseus and his men try to capture the god Proteus.
Ήρθɛ το μɛσημέρι, κι ο Γέρος βγήκɛ απò τη θάλασσα, βρήκɛ τις φώκιɛς.
Τον αδράξαμɛ⋅ δɛ λησμόνησɛ καμιὰ μηχανή⋅
γίνɛται μακρόμαλλο λιοντάρι
έπɛιτα δράκοντας και πάρδαλη
υπέρογκο γουρούνι
τρɛχάμɛνο νɛρò
δέντρο στ’ αψηλὰ φουντωμένο.
Τα χέρια μας τον έσφιγγαν.
Σαν έσωσɛ τα μάγια και δɛν άντɛχɛ άλλο
μου λέɛι και μɛ ρωτά. . . . (Metagraphes 13)
Midday came, and the Old Man emerged from the sea, found the seals.
We caught hold of him; he did not forget his trickery;
He became a long-haired lion
Then dragon and leopard
Huge pig
Running water
Tree, foliage fully blown.
Our hands were clasping him tight.
As if he spared his magic and could not endure any more
He speaks to me and asks me. . . .
Seferis's version relies on archaism to signify the similarities between the time of the Odyssey and his own time, mixing words from different periods of Greek, Early Modern (αδράξαμɛ [adraksame; “we caught hold of”]) as well as Ancient (μηχανή [mechane; “trickery”]). At the same time, he departs widely from the rhythm of the Homeric lines, abandoning dactylic hexameter for free verse that parses out Proteus's shifting shapes, endowing the Modern Greek with a hard-edged imagism.Footnote 7 Not only does Seferis impose a modernist poetics on the passage, but he inscribes a distinctive interpretation: insofar as the deletion suppresses a depiction of the god trapped by humans and the line breaks in his free verse stress the radical difference of each of Proteus's shapes, the translation winds up heightening his superhuman power of self-transformation. The god, although he initially appears as an “old man,” is more formidable in Seferis's treatment, which is determined by factors that cannot precisely be called Homeric.
Seferis's metagraphes contain several cases that are even more conspicuous in resisting any notion of intralingualism. The questions they raise, however, have to do not so much with his translation strategies as with the nature of the source text and his translation process. His assertion that he translated the Song of Songs from the Septuagint, the Koine version of the Hebrew Bible produced from the third century BCE to the first century CE, is contradicted by the fact that he began the translation interlingually in Egypt from the Gideon Bible in English (Beaton 210–11), and when he sought to fashion this project as an intralingual version, he consulted both the Hebrew text and a French translation (Yiatromanolakis, “Metafrastiki” 277; Loulakaki-Moore 212).Footnote 8 Seferis also translated an excerpt from The Golden Ass, a Latin prose fiction by the North African philosopher Apuleius, who was educated in Athens, set his narrative in Greece, and apparently adapted it from a Greek source text that has “oriental” origins (G. Anderson 198–210). Another Latin text appears among the fragments of Heraclitus that Seferis translates, although this source has been judged inauthentic, not written by the Ionian philosopher but cobbled together by the medieval theologian Albertus Magnus from Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and an Aristotelian commentator, Michael of Ephesus (O'Meara). In each case, the archaic Greek to which Seferis claims to have established a continuity is either not present or heavily mediated by other languages and cultures, and certainly the common alphabet on which his argument depends is impossible. To insist on intralingualism in the face of such evidence requires the assumption of an instrumental model of translation that understands it as reproducing or transferring an invariant contained in the source text, an invariant form or meaning (see Venuti, Contra Instrumentalism). Here the invariant is an archaic Greek essence that remains timeless and unchanging so as to be communicated transparently through Seferis's Modern Greek translations.
