An Athenian Diary

25

Reading around in Modern Greek Literature

Getting competent enough in modern Greek to start to read, however haltingly, however dictionary-dependent, and however baffled by idiomatic phrases (my favorite so far: "He took out his eyes with her," which means, "He had really good sex with her"), has added another whole category of things to be humble about -- I've come to begin to appreciate just how much literature, in the broadest sense, there is out there, and how little of it I will ever explore, even if I devoted the rest of my life to it. So what do you do, where do you start? There's the classics, and there's what folks are reading now, and there's the stuff in between. And there's the newspapers, which are a kind of literature themselves, with their own specialized vocabulary and range of style. Here's where I've begun:

    My newspaper is the Kathimerini

The Kathimerini (the name means "daily," a misnomer since it's not published on Mondays) aims to be the New York Times of Greece. Indeed, they reprint, in English, several pages of the Times on Saturdays, and some of the articles are translations of pieces that appeared in the Times. But in a broader sense this goal means that the Kathimerini seeks to be objective. Most Greek newspapers wear their politics on the front page -- no one would ever mistake the Rizospasta, the Communist paper, for a Murdock publication, and so too with many others. Politically the K, as it calls itself, sits about where the Times does -- making it moderately conservative here. The style fits the self-image -- the K still insists on some older spellings (traditional vowels in the subjunctive, for example, which no one else uses) and maintains an elevated, vocabulary-rich prose. (The occasional sentence still escapes me.) You can tell when you compare it to other papers, say Ta Nea ("The News"), tabloid in appearance and style. People here fain to be impressed when they see me reading the K. In fact with patience it reveals itself, and you learn things. And its coverage of Iraq has been honest -- it calls things what they are, sometimes a bit shrilly for an American ear, trained to a less expressive press, but with an integrity that some American media outlets would do well to emulate. But the K could not resist pulling for Nea Demokratia in the recent elections, however indirectly their support was displayed (mainly as endlessly reprinted poll results showing ND ahead) until the very last day; in this, they still aren't quite where the Times is (and maybe that's for the better). You can check out the English-language version on line.

    Ntora Giannakopolou, H Provba tou nufikouv (Athens 1993)

I started this book in my Greek Level 5 class, and finished it after the class ended. It's the first novel I've read all the way through in Greek. (I'd read some professional books in their entirety before.) It's a real pot-boiler, a family story set in the late 1930s and Greece under Nazi occupation. (For this the best book I know if Mark Mazower's Inside Hilter's Greece. The Experience of Occupation, 1941-44 [Yale 1995].) There's lots of sex and betrayal, suicide and shame, weak men and strong women. The characters are cardboard -- the bad guy is irremediably, inexpressibly bad (nothing he does is anything but morally reprehensible), the good guys endlessly, almost perfectly good. (I got excited when one of the good characters looked like she was going to have an affair with a married man -- thank heavens, a fault! -- but of course she refrained, and the guy never even knew what she was contemplating, since her sin, such as it was, remained, like Jimmy Carter's, in her heart.) They made a TV movie out of the book some years ago, which was a wild success. Giannakopoulou, who was a singer and actor before she took up the pen, seems a sympathetic and well-liked figure; she's gone on to write several other novels. I did learn from this book my favorite Greek idiom, quoted above. And I have to say it kept me interested and turning the pages (of both the novel and the dictionary).

    Demetres Hatzes, To tevlo" th" mivkrh" ma" povlh" (Athens 1999)

Hatzes was a curious fellow. This book, really just a collection of short stories, represents the totality of his output as a writer. Born in northern Greece, he lived for some years in Bulgaria. I suspect his sympathies lay on the losing side in the Greek Civil War (the side so castigated by Nicholas Gage in his book Eleni [New York 1996]). The tales are laced with irony and sadness. The first, for example, "The Tanner," tells the story of a proud tanner in the small town where all the tales are set. At the top of the social hierarchy, the tanners find that their business is slowly being destroyed by modern international competition; they finally lose all business, and collapse into abject poverty. The hero of the story is the proudest tanner of all, who finally decides to change his trade (to hunting) in order to make a living for his family, despite the shame it brings. Hatzes tells the story with simplicity and compassion -- and a plethora of local dialectical forms found in no dictionary known to me.

    Basiles Vasilikos, Z (Athens 1987)

Z is the classic story of Greece under the junta. It is also a tale of the clash of modern and traditional life; it begins with the wrenching decision -- for the narrator -- to buy a refrigerator to replace the icebox he and his wife have been using. She's the one who wants it, because she's the one who has to go down and buy ice every day; he resists, because the refrigerator is a symbol of the intrusion of modern, American values into his life. (A pretty telling tale from another point of view too, eh?) But he himself, as a writer who writes for film, is no pure traditionalist. And so it goes. This book was banned under the junta and is regarded as one of the great works of modern Greek literature; it's readily available in English translation and was the subject of a Costas Graves film (rather heavy-handed, as I recall).

    Dionysis Kalambrezos, H arrwvstia kai to loulouvdi to lwtouv (Athens 1995)

This book is my venture into Greek science fiction -- of which, it must be admitted, there isn't much. (I hope later to be able to say something about a few other examples.) Published in 1995, it shows a bit its age. Its a fable about AIDS, recast as a sexually transmitted disease that is easily communicated and drives infected people to seek to infect others. The protagonist, Viktor, works for an international "committee" charged with finding ways to arrest the progress of the disease; measures employed include severe restrictions on civil liberties, forced deportations of the sick, and semi-official sanctioning of vigilante committees. Viktor, himself immune, follows an old friend now infected to Egypt in the hopes of effecting a cure through a mysterious remedy connected with the flower of the lotus in the title. The characters, I'm afraid, are rather clunky and wooden, and the plot a bit overwrought, but Kalambrezos was engaged on the right side of the struggle a long time ago, writing rather bravely at a time when AIDS seemed far more terrifying in developed countries than it does now, and when Greece -- which still has a lot of trouble with homosexuality -- was still in complete denial.

    Greek Poetry

Greece has two Noble-laureate poets. George Seferis (1900-1971), whose poems are pretty well known in the west, had a long career as diplomat and public figure and was awarded the Noble prize for literature in 1963; you can read all about him in a new biography George Seferis. Waiting for the Angel. A Biography by Roderick Beaton (New Haven 2003), who I saw give an inspiring lecture on Cavafy at the British School not long ago.

The other laureate, less well known outside Greece, is Odysseus Elytis (1911-1996), whose statue stands in a plateia not far from our house, in a pose as an man of the working class. The first complete collection of his poetry appeared only in 1997 as The Collected Poems of Oddyseus Elytis, tr. Jeffery Carsen and Nikos Serris (Baltimore 1997).

But for me the truly great Greek poet of modern times was C. P. Cavafy. He deserves an entry of his own in this "Athenian Diary," and so he shall have: C. P. Cavafy and Alexandria by Egypt.

If you want to buy some Greek books, you might try Cosmos Publishing Company, based in New Jersey (262 Rivervale Road, River Vale, NJ 07675-6252; telephone: 201-664-3494); they can supply both originals and translations. (I have found their service iffy, especially for slightly off-beat requests.)

May 8, 2004

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