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MODERN GREEK STUDIES (AUSTRALIA & NEW ZEALAND) Volume 13, 2005 A Journal for Greek Letters Pages on Australian Society Published by Brandl & Schlesinger Pty Ltd PO Box 127 Blackheath NSW 2785 Tel (02) 4787 5848 Fax (02) 4787 5672 www.brandl.com.au for the Modern Greek Studies Association of Australia and New Zealand (MGSAANZ) Department of Modern Greek University of Sydney NSW 2006 Australia Tel (02) 9351 7252 Fax (02) 9351 3543 E-mail: [email protected] ISSN 1039-2831 Copyright in each contribution to this journal belongs to its author. © 2006, Modern Greek Studies Association of Australia All rights reserved. No parts of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Typeset and design by Andras Berkes Printed by Griffin Press MODERN GREEK STUDIES ASSOCIATION OF AUSTRALIA & NEW ZEALAND (MGSAANZ) ETAIREIA NEOELLHNIKWN SPOUDWN AUSTRALIAS KAI NEAS ZHLANDIAS President: Michalis Tsianikas, Flinders University Vice-President: Anthony Dracoupoulos, University of Sydney Secretary: Thanassis Spilias, La Trobe University, Melbourne Treasurer: Panayota Nazou, University of Sydney, Sydney MGSAANZ was founded in 1990 as a professional association by those in Australia and New Zealand engaged in Modern Greek Studies. Membership is open to all interested in any area of Greek studies (history, literature, culture, tradition, economy, gender studies, sexualities, linguistics, cinema, Diaspora, etc). The Association issues a Newsletter (Enhmevrwsh), holds conferences and publishes two journals annually. MODERN GREEK STUDIES (AUSTRALIA AND NEW ZEALAND) Editors VRASIDAS KARALIS & MICHAEL TSIANIKAS Book Review Editor HELEN NICKAS Text editing: Katherine Cassis MEMBERSHIP TO MODERN GREEK STUDIES ASSOCIATION plus ANNUAL SUBSCRIPTION for two issues Individual: AUS $45 US $35 UK £25 C35 Institutions: AUS $70 US $65 UK £35 C45 (plus postage) full-time student/pensioners: AUS $20 US $30 UK £20 (includes GST) Address for all correspondence and payments MGSAANZ Department of Modern Greek, University of Sydney, NSW 2006 Australia Tel (+61-2) 9351 7252 Fax (+61-2) 9351 3543 E-mail: [email protected] The periodical welcomes papers in both English and Greek on all aspects of Modern Greek Studies (broadly defined). Prospective contributors should preferably submit their papers on disk and hard copy. All published contributions by academics are refereed (standard process of blind peer assessment). This is a DEST recognised publication. To periodikov filoxeneiv avrqra sta Agglikav kai ta Ellhnikav anaferovmena se ovle" ti" apovyei" twn Neoellhnikwvn Spoudwvn (sth genikovthtav tou"). Upoyhvfioi sunergavte" qa prevpei na upobavlloun katav protivmhsh ti" melevte" twn se diskevta kai se evntuph morfhv. VOle" oi sunergasive" apov panepisthmiakouv" evcoun upoblhqeiv sthn kritikhv twn ekdotwvn kai epilevktwn panepisthmiakwvn sunadevlfwn. CONTENTS SECTION ONE Stuart Roseworne The Shifting Power Relations in Australia’s Economic Success Story: From Neo-Liberalism to Neo-Conservatism 7 Carole M. Cusack Religion in Australian Society: A Place for Everything and Everything and Its Place 28 Evan Kanarakis Where Be the Rock? Sex, Drugs and Rock & Roll: Influence, Empowerment and rebellion, or Commercial Constructs, Cheap Imitation and War Over? 46 Steve Georgakis– Richard Light The Athens of the South: Sport in Australian Society 58 Andrea Bandhauer– Maria Veber German Studies Today: Gender and Intercultural Studies 75 Panayiotis Diamadis Aegean Eucalypts 86 SECTION TWO S. M. Hawke Dancing with the Ghost of Charmian Clift: A Ficto-Critical Requiem 106 Alexander Norman Where the Church Bell Can Be Heard, There the Parish Lies: Issues of Schism and Continuity in the Greek Orthodox Church in Australia 122 Yiorgos Anagnostou Through the Lenses of Rage: Refracting Success in Greek America 132 Angie Voela The Construction of the Woman in Karkavitsas’ Η Λυγερή 145 Vassilios Letsios Back to Bable in the Time of Modern Greek. Language Varieties in the Novel Αντιποιησισ Αρχησ 167 Elena Koutrianou Poetry as Recomposition: Odysseas Elytis Translating Sappho 192 Petro Alexiou Diaspora and Colonialism in Australia in the 1920s: The Case of Alekos Doukas’s Migrant ‘Voyage South’ 206 Anthony Stephens Interrogating Myth: Ariadne 230 SECTION THREE Joanne Finkelstein The Demotic City – The Chattering Classes and Civility 263 Robert van Krieken Occidental Self-Understanding and the Elias–Duerr Dispute: ‘Thick’ versus ‘Thin’ Conceptions of Human Subjectivity and Civilization 273 Craig Browne Castoriadis on the Capitalist Imaginary 282 SECTION FOUR BOOK REVIEWS (Edited by Helen Nickas) 300 LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS 327 Elena Koutrianou University of Peloponnese POETRY AS RECOMPOSITION: ODYSSEAS ELYTIS TRANSLATING SAPPHO Odysseas Elytis’s introduction to his essay on Theofilos, the Greek painter of naive art, focuses on a highly sensual perception of the ‘legendary’ Lesbian landscape, which is viewed as woman and is described (in a lyrical manner) as such.1 The connection or intersection of landscape