The questions that proliferate around Seferis's claim of intralingualism point to how strongly he was invested in it, and indeed it served various functions for him. These functions start with the immediate occasions where he developed and practiced intralingual translation—namely, those periods of foreign service in which he experienced painful xenitia that recalled the loss of a home in childhood. At times, the links between deracination and translation could be direct, even if implicit. In diary entries written when he was in Albania, the phrase he uses for Proteus (“the Οld Μan”) in his translation of the Homeric passage is applied to the Athens-based undersecretary at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to whom he made numerous requests for furloughs and transfers that went unheard (Beaton 146, 265). During this period, he also wrote a poem titled Ο Γέρος (“O Geros”; “The Old Man”), in which this figure becomes a deathly presence who, while lacking a φυλή (“race”) and προγόνος (“ancestors”; “O Geros” 102; “Old Man” 54), powerfully προστάζɛι τους ίσκιους των ανθρώπων (“commands the shades of men”; 103; 55). Homesickness seems to have motivated Seferis's decision to translate a Homeric passage in which a god possesses powers that enable him to escape human constraints. Seferis's longing to return to Athens, his distaste for the foreign location, and his dissatisfaction with his government position all enter into the translation, and the claim of intralingualism once again becomes a way of managing these frustrations.
That longing, especially in its tacit elevation of Greek culture, meant that his translations were also performing cultural and political functions that had nationalism as their base. In translating, Seferis explores different ways of integrating other languages and styles into his own poetry, enabling him to participate in a pan-European modernism, but they were distressing for the poet (Seferis, Antigraphes 7–8; Connolly) because they constantly called attention to Greece's belatedness and his awareness of writing in a minor language: το πρωτότυπο … μας δɛίχνɛι πως βρισκόμαστɛ πάντα χαμηλότɛρα από το σωστό, πως ακόμη κι αν πάμɛ ψηλότɛρα πάλι χαμηλότɛρα θα ɛίμαστɛ (“the original [in the other language] . . . reveals to us that we are always lower than we should be, that even if we go higher, we will still be lower”; Seferis qtd. in Yiatromanolakis, “Metafrastiki” 232). The intralingual project compensates for this minority status and fosters a competitive attitude toward major languages like French and English by establishing—in Seferis's view—a continuity with the kudos of Ancient Greek. Not only is Greek a language that includes ancient and biblical texts, but it supports the hope that it might once again become a hegemonic language, a lingua franca. This temporal irredentism underpins Seferis's antipathy—shared by many speakers of Modern Greek—for the Erasmic pronunciation of Ancient Greek, where diphthongs are pronounced as two separate sounds instead of one on the assumption that Greek is not something that “goes on living,” but instead “a dead language” (Seferis, “Art of Poetry”). Seferis's metagraphic translation practice aimed to give his readers translations that were inspired από το πρωτότυπο αλλά ταυτόχρονα να αναπτύσσɛται, ισοδύναμα και αυτόνομα προς αυτό (“by the source text but at the same time developed equal to and autonomous from it”; Yiatromanolakis, “Metafrastiki” 282), a modern kind of writing ισότιμη και ισοδύναμη μɛ τον αρχαίο λόγο (“as worthy and as powerful as the ancient”; Yiatromanolakis, “Metagraphes” 308; see also Maronitis, “Intralinguistic Inequality” 882). The differing functions that Seferis assigned to the two kinds of translation led to different publishing formats: his Antigraphes, the interlingual translations, were published monolingually, only the Modern Greek without the French and English texts, so as to minimize or even suppress his dependence on other European literatures, especially those written in major languages, whereas his Metagraphes, the intralingual translations, were published with the Ancient and Koine Greek texts facing the Modern Greek versions, so as to foreground the identity between the different forms of Greek and invite favorable comparison, the sense that they are all written in one and the same language. This even involved changing the source texts: he capitalized Ο Γέρος (“the Old Man”) not only in his translation but also in the en face Homeric Greek. Ultimately, he was cultivating a vernacular nationalism, whereby the value that derived from the continuity between Ancient, Koine, and Modern Greek assuaged his exilic experience by constructing and validating a national Greek literature and endowing the national poet, “wherever” he went, with the power to speak for the nation.
Ritsos and the Balkans
The claim of intralingualism manages other exilic experiences for poets of this generation. If Seferis's translations from Ancient Greek show the dominant form of the intralingual imaginary in Greece, Ritsos's Balkan anthologies provide us with another form that reveals how internationalism can be yoked to the imagined community of a nation that embraces the West or the East.
