Erotocritos. Circa 1640 A.D., and: The Sacrifice of Abraham on the Computer: A Concordance, Word-Indexes and Stylistic Remarks (review)

Reviews 271 It must be remarked that as constantly the experimental "modernist ' ' and renovator as Elytis has been, he has also been passionately devoted to the Greek language in its richness and expressive power and variety since Homer's time. Except in the sparse instances where he intentionally did otherwise, he has always been meticulously faithful to that language's correct use. The proper rendering , therefore, of his poetry into another language would require thorough and deep familiarity with Greek in general as well as in its particular uses. The shortness of a review does not allow giving individual illustrations of where Broumas' text fails in its faithfulness, accuracy, correctness and clarity because of either of the two reasons. The careful and interested reader may find such inadequacies on pages 3,5, 9, 19, 21, 23, 25, 27, 31, 33, 37, 39, 41, 43, 45, 47, 51, 59, 61, 63, 65, 73 and elsewhere. There are some misprints as well that could have been avoided. In a second edition of this volume one would wish to see its undeniable beauties preserved and its errors corrected. Andonis Decavalles Fairleigh Dickinson University Vitzentzos Kornaros, Erotocritos. Circa 1640 A.D. Translated by Theodore Ph. Stephanides. Athens: Papazissis. 1984. Pp. 345. Dia M. L. Philippides, The Sacrifice of Abraham on the Computer: A Concordance , Word-Indexes and Stylistic Remarks. Athens: Ermis. 1986. Pp. xxvi + 243. Theodore Stephanides, known to English-speaking readers as a character in books by Gerald and Lawrence Durrell, but also to neohellenists as George Katsimbalis' collaborator on translations of Palamas, spent much of his later life in London engaged on a labor of love: a translation into metrical, rhymed English couplets of the entire Erotocritis, which was sadly published only after his death. The notion of translating the more than 10,000 lines of the Erotocritos into verse might seem to be an undertaking of fruitless audacity; yet Stephanides' sensitive rendering manages to sustain a fluency and elegance without excessive recourse to fussy archaism. How is it possible to translate the Erotocritos? Perhaps we should start by looking at what can't be translated. What is chiefly impossible to render is the metrical structure and all that goes with it. Stephanides wisely decided to abandon the decapentasyllable in fa- 272 Reviews vor of the iambic pentameter, which possesses a similar standard, classic status in English literature to that of the 15-syllable iambic verse in Greek. But to jettison the politikós sticos means to cast aside the whole elaborate dictional structure, with its constant use of antithetical , pleonastic and complementary elements. And, because the decapentasyllable is the metre of oral poetry and of late Byzantine verse romance, its abandonment also leads to the relinquishing of the subtle references, both explicit and implicit, to Byzantine popular literature and the contemporary folk tradition. For although the story of the Erotocritos is based on a French model and although many passages can be traced to a variety of other texts, ancient Greek, Latin and Italian, the primary intertext consists of the corpus of vernacular Greek literature written since the 12th century and the unwritten tradition of song that existed in the poet's own time. Without an exhaustive and exhausting critical commentary (which Stephanides does not supply), these references are unavailable to the Greekless reader. How then has Stephanides faced these problems? He has generally avoided reproducing discoursal repetitions, preferring to collapse a pair of roughly synonymous phrases into a single, longer one. For example (I 786): Ke plia den t'sai zondanós, m ' apothaménos miázeis. You seem a corpse estranged from human kind. Often he renders a description less mythical and symbolic by being more specific and therefore more realistic than the original, although there are times when he sacrifices detail: e.g., while the poet states (II 597) that Charidemos' father died when he was three days old (the number three having a special resonance in popular tradition), Stephanides blandly writes that "while he was a babe, his father died." At other times the translator is obliged tacitly to skirt round a traditional form of words without providing an intrusive footnote. For instance, the anathemas at II...