Macedonia

Commentary 167 lations (to avoid lengthy repetition of instances, I refer readers to pages 125128 of my article, notes 4, 11, 22, 23, and 25). That Holst-Warhaft seeks to make a virtue of the ingénue excitement still allegedly present in later versions of her book makes it very hard to draw the line between ingenuousness and disingenuousness. This is especially the case when, in the same paragraph, one reads an exposé of an instance of irresponsible treatment of rebétika texts by others engaged in their commercial appropriation. As for my own "strong agenda," I believe that I stated it clearly in my article. I sought to demonstrate that translations should strive to preserve the source-text's resistance to a single determinate interpretation. Most of my article was devoted to exploring the competing options for translating a muchtranslated rebétiko, Vamvakaris's «Μπουζοϕκι γλÎ-ντι του ντουνιά». In the course of this I referred to the manifest shortcomings of Holst-Warhaft's treatment of the text—which cannot be attributed to EMIAL, whose reissues of 78s were in fact not "the first and only available recordings" in 1975, as she now claims, for Minos Matsas and Philips (among others) had started publishing them some three years earlier (cf. Road to Rembetika, p. 164). In any case, if there is still some doubt about to whom one should attribute the residual deficiencies in Hoist- Warhaft's transcription of this longsuffering song, those in her translation derive from her willful, but unrepented , suppression of a small and troublesome relative pronoun / interrogative adverb. The reader will have to decide whether this exonerates the translation and makes "a better poem or song in English," as claimed. It has not changed my published view. As for the rebétika-blues nexus, popular usage and intuition may well form a sufficient basis for marketing rebétika abroad, but they are highly problematic in scholarly argumentation. Dimitry Paivanas La Trobe University MACEDONIA Despite Karakasidou's attempt to evaluate critically the alleged repression suffered by Slav-speakers in Greek Macedonia ("Politicizing Culture: Negating Ethnic Identity in Greek Macedonia," JMGS 11 [1993]: 1-28), she fails to make a persuasive case because of questionable methodology, flawed analysis, and inaccurate evidence. The research design suffers from several threats to its validity. First, how representative is her sample relative to the total Slav population in the region? If she has studied the elephant's tail, so to speak, how can she be so sure of what the entire elephant looks like? Second, what controls did she use to avoid biases in the sample? On what basis did she select her respondents? Was there any variation among individual respondents in information concerning ethnic identity and historical memories ? Third, whereas to build the Slavs' case, perhaps to personalize their "plight," she uses anecdotal evidence almost exclusively, she uses no interviews 168 Commentary to make the Greek case. Why? Fourth, timing could have easily biased the reliability of her data because the period when she collected evidence coincided with outbursts of nationalistic fervor in neighboring Yugoslavia. Since her subjects claim to have a close affinity with the people in Skopje, it is conceivable that the search for the ethnic identity of the former is motivated by the political objectives of the latter, and that consequently their ethnic identity is neither constant nor apolitical despite her claim to the contrary. The legalistic logic of argumentation is flawed because proving the "defendants" wrong does not make the "plaintiffs" right. Because the null hypothesis is that there is no relationship between the variables that she examines, she should convincingly establish first whether and why the Slavs are "right" and then assess whether the Greeks are "wrong." She attempts the latter but neglects the former. The accuracy of the evidence and the objectivity of the author are questionable. First, why are Greek claims carefully scrutinized whereas patently false remarks made by Slav villagers—for example, that the Greeks arrived in Macedonia after 1913—are left unchallenged? Second, if genealogy and language alone do not constitute adequate criteria of ethnicity, why are the respondents distinguished as "either Slavic speakers or descendants of Slavic-speaking families" (note 6)? Third, the author does...