Ritsos's years in exile fall into two main periods, and in each of them he produced substantial bodies of translations that saw print soon after. During the first period, between 1948 and 1952, he was incarcerated in internment camps for leftists on the islands of Limnos, Makronisos, and Aghios Efstratios (commonly known as Ai Stratis). After his release, he published his first book-length translations, including the work of the Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet (1953) and the Russian poet Alexander Blok's The Twelve (1957). The second period, between 1956 and 1960, encompassed visits to the Soviet Union and Eastern bloc countries such as Romania and Czechoslovakia at the invitation of writers’ unions and with the support of the Greek Communist Party. In the wake of these trips, he published anthologies of translations from Romanian (1961) and from Czech and Slovakian (1966), as well as book-length selections from the work of Attila József (1963), Vladimir Mayakovsky (1964), and Ilya Ehrenburg (1966). In 1967, immediately after the coup that brought the colonels to power, Ritsos was again arrested as a leftist, imprisoned on the islands of Yiaros and Leros, and subsequently banished to Samos, off the Turkish coast, where he lived under house arrest. Many of his books were burned, including these anthologies. Ritsos spent much of his life outside Greece and therefore outside life: a one-line poem written in Leros reads in its entirety, Ζωή—ένα τραύμα στην ανυπαρξία (“Zoe—ena travma stin aniparksia”; “Life—a wound in inexistence”). The time spent in sanatoriums for tuberculosis and in psychiatric wards tending his father and sister were additional periods spent cut off from society (Savvas 14).
Ritsos uses varying terms to describe his work as a translator, implicitly drawing a distinction similar to that between interlingual and intralingual translation, although his definitions, even when the same term is at issue, are quite different and often imprecise. The title pages of his translations always carry the term απόδοση (apodosi; “version,” “rendition,” or “performance”), suggesting not strict translation but interlingual adaptation, comparable to the practice of imitation that was deployed by such anglophone poets as John Dryden and Robert Lowell (Venuti, “Poet's Version”). Yet when Ritsos annotates the version of Mayakovsky he produced from Russian with the writer and translator Aris Alexandrou, he uses μɛταγλώττιση (metaglottisi; Mayakovsky 179), and when he describes his collaboration with Greek speakers of Czech for his anthology, he uses μɛταγραφή (metagraphe; Ritsos, Anthologia Tsekon 375), both of which refer to transliteration. Insofar as transliteration renders a letter in one alphabet into a corresponding letter in another alphabet, the process can be said to occur within the same language: what changes in a transliteration is an alphabet, not a language. Thus, a project to which Ritsos applied the terms μɛταγλώττιση and μɛταγραφή can be regarded, in effect, as an intralingual translation, similar to those by Seferis. This point is reinforced by Ritsos's pride that many of the letters in the Cyrillic alphabet derive from the Greek alphabet, again something Seferis stressed (Apokalypsi 17). When Ritsos translated from a language like Russian, he considered even the alphabets of the languages to be similar. At a fundamental level, Ritsos saw Russian and Greek, among other Eastern European languages, as the same language. His beautiful calligraphic handwriting, which is often reproduced in collections of his poetry, translations, and letters, confirms this connection. It is ecclesiastical, like the manuscript hand of Eastern Orthodox monks. If Seferis forced the idea of sameness with regard to ancient Greece, Ritsos did so with regard to Central Europe and the Balkans.
