Condemned by Konstantinos Theotokis, and: Niki by Christos Chomenidis, and: Time Stitches by Eleni Kefala (review)

Abstract

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Reviewed by:

• Condemned by Konstantinos Theotokis, and: Niki by Christos Chomenidis, and: Time Stitches by Eleni Kefala
• Karen Emmerich (bio)

Konstantinos Theotokis, Condemned. Translated by Susan and Miltiades Matthias. Foreword by Vangelis Calotychos. River Vale, NJ: Cosmos Publishing, 2021. Pp. 157. Paper $21.95. Christos Chomenidis, Niki. Translated by Patricia Felisa Barbeito. New York: Other Press, 2023. Pp. 482. Paper $18.99. Eleni Kefala, Χρονορραφία/ Time Stitches. Translated by Peter Constantine. Dallas, TX: Phoneme Media and Deep Vellum, 2022. Pp. 199. Paper $15.95.

Many of us in the field of Modern Greek Studies who teach at colleges and universities in North America have long lamented the fact that Greek language programs (where they exist at all) are often small, understaffed, and underfunded, such that only the lucky few are able to take courses beyond the second year, while more robust programs in other, more commonly taught non-English languages can offer topics courses in which students read, speak, and write primarily or exclusively in those languages. For fields like ours, translations play outsized roles; virtually no class in Modern Greek Studies could exist without them, but we remain hampered in our teaching and research alike by the paucity of readily available texts in translation, particularly of Greek-language scholarship in all the disciplines that comprise our interdisciplinary field. Still, while there are countless texts that many of us would love to see translated, and existing translations that we would love to see reprinted, the wealth of recently published English-language translations of Greek-language literary texts is a fact to be celebrated.

The present review will offer brief thoughts on a few such translations, while also highlighting the work of particular translators and publishing houses that have been steadily expanding the available offerings for educators, students, and general readers. It also has the aim of encouraging all of us in the field to make a habit of familiarizing ourselves with recent publications and incorporating newly available texts into our courses: course adoptions can have a significant effect on book sales and thus on a publisher's willingness to take risks on other Greek-language works in future. For better or for worse, many publishers do still think of book sales in these terms—and the more we do as an academic community to support individual works translated from Greek, the greater the effect we will likely have on the entire field of Greek-language literature in translation.

My review takes up for discussion three quite heterogeneous books: Susan and Miltiadis Matthias's translation of Konstantinos Theotokis's 1919 [End Page 114] novel Condemned (Κατάδικος), Patricia Felisa Barbeito's translation of Christos Chomenidis's 2014 novel Niki (Νίκη), and Peter Constantine's translation of Eleni Kefala's 2013 book of poetry Time Stitches (Χρονορραφία). And this heterogeny is, in a sense, the point: it invites us to think not only about how particular books can be incorporated into comparative syllabi, or even syllabi in non-literary disciplines, but also about how courses in modern Greek literature can move away from a "greatest hits" model to topical courses that use Greek-language literature as a test case but are of broader interest for a particular topic or theme. It is difficult to imagine a course in which all three of these books could logically sit together on a syllabus, but it is relatively easy to imagine a whole host of syllabi for comparative courses, reading across multiple literary traditions, on which each one of these books, or perhaps even two of them, could find a home.

I begin with Susan and Miltiades Matthias's compelling translation of Theotokis's 1919 novel Condemned, published in 2021 by Cosmos Publishing, a longstanding source of Greek-language texts in translation. This translation comes to join two recent translations, by J.M.Q. Davies, of Theotokis's The Life and Death of Hangman Thomas and Corfiot Tales, thus enriching the available literature of the Greek countryside, of the Ionian islands, and of early twentieth-century Greek literature dealing with issues of justice and morality, class and gender oppression, the penal system, incarceration, and faith. Condemned would sit comfortably on syllabi alongside other works as varied as Papadiamantis's The...