The Archeologist and Selected Sea Stories by Andreas Karkavitsas (review)

The Archeologist and Selected Sea Stories belatedly but brilliantly brings to an English readership long-overlooked works by Andreas Karkavitsas. One of the most prominent authors of Greece’s generation of the 1880s and a practitioner of ethografia, a form of Greek naturalism focused on the rural experience, Karkavitsas was known for his masterful blend of folk and literary traditions, as well as his keen eye for the texture and tenor of the life and vernaculars of the common folk, all set against the backdrop of the turbulent political and social upheaval that caused Greece and the wider Balkan region to be dubbed the “powder keg” of Europe during this period. Coinciding in its release with the bicentennial of the Greek War of Independence (1821) and the centennial of the outbreak of the second Greco-Turkish war (1921), this volume brings together what can be considered two main axes of Karkavitsas’s reflections on evolving nationalist debates: on the one hand, his final, historically significant albeit, at the time, negatively reviewed novel, The Archeologist (1904), with its treatment of the territorial aspirations and anxieties prompted by the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire; on the other, four of the best-known stories from his celebrated collection Tales from the Prow (1899), with the transnational and transcultural ethos that animates the maritime life they describe. Whether digging up ancient relics from the ground or diving down into the oral traditions of the sea, the works in this volume plumb the potentialities of the modern Greek novel.

An allegory-cum-folktale-cum-morality play, The Archeologist presents us with the disparate forces shaping an emergent Greek modernity via the tale of two brothers, their romances, and the homosocial patterns of desire to which those romances attest. The elder brother, Aristodemus, literally succumbs to the cold dead weight of his obsession with antiquity and the fatal romanticizing of the foreign philhellene scholars with whom he consorts. The younger, Dimitrakis, smitten by the peasant vitality of the “bastardized” Elpida, promises, through the anticipated literal and figurative fruitfulness of this union, to hold at bay the encroachments of the Ottoman, Bulgarian, Serb, and Vlach neighbors he is in competition with. Similar themes of fraternal competition, betrayal, and commemoration shape the selections from Tales from the Prow, stories gleaned from the yarns told to Karkavitsas by the salty seafarers he encountered during his time as a ship’s physician; as Johanna Hanink writes in her introduction, they attest to Karkavitsas’s reclamation of “the deep as the literary territory of the modern Greek nation-state” (xxxix) and the inauguration of a rich and lasting tradition of modern Greek maritime writing. Situated on two resonant frontiers of Greek modernity, the volume presents us with worlds within worlds—worlds both central and marginal, modern and ancient, that undergird just as much as they unsettle some of that modernity’s central discourses.

Hanink’s training as a classicist and her work focusing on the legacies of antiquity inform a remarkable introduction that contextualizes and frames her translations by means of the two aforementioned axes. In other words, the introduction locates Karkavitsas not only in terms of his national contexts but also in terms of his broader transnational literary and cultural concerns, which range from the role of the distant past in the conception of the modern nation to the evolution of maritime literature. If, as Anthony Burgess famously said, “translation . . . is a matter of making intelligible a whole culture,” the pleasures of reading this volume are very much deepened by a pedagogical positioning that elucidates not only the role of Karkavitsas in the development of the modern Greek novel, but also, in tandem, the intersections and dialogues—from Phil-hellenism to naturalism—that animate global literary cultures.

Of course, no discussion of works in translation ought to overlook the question of language, of language as culture—a point of particular significance to any discussion of these...