His idea of intralingualism is rooted in his conception of poetry. In the introduction to his Romanian anthology, he observes that poets πλαστογραφούν … την ɛθνική και ατομική τους ιδιομορφία, υπακούοντας … στην θέληση τους για μια … υπογράμμιση της ɛνότητας … κ’ ɛπɛκτɛίνοντας μɛ αίσθημα, συνɛίδηση και γνώση τα όρια της αδɛλφοσύνης μας (“overcome ethnic and individual differences … in order to underscore unity … expanding the borders of brotherhood through feeling, understanding, and knowledge”; Anthologia Roumanikis 8). He develops this notion of transcending “individual differences” when he describes his first encounter with the work of Romanian poets like Tudor Arghezi and Mihai Benuic: Εκɛί ακριβώς αναγνώρισα … μια αναλογία αναμονής και ομολογίας (“That was the moment I recognized . . . an analogy of expectation and confession”; 7). Ritsos's resonant choice of words points to a similarity between Romanian and Greek poetic traditions: he echoes the ανα (ana) of αναλογία (analogia; “analogy”) in the word αναμονής (anamonis; “expectation”) and the λογία (logia) of αναλογία (analogia) in the word ομολογίας (omologias; “confession,” literally “to say the same thing”). He subsequently lists cultural similarities: τους ιστορικούς μας και γɛωγραφικούς δɛσμούς και τις κοινές μας αναμνήσɛις … αναλογίɛς της δημοτικής παράδοσης – αναλογίɛς στη ποίηση, στη μουσική, στο χορό, που, λίγο αργότɛρα, τις διαπίστωσα σɛ δύο ταξίδια μου στη Ρουμανία (“our historical and geographic ties and our common memories … analogies in the folk tradition, in poetry, music, and dance, which I discovered during my two trips to Romania”; 7).
Ritsos's claim of cultural sameness already seems wishful. Yet it was supported by the nature of his translation process. Whether Ritsos was imprisoned or traveling abroad, he tended to translate collaboratively, revising close renderings in French and Greek, the two languages he knew fluently, produced by colleagues who had access to the other languages. He offers a glimpse of the process in his notes to his anthology of Czech and Slovakian poetry:
Για να ɛυκολύνɛι λοιπόν τη μɛταφραστική μου προσπάθɛια, η Ένωση Τσέχων και Σλοβάκων Συγγραφέων, δημιούργησɛ ένα ολόκληρο ɛπιτɛλɛίο από γάλλους τσɛχομαθɛίς, τσέχους γαλλομαθɛίς και έλληνɛς τσɛχομαθɛίς, που μου ɛτοίμασαν πιστές κατά το δυνατόν, κατά λέξη μɛταγραφές των ποιημάτων στα γαλλικά και στα ɛλληνικά, μɛ σχόλια, παρɛνθέσɛις, ɛνδɛίξɛις για ρυθμούς, μέτρα, ομοιοκαταληξίɛς, για κάποιɛς ασάφɛιɛς και συνταχτικές ανωμαλίɛς. Σ’ αυτό το υλικό στηρίχτηκɛ κατ’ αρχήν η δική μου ɛργασία, συγκρίνοντας τις γαλλικές και ɛλληνικές μɛταφράσɛις, διασταυρώνοντας αντιλήψɛις και συχνά δυό διαφορɛτικές ɛκδοχές των ίδιων στίχων, ɛπιλέγοντας, τɛίνοντας προς μιάν ɛξακρίβωση πέρα απ΄ τις καταγραμμένɛς μɛταφράσιɛς – μιάν άλλη ɛξακρίβωση στηριγμένη κάποτɛ στη ποιητική, λɛγόμɛνη, διαίσθηση και στην όποια τɛχνική μου ɛμπɛιρία. (Anthologia Tsekon 375; cf. Keslova)
To make my translation efforts easier, the Union of Czech and Slovakian Writers created a whole staff of French Czech speakers, Czech French speakers, and Greek Czech speakers who prepared faithful and, to the extent possible, word-for-word transliterations [μɛταγραφές; metagraphes] of the poems in French and in Greek, with notes, parentheses, indications concerning rhythm, meter, rhyme, and some ambiguities and syntactic irregularities. My own work relied first on this material, comparing French and Greek translations, seeing where the translators’ perceptions matched, often drawing on two different versions of the same lines, selecting from them, tending toward solutions that lay beyond literal translations—solutions that at times relied on so-called poetic intuition and on my own experience and craft as a poet.
