Rebétika

Commentary The editors invite readers to respond briefly to what they have read in previous usues, and we offer authors an opportunity to reply. Clashing opinions will not frighten us; however, we do not want submusions aimed at an author personally rather than at an author's scholarly argumentation, interpretation, and/or documentation. Responses should be no longer than 500 words. The editors reserve the right to reject or edit responses that are sent. In no case will a controversy be extended over multiple issues of the journal. REBÉTIKA I must confess to being both irritated and flattered by PaÃ-vanás's long and scholarly objection to my translations and to my remarks about the problems of translating rebétika ("The Translatability and Interpretation of Reb étika," JMGS 11 [1993]: 107-131). When I first published my small book on rebétika, its format was dictated by a publisher's request for a readable introduction to the subject. At the same time, EMIAL wished to release a series of three records, re-recordings of old 78s, with the idea of marketing the book and the records together. Given the later revival of rebétika, it may be hard to imagine that these were the first and only re-recordings available at the time. The records were in the hands of various private collectors; for my translations I was given handwritten versions of the songs used on the EMIAL series. I was gullible, ignorant, an inexperienced translator, and I had only a couple of weeks to do the translations. Still, I am glad I did them. The book is now going into a fifth edition in Greek and English, it still circulates in German, and it was recently published in Turkish (Rembetika [Istanbul: Pan Books, 1992]). Although some of the errors may have been missed, most have been corrected. The reason for the book's popularity is probably a combination of the material's intrinsic interest and my ingénue excitement in discovering it, a quality difficult to recapture in a thoroughly revised edition. A more serious objection to my work on rebétika is PaÃ-vanás's claim that I have a hidden agenda, especially in my article "Resisting Translation: Slang and Subversion in the Rebétika" (JMGS 8 [1990]: 183-196), a "hermeneutic" approach that allegedly leads me to omit or rearrange my translations to suit my thesis. PaÃ-vanás's case rests principally on my translation of Vamvakaris's «Μπουζοϕκι γλÎ-ντι του ντουνιά», in which my most serious crime seems to be the omission of the word που. Although I had noted the error and restored the word in my original draft of the translation, the elusive που seems to have slipped between the keys of the computer again. As for not translating it, I Journal of Modern Greek Studies, Volume 12, 1994. 165 166 Commentary did in fact translate it as "which" in the English edition of my book (Gail Hoist, Road to Rembetika [Athens: Anglo-Hellenic Publishing, 1975], p. 46), but because of the slight ambiguity created by such a translation (an ambiguity not present in the Greek) and because it is unattractive in English, I deliberately left it out. Short of arguing with Pa'ivanás about each choice I made in the translations, I would simply say that, like all translators, I undoubtedly bring an unconscious personal bias to my work that makes me favor one word over another. I would also like to point out that there is nothing careless or irresponsible in my comparison of rebétika to the blues. Pa'ivanás seems to think that there is some objective way of comparing the two genres. Sakis Papadimitriou (in Katharine Butterworth and Sarah Schneider, editors, Rebétika: Songs from the Old Greek Underworld [Athens: Komboloi, 1975]) attempted to formalize the comparison, but all such parallels are bound to be partly intuitive. The fact that they have been made by so many observers suggests an affinity between the genres, one that certainly extends to the vocal quality of singers like Bessie Smith and Sotiria Bellou. If I fail to recognize myself in the humorless translator with the hidden agenda that Pa'ivanás portrays...