This is the second of Denise Harvey's projected three-volume selection of Papadiamandis’ short stories in English translation. (The first volume was reviewed in BMGS, 33.2, 2009.) It includes 31 stories, written between 1894 and 1902 and including some of the most celebrated examples: ‘Love in the Snow’, ‘Homesick’ and ‘Dream on the Wave’. As before, the individual translators, twenty in all, have been given a free rein to choose their own style and method. The editors follow the principles of selection set out in the first volume; the stories are printed in chronological order of first publication and are chosen as the ‘most representative’ (not necessarily the best, or best known) of the writer's work. Stories of island life (sometimes characterized as ‘timeless’ but in fact evoking distinct historical moments) sit alongside those set in the narrow lanes of contemporary (late nineteenth-century) Athens.
For the English-speaking reader there will be a new sense of the range and volume, and even the occasional repetitiveness, of Papadiamandis’ work beyond the anthologized favourites. A note of the date and source of original publication would have been useful, given current scholarly interest in the social and linguistic context in which Papadiamandis wrote: for periodicals and newspapers and for an urban educated readership. The stories in this volume were written when he was in his forties and early fifties, living in Athens and much taken up with translating contemporary English, Irish and American fiction. In his ‘Prologue’ to the volume Lakis Proguidis, a firm believer in the ‘European’ and ‘universal’ character of Papadiamandis’ work, also outlines its variously and specifically Greek contexts.
A constant theme is the precarious, unforgiving life of the Greek islands, blighted by poverty, illness and emigration. Many of the characters in the stories survive on the margins, as alcoholics or outcasts, or in the grip of some obsession. Women are particularly hard-pressed (‘The Mother-in Law's Servitude’, translated by Bruce Clark), but also claim special powers: weaving spells, practising ‘witchcraft’ or casting the evil eye. Both the narrator himself and his characters may be caught up in processes of enchantment and (half-welcome) disenchantment; the stories that profess to be ‘copied’ or ‘transcribed’ from real-life sources or ‘heard straight from the mouth of’ an informant are often the most magical or dream-like. Places are both remembered and conjured into being. In ‘The Aga and the Evil Eye’ (sympathetically translated by Liadain Sherrard) an abandoned village is evoked and then repeopled in Papadiamandis’ imagination as women and children visit to play among the ruins and to gather wild figs to pollinate their own cultivated trees.
For the island community of Skiathos the sea is omnipresent and the distinction between land and water sometimes blurred: a sailor falls asleep on the beach, half in and half out of the waves (‘For the Sake Of Pride’, translated by the editors), an offshore rock is held to be a woman grieving for her husband lost at sea (‘The Lookout, translated by Maria Margaronis), a house is almost submerged by floods (‘The Little House in Livadi’, translated by Andrew Watson). An autobiographical impulse is recognisably at work in ‘The Demons in the Watercourse’ (also translated by Liadain Sherrard), a wry account of the temptations and ordeals of a ten-year-old boy who gets lost in the tangled darkness of the local ‘Lifegiving Stream’ but finally experiences a vision of a wise old monk: to the mature narrator, looking back, ‘it seems to me like an allegory of my entire life’.
Six of the stories in this volume are set in Athens. In ‘The Destitute Dervish’ (translated by Leo Marshall), a salep-seller, a watchman and an unnamed observer (perhaps an authorial figure) puzzle over the enigmatic nocturnal appearances and disappearances of a half-recognized Turkish musician. ‘Neighbourhood Entertainment’ is relayed almost entirely through dialogue (translated with pace and panache by Peter Mackridge): the story of a boy who stabs himself for love, seen through the eyes of an unfeeling chorus of gossiping spectators, with a final ironic comment from the narrator.
Papadiamandis’ language encompasses demotic, katharevousa, ancient and ecclesiastical Greek, posing a series of challenges for any translator, even the translator into Standard Modern Greek (still a controversial project). Finding English equivalents for such linguistic variety is only the beginning: the translator must judge how far to merge and how far to foreground the layers of style and register: pastoral-idyllic, mock-epic, naturalistic, vernacular. How might the translator catch Papadiamandis’ protean narrative voice, by turns conversational, speculative, exhortatory or ironic? How keep abreast with the co-existence (often in the same story) of claims to truth and flights of fancy, with the sophisticated handling of free indirect style and the teasing commitment to take the reader's wishes into account? ‘In the end, did he overturn the boat? Did he drown the passengers? Did he save the girl? We have no tele-aesthesia to suddenly and numinously obtain our readers’ votes on the matter’ (‘A Hero's Eros’, translated by John Raffan).
Perennial problems in translating Greek—toponyms and personal names, religious and cultural allusions, occupational and regional dialects—loom large in these stories. Unfamiliar terms and references can be neatly elucidated in the footnotes, endnotes and glossary, but a real difficulty remains in the way the languages of the sea, of religion and of folklore are woven throughout the text. Nautical terms risk sounding incomprehensible, even absurd, to the landlubber reader: ‘Reef middle-jib! Smartly now! Reef fore t'gallants! Reef outer jib! Brail spanker! Brail main! Brail staysail!’ (‘Lovely Lady Sea’, translated by Daphne Kapsambelis). On the whole the translators in this volume strike a satisfying balance between translating and glossing the feasts and liturgy of the Greek Orthodox Church—and it jars when the accepted English term is overlooked (‘the flight to Egypt’ should be ‘the flight into Egypt').
The best translations in the volume are attentive to Papadiamandis’ sentence and paragraph structure, for it is often the syntax and word order of katharevousa as much as the vocabulary that makes it distinctive. Important too are such details as the use of quotation marks (marking different registers) and ellipses (suggesting half-formed thoughts and merging levels of reality). A notable example is the paragraph beginning ‘One evening’, from ‘Dream on the Wave’, translated by Gail Holst-Warhaft, (p. 207). The English traces Papadiamandis’ meandering evocation of the small bay through a paragraph-long sentence in which an extended simile (sea as child, land as mother) curls back on itself as the narrative resumes. As befits the pastoral idyll, the down-to-earth ‘lick of salt’ for the goats and the narrator's ‘I was ravished’ are juxtaposed without dissonance or irony. Similarly, in rendering demotic and dialect the translators give a sense of the rhythms and patterns of Greek by way of some internally consistent form of English that sounds well formed to a native speaker and is not too closely associated with any one region or community. Phonetic imitations of vernacular English risk sounding outlandish or patronizing: ‘An’ ee called me an’ all’ (‘Homesick’, translated by Leo Marshall).
Before the first volume of The Boundless Garden was published only twenty or so of Papadiamandis’ stories had been translated into English: twelve by Elizabeth Constantinides, three by Peter Constantine and the rest in ones and twos in periodicals and anthologies. Since then Denise Harvey's Romiosyne Series has published translations of The Murderess and ‘Around the Lagoon’, but much of Papadiamandis’ work remains inaccessible to English readers. It would be good to have some of the other novels and novellas; the editor's note to the first volume suggests that The Rose-tinted Shores and The Watchman at the Quarantine Colony (the latter often recommended in the Greek press during the early days of the Covid-19 epidemic) might one day appear.