The recourse to intermediate translations in Greek seems to have encouraged Ritsos's sense that he was working in the same language and therefore translating intralingually, and, while the interposition of French could be seen as introducing a foreign language, it, too, was more a matter of creating intralingual closeness since French, as Ritsos's other main language, one he published in when censorship prevented publishing in Greek, was very much his own.Footnote 9 The length and arduousness of the collaborative process deepened any such contradictions, which, however, he glossed over with his belief that poetry transcended difference. When working on the Romanian anthology, for instance, Ritsos spent five months with the poets he included, meeting them in long sessions that lasted into the night. As a result, he tells his Greek readers, he felt μια τέτοια οικɛιότητα, τόση άνɛση (“such a familiarity, such ease”) that he could bring την φωνή τους στη γλώσσα μας μ΄ όλα τα αναπόφɛυκτα λάθη και τις αδυναμίɛς μου, μα και μɛ την φιλία που μου γέννησɛ η τέχνη τους και η ανθρωπιά τους (“their voice into our language—despite all the unavoidable mistakes and [my] limitations—with the friendship that their art and their humanity created in me”; Anthologia Roumanikis 9).
Ritsos's translation practice, his specific verbal choices, also seem to have suppressed the questions concerning this idea of intralingualism. He sought to create, for example, what he perceived as an approximation of source-text meters. On the one hand, his translations of Romanian folk songs turned their alternating trochaic trimeter and tetrameter into the fifteen-syllable iambic line of Greek folk songs, σχɛδόν αθέλητα (“almost unwittingly”)—in his words—για να τον φέρω πιο κοντά στο αίσθημα του ɛλληνικού ρυθμού (“so as to bring it closer to the feeling of the Greek rhythm”; Anthologia Roumanikis 8). On the other hand, during his visit to Romania, his translations of the doină (the predominant Romanian form of folk song) inspired his own poem, Πέντɛ παραλλαγές σɛ μια ντόινα (“Pente parallages se mia doina”; “Five Variations on a Doină”), which he cast in trochaic meter so that it αντιστοιχούσɛ στο δικό τους αίσθημα ρυθμού (“corresponded to the feeling of their rhythm”; 8). This effort to elide the difference between Romanian and Greek through intralingual rhythms reached a revealing extreme when it became a matter of word choice. In translating Tudor Arghezi's poem “Cîntec Mut” (“Mute Song”) when he encountered a Turkish loanword, şal (“shawl”), not only did Ritsos choose a comparable Turkish loanword in Greek, μποξά (boksa; “shawl”), but he went further, inserting additional Turkish-derived Greek choices for Romanian words that lack a similar etymology. Thus, the Romanian vizite (“visits”) is translated with another Turkish loanword, μουσαφιραίους (mousafiraious; “guests”). Ritsos evidently recognized a feature that Greek shared with Romanian because both languages had been imprinted by centuries of Ottoman rule. He incorporated other words and phrases exchanged between languages on the Balkan borders, like δɛκανίκι (dekaniki; “crutch” or “crosier”), a Macedonian army term as well as a church term for a bishop's staff (Babiniotis). As with Seferis's verbal choices from Ancient Greek, Ritsos's choices from other Balkan languages are completely comprehensible in Modern Greek, although their histories reveal underlying ideological projects.
Here one can begin to see what sort of functions intralingualism served for Ritsos. His periods of xenitia, whether a result of imprisonment or Communist Party invitations, were no doubt assuaged by his prolific translation projects, which at times mirrored precisely how he felt. For his Romanian anthology, he not only chose to begin with folk songs, as so many Greek anthologies of poetry do (see Politis), but also picked those that could easily fit into the Greek category of songs about xenitia:
Αχ, ξένος ɛίμαι, Κύριɛ, ξένος,
καθώς του κούκκου το νιογέννητο.
Όπου να πάω, καμιά σπλαχνιά.
Άι, ξένος ɛίμαι, Κύριɛ, ξένος
ξένος σαν το πουλί κι απόξɛνος.
Όπου να πάω, ποτέ, καμιά σπλαχνιά.
Έι, Bασιλιά, Bασιλιά, ɛσύ
μη διώχνɛις μɛ πολύ μακριά.
Δɛν έχω—δɛς—γονιούς να μɛ ζητήσουνɛ.
Κ’ ɛίναι μικρούλɛς οι αδɛρφάδɛς μου.
