Language Questions: Diglossia, Translation and the Poetry of Nikos Engonopoulos

Language Questions: Diglossia, Translation and the Poetry of Nikos Engonopoulos Martin McKinsey I. Approaches "Since 1976," writes Peter Mackridge in his book The Modern Greek Language, "Modern Greek diglossia has more or less ceased to exist" (1985: 11). But while diglossia as a generative feature in Greek linguistic life may play a drastically reduced or nonexistent role today, evidence of its past impact, as Mackridge's book amply shows, abounds in contemporary colloquial Greek. Moreover, diglossia survives as a permanent feature of much of modern Greek literature, and as such continues to affect how Greek readers respond to specific literary works. These responses can be as baffling to the foreigner as are the subtleties of the Language Question itself. I remember, a few years ago, reading a favorite Cavafy poem aloud to a young Greek friend: Κατήντησα σχεδόν ανÎ-στιος και Ï€Î-νης. At the time I too was "all but broke and on the streets" (as I would provisionally translate that wonderful opening) of Athens, so the poem carried a particular freight for me. On this occasion, however, I got no farther than the first line. My friend cut me short with a groan of impatience and disgust. Obviously , she was not hearing the line the same way I was. Something— the language of the original—kept her from responding as I had expected. (In contrast, I had once known a Greek dentist who was only too happy to recite the poem in its entirety.) ΑνÎ-στιος, Ï€Î-νης, the obsolete augment in κατήντησα, triggered unpleasant associations in her mind, deriving from painful high school drills and ugly political situations, that I could only guess at.1 Non-native readers like myself are in danger of missing the tonal nuances and emotive impact of such passages. While it could be argued Journal of Modern Greek Studies, Volume 8, 1990. 245 246 MartÃ-n McKinsey that we are better off without my friend's largely negative and extraliterary associations, in the long run, our exclusion from this associative framework may hamper our grasp of one of the signal features of modern Greek literature. Divisive as it may have been as a social phenomenon, diglossia is part of the Greek linguistic heritage, and one of the potentially expressive elements of the language. In a poet like Cavafy it can be used to indicate irony, while in the surrealist work of Andreas Embirikos it suggests a range of experience outside the reach of everyday usage. It is integral to Kariotakis' satiric sense. English-speakers have little in their linguistic background with which to compare the radical split and long, politicized conflict between katharevousa and demotic. Yet as M. Bakhtin and others have pointed out, all languages are subject to a degree of "polyglossia"—that is, they can be broken down into subgroups defined by social, professional and dialectal variations. It is relatively easy to find limited parallels to the Greek situation in our own language and literature. Take, for example, an American work first published in the same year (1930) as Cavafy's—Hart Crane's "The Bridge." In the "Proem" that opens Crane's poetic sequence, we find the following stanzas: And Thee, across the harbor, silver-paced As the sun took step of thee, yet left Some motion ever unspent in thy stride,— Implicitly thy freedom staying thee! And obscure as that heaven of the Jews, Thy guerdon . . . Accolade thou dost bestow Of anonymity time cannot raise: Vibrant reprieve and pardon thou dost show. (Crane 1958: 3-4) Crane is, of course, making pointed use of liturgical language here; he is setting up the Brooklyn Bridge as the altar to a new religion— Progress. Yet an American reader steeped in the influential "demoticist " poetics of W. C. Williams, who held that poetry should be written in a language approximating the spoken idiom of one's time, will balk at words like "Thee," "Thy guerdon," "thou dost." People, we know, didn't speak like this in America in 1930, any more than they do today. Such a response (which was, in fact, my own, upon first reading the poem many years ago) surely contains something of that shiver of distaste my Greek friend experienced with the Cavafy poem. But the comparison is imperfect...