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Resisting Translation: Slang and Subversion in the Rebétika Gail Hokt-Warhaft Μπουζοϕ κιγλÎ-ντιτοϕ ντουνιά ΓλÎ-νταγεςτουςμάγκες Κι οι πλοϕ σιοι σου κάνανε Μεγάλεςματσαϕ άγκες. Τώϕ ασεβαλανσεχαλιά Και σε σαλόνια πάνω Ακόμακιαπότοβιολί Δυοσκάλεςπαϕ απάνω. ΜεασανσÎ-Ï• ανÎ-βηκες Σε πολυκατοικίες ΚιÎ-παιξεςκαιγουστάϕ ανε Αφάν-γκατÎ-κυϕ ίες. Τώϕ α θ' ανÎ-βεις πιο ψηλά Θα φτάσεις και στον Αϕ η Κι ο Απόλλων ο Θεός Κιαυτός9ασεγουστάϕ ει. Bouzouki, the world's joy, you made AU the manghes happy But now the rich have played A dirty trick on you. They put you on their carpets In their smart salons Higher than the violin Two steps further up. In an elevator you went Up to their apartments; You played and they were really sent Those smart society dames. Now you'll rise still further, go High as divine Ares Right to the god Apollo, He'll really dig you too.1 What is it about the rebétika which has made them both popular with some middle and upper class audiences and despised by others? Apart from their intrinsic musical merit, they cater to what seems to be a universal fascination for sampling low-life at a distance. As Vamvakaris ' song makes clear, this sort of vicarious excitement is a form of voyeurism that may deceive the performer as well as the audience. The appropriation of rebetika by recording companies, bourgeois audiences, afficionados and scholars has undoutedly weakened their credibility as an expression of the sub-culture where they originated. At the same time musical and linguistic elements of rebetika have filtered into composed music and everyday speech, so subtly subJournal of Modern Greek Studies, Volume 8, 1990. 183 184 Gail Holst-Warhaft verting a culture in the course of being appropriated. In the special context of Greece where the issue of "pure" language has been so bitterly disputed, not only the subject matter, but the language of the rebetika is especially provocative. Slang was once used by the rebétes, as it is by other marginalized groups, as a deliberate barrier intended to resist comprehension by the society at large. The slang we find in the recorded rebetika songs is no longer functional, but is retained in part as a deliberate rhetorical strategy to give authentic underworld flavor to the songs and at the same time to provoke the establishment. Part of its allure is a delight in what black American English calls "signifying," the use of indirect figures of speech for their own sake. Translating the slang-filled lyrics of the rebetika into another language , especially one like English, raises serious theoretical and practical problems some of which I will illustrate in this paper. My conclusion is that any solutions we arrive at do little more than remind us that the language of the rebetika resists, among other things, translation . Slang and the Rebetika Although the rebetika employ slang expressions from the secret language of the drug-users and other underworld groups, they are never composed in the entirely cryptic argot such sub-cultures habitually employ. The Dalals of Benares, swindlers who act as middlemen for the silk-merchants of that city, speak a restricted language whose grammatical patterns and vocabulary are drawn almost exclusively from the majority language, Hindi, so that it cannot be called a dialect, but yet is sufficiently impenetrable to the average Hindi speaker to constitute a cant or secret language.2 Slang usually has in common with such secret languages the fact that it often originates "in communicative situations that are under some kind of stress or even oppression" (Sornig 1981: 1). This may account for the fact that most slang occurs in urban areas, or areas in which social groups come into unexpected contact with one another. Urban life, for most of the citizens of Athens as of other European capitals, begins in subordination . The influx of Asia Minor refugees into Piraeus and outer suburbs of Athens in the 1920s marked the beginnings of a large and disaffected urban population in Greece and of the enforced contact between different linguistic groups that is responsible for the extraordinarily innovative quality of urban slang. Foreign borrowings are common to all slang—as are loan translations (cf. Italian erba via English "grass" = marijuana). Similarly slang freely adapts lexical material already in use, substituting one word for another (mavro- Resisting Translation: Rebetika 185 black=marijuana). It is the subnorms of language, the slang of the sailor and the criminal, the hashish smoker and the motor-bike gangs that help bring about...

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