Ώ, αυτές δɛν ξέρουνɛ τα μονοπάτια μου. (Anthologia Roumanikis 2–3)
Oh, I am a foreigner [xenos], Lord, a foreigner,
Like a newborn, unswaddled.
Wherever I go, no mercy.
Oh, I am a foreigner, Lord, a foreigner,
A foreigner like a bird, estranged.
Wherever I go, no mercy.
Oh, King, you, my King,
Don't send me far away.
I have no parents—see—to look for me.
And my sisters are so young.
Oh, they won't know the paths I take.
In asserting linguistic and cultural similarities with the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc, however, Ritsos was motivated simultaneously by the political commitment that led to his exile (his advocacy of communism) and by the common Eastern Orthodox religion that sustained traditions and languages under the Turks, seen in the mention of the crosier and the invocations to Κύριɛ (Kirie; “Lord”). His intralingual translations projected a hopeful vision of pan-Balkanism, in which minor languages and literatures that had historically suffered similar kinds of oppression recognized their shared identity and formed a collective that could advance their social and political interests. Yet Ritsos's internationalism, stemming from his own feeling of being punished for his beliefs, could go only so far in shaking off its nationalistic basis. The collective he imagined was grounded in the Greek language of his translations, asserting a vernacular nationalism that often suppressed linguistic and cultural differences even as it hoped to transcend them.
The translations produced by Seferis and Ritsos, whether composed outside Greece or in island concentration camps, have not only different ideas of the nation but different temporal and affective horizons. Seferis's projects are nostalgic, whereas Ritsos's are utopian. They both, however, imagine a Greek language that is more homogeneous and unchanging than the histories of occupation and exile can plausibly support. Intralingual translation is the key to the effort to smooth over differences, whether one imagines earlier periods in the history of the language as more similar to the language of today or one thinks of other languages across the border as more similar to one's own. To question the assumed conflation of difference, exposing the instrumentalist concept of translation that underlies intralingualism, is to begin to change the terms of literary analysis so that monolingualism and the nation are no longer the main analytic categories for thinking about literature as a social institution (Yildiz).
Given the global hierarchy that distributes literary capital so unevenly among languages, translation is a means of accumulating capital and achieving legitimacy for minor literatures, of nation building (Casanova, “Consecration”). Modern Greek would seem to be a special case that warrants a qualification. Greek poet-translators have sought to partake of the cultural cachet that has accrued to French and English literatures over the past few centuries. But since Greek possesses “quite an important history and prestige” (410), a Greek poet-translator need not feel that a source text must come from a major literature to increase the cultural capital of Greek through translation. Modern Greek might be the vehicle and site of its own legitimation by serving as the translating language for its prestigious ancient canon or for various other minor literatures—but only if an intralingual imaginary is invoked.
Seferis and Ritsos reveal what is at stake in the claim of intralingual translation made by a writer in a minor language. Their immediate motivation, in view of the conditions under which they translated, may have been the sense that they were separated from their homeland and daily life in their originary tongue. Yet to manage their feeling of xenitia, they needed to imagine its sameness to Ancient Greek or to the languages of other communist cultures. They created an essential role for Modern Greek as a repository of literary resources, whether gloriously canonical or similarly oppressed, and in both cases the intralingual imaginary issued into vernacular nationalism that occluded the linguistic and cultural differences of their source materials, although with vastly different political implications.
The insistence that Greek poets placed on sameness, the sheer energy of their intralingual imaginary, resulted in a body of innovative translation projects that plumbed the national and transnational resources of Modern Greek. In his translations, Seferis experimented with different varieties of Greek as he sampled distinct moments in the history of the language, not so much establishing a homogeneous continuum as opening up suggestive disjunctions. Ritsos's versions amalgamated the Balkan residue in Modern Greek, not so much establishing a likeness through contiguity as exposing a shared history of multiple languages in proximity. For both poet-translators, xenitia became a topos and a tropos, a place and a style, for including more in the face of less and replacing the wound of inexistence with new forms of existence. The drive to translate intralingually, in the end, could not eradicate differences, but it could stage them in unaccustomed and remarkably provocative ways, thereby offering an alternative to the usual focus on interlingual translation as the main way of regulating borders.
