Chair: David Ricks (King’s College London)
3:00-3:20pm: Sophia Voulgari, ‘Miracles and Tragedies: Re-inventing Greekness in Times of Crisis’
This paper will provide a critical overview of the conceptualizations of Greek history and modern Greek identity during the financial crisis and amidst the Covid-19 pandemic, focusing on Yiannis Kiourtsakis’ recent book The Miracle and the Tragedy (2020), and the ways in which it echoes Seferis’ cultural programme of a ‘Greek Greekness’. The critical conditions of the last decade have created a state of emergency that has in turn necessitated a re-examination of Greek culture and its relation to Europe, a need to retrace the evolution of the modern Greek state as a hybrid entity, oscillating between the miracle and the tragedy.
Speaker Bio
Sophia Voulgari is Associate Professor of Modern Greek Literature at the Department of Greek Letters, Democritus University of Thrace. She studied at the Department of Philology, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (1985-1989), and received her PhD from King’s College London (1996). Her thesis Between and Beyond Genre(s): The Poetic Prose of Andreas Embirikos, E. Ch. Gonatas and Nanos Valaoritis was supervised by Roderick Beaton. She has taught Modern Greek Language and Literature at the University of Hamburg (1997-2000) and the University of Munich (Erasmus Exchange Program, 2009 & 2018). Her fields of research are Greek modernist poetry and prose, borderline and hybrid texts, genre theory, theory of literature, comparative literature. She has worked extensively on Nanos Valaoritis, E. Ch. Gonatas, Giorgos Heimonas, Νikos Kachtitsis and Manolis Anagnostakis. She has published a book on G. Heimonas (2015) and is preparing one on Anagnostakis.
3:20-3:40pm: Eva Kokkinidi, ‘Rediscovering Kazantzakis: Perceptions of Greece and England in His Recently Published Novel Ο Ανήφορος’
Kazantzakis’ novel Ο Ανήφορος, which was written during his sojourn in England in 1946, remained unpublished for 76 years. It was recently released for the first time in October 2022. The novel is set in the aftermath of World War II, at the beginning of the Greek Civil War, and the protagonist of the novel, Kosmas, explores his personal mission as well as the role of Greece and humankind in the modern world that has changed dramatically. This paper examines Kosmas’ perceptions regarding Greece and England throughout his quest for identity, which is described as a difficult and ascending path. Kosmas travels from Irakleio to London and other cities of England, wanders around the antiquities of Knossos and the British Museum, reads Homer and Shakespeare, and converses with intellectuals as well as war victims. I argue that the novel does not only pinpoint the distinct traits that characterise each country but also highlights the cultural interactions and the attributes that people have in common, stressing the universal need for peace and unity.
Speaker Bio
Eva Kokkinidi was first an undergraduate student of Roderick Beaton, while he taught a course on Kazantzakis at the University of Crete along with Emeriti Professors Peter Bien and Stamatis Philippidis in 2007, as part of the celebrations marking the 50th anniversary of Kazantzakis’ death. After her graduation as Class Valedictorian from the University of Crete, she pursued an MA and PhD degree at King’s College London. Her PhD thesis, ‘The Modern Greek Literary Tradition in the Major Novels of Nikos Kazantzakis’ (2016), was supervised by Professor Beaton. Her research and studies have been awarded grants and have been funded by the Greek State Scholarships Foundation, the Lilian Voudouri Foundation, and the Schilizzi Foundation. Since 2017, she has been editing books at Crete University Press (Foundation for Research and Technology-Hellas) and teaching in Secondary Education.
3:40-4:00pm: Joshua Barley, ‘Translating Greek Folk Songs’
This paper looks at the translation of Greek dimotika tragoudia (folk songs) from a historical, theoretical and practical perspective. I will begin with a discussion of some of the 19th-century English translations, notably those of Charles Brinsley Sheridan (1825) and Lucy Garnett (1896), considering how their approach was shaped by historical as much as aesthetic factors. I will then look at modern theory surrounding translation of folk song, drawing on K. Emmerich’s Literary Translation and the Making of Originals (2017), before concluding with some personal reflections on translating folk songs for my recent publication Greek Folk Songs (Aiora Press 2022).
Speaker Bio
Joshua Barley is a freelance translator and writer. He read Classics at Oxford and Modern Greek at King’s College London, under Professors Beaton and Ricks. Since his graduation he has published several novels in translation, including Ilias Venezis’ Serenity (Aiora Press, 2019). His translations (with David Connolly) of the poetry of Michalis Ganas were published as A Greek Ballad by Yale University Press in 2019 and shortlisted for the Runciman Award. In August 2022 he published (with Aiora Press) the first translations of the modern Greek folk songs in over a century. He lives between Athens and Zagori, Epirus.
4:00-4:20pm: Questions
4:20-4:30pm: Short break and technical set-up for Zoom session
4:30-4:50pm: Nektaria Klapaki, ‘The Cult of the Insurgent Greek Nation in Kalvos’s Odes’ (online)
The insurgent Greek nation features under different guises in Kalvos’s Odes (1824, 1826): as Liberty (‘The Ocean’, ‘To Psara’) and Victory (‘To Victory’) but also as Glory (‘To Glory’) and Virtue (‘To Glory’). In these odes, Kalvos employs the rhetorical trope of allegory, which is combined in some cases with the trope of divine epiphany, to represent the insurgent Greek nation in the form of allegorical female figures who resemble ancient Greek goddesses and occasionally manifest themselves to the Greek insurgents, especially in contexts of crisis. While critical discussion of these odes has read Kalvos’s use of allegory and divine epiphany as instances of a neoclassical poetics, this paper argues that the use of these two tropes also points in the direction of the cult of the insurgent Greek nation in line with the discourse of nation cult informing the Odes.
Speaker Bio
Nektaria Klapaki is a Lecturer in the Hellenic Studies Program at the University of Washington’s Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies where she is also a faculty affiliate in the Comparative Religion Program. She was trained both in Classics and Modern Greek Studies in Greece (B.A. in Classics, University of Crete) and the UK (M.A. and Ph.D. in Modern Greek Studies, King’s College, London). While an undergraduate, she came to King’s as an Erasmus exchange student, where she did her PhD under the supervision of Roderick Beaton. She has published, both in English and Greek, on various facets of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Greek literature. Her publications have appeared in the Classical Receptions Journal; Journal of Modern Hellenism; Journal of Modern Greek Studies, and several collective volumes. She is currently serving as Arts & Humanities Associate Editor of the Journal of Modern Greek Studies, and as a Member of the Modern Greek Studies Association Executive Board.
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