and woman is typical in surrealist poetics, in which nature is transformed into woman, a universal principle of life and death, and of movement and stasis.2 Surrealist poetry and art explore the metamorphoses of the instant,3 while metaphor constitutes the principal device employed in surrealist aesthetics for the recomposition or the reconstitution of reality.4 Yet, the legendary land of Aeolis is not only the homeland of Theofilos and the fatherland of Elytis, but also the dream-like and indefinite feminine χώρα (as described in Plato’s Timeus 52), which has been associated, both historically and culturally, with the love poetry of Sappho. Actually, the textual description of the Lesbian landscape mentioned above is materialized visually in Elytis’s collage Ο κόλπος της Γέρας, which appears in the very beginning of his book entitled Σαπφώ. Sappho was published in March 1984, after a long period of gestation that dates back to 1968.5 This and Elytis’s book that brings together his translations of Krinagoras’s epigrams6 constitute his most complete studies on ancient Greek poetry.7 A new edition of Sappho came out in March 1996, and this includes the eleven illustrations that appeared only in the first seventy-seven numbered copies of the original edition. Yet, both editions contain the same Introduction, Epilogue and ‘Bibliographical note’. The traditional classification of Sappho’s work into nine books is abandoned. Following its content and form, the corpus is classified into seven unities, which bear titles that have ODYSSEAS ELYTIS TRANSLATING SAPPHO 193 been selected by drawing on the original texts. The terms ‘recomposition’ (ανασύνθεση) and ‘free translation’ (απόδοση), which appear next to the name of the translator on the title page, point to his perspective, method and aims. In his influential essay ‘The Task of the Translator’ (1923), Walter Benjamin stresses the belated nature of translation, its relation to the afterlife of the original.8 In his view, both the original text and the mother tongue of the translator are always subject to the passing of time; even the relation between the content and the language of the original, and the content and the language of the translation undergoes continual change. Subsequently, the task of the translator is not to reproduce (a ‘resembl[ance of]’) mean - ing, but to give expression to the original text’s ‘mode of signification, thus making both the original and the translation recognizable as fragments of a greater language’ and to ‘giv[e] voice to the intentio of the original not as reproduction but as harmony’; trans - lation ought to aim at ‘linguistic complementation’, at releasing the linguistic energy that the original text includes.9 It would be useful to bear in mind these observations, not only in order to study the main formative factors and the conditions regulating translation in different times and cultural environments, but also to be able to perceive the great distance that separates the original Sapphic text from its translation by Elytis, as well as from other translations of Sappho’s poetry into modern Greek or into other languages.10 Also, the above theoretical approach encourages the development of a common consideration of the translation of ancient Greek poetry and that of modern non-Greek poetry. Elytis’s theoretical attitude and his practical choices, which are more or less the same in both cases, present particular interest to the student of comparative literature. The poet explains the difference between free translation and literal translation (πιστή μεταγλώττιση) in the introduction and the afterword to his book Second Writing (Δεύτερη γραφή) – the 1976 collective edition of his translations of European poetry of the 19th and the 20th century –, as well as in an interview he gave around the same period, in which he comments on his views. As he specifies, his aim was to preserve the particular traits of the personal style of each translated poet (such as ‘embedments, condensations, gaps, verbose expression, problems with syntax’),11 but primarily to produce translations that would ‘make up [modern] Greek poems’, that is, that would function effectively in the target-language, without giving the impression that they were actually translations.12 His approach to Sappho’s poetry was similar. In the respective epilogue, he explains that his main concern was to create new poetic units (by which he means poems, or even, in the particular case of Sappho, fragments); in fact, this is why he attempted the arbitrary connection of the fragments, yet without complementing the ruined parts or the semantic gaps with any possible words or phrases.13 194 ELENA KOUTRIANOU In my view, the effectiveness of his free translation of Sappho’s work is based precisely on the innovative and creative exploitation of the method of recomposition, that is, of the original connection of the fragments into the larger seven unities, as well as into the particular textual entities that figure as independent poetic units or are suggested to be such by the translator.