Christina Karakepeli writes for Bloggers Karamazov about an interesting bit of literary history:
The first translation of Crime and Punishment was published in Athens in 1889. At that point, the Greek nation was no more than half-a-century old. […] At the time, production of national—modern Greek—literature was low. After Greece became independent, the question of what modern Greek literature should look like—what should be its goals, language, style and themes—was constantly debated. Literary critics dismissed Greek literary works written at the time as a passive mimesis of European literary models that did not reflect the realities of modern Greek society. For newspaper editors, publishing imported—mostly French—literature was easier and more profitable. Daily newspapers of the time featured regularly in their pages the works of popular French authors. Not everyone was in favour of French literature though, especially Greek literary critics, who saw French novels as superficial and morally detrimental lamenting their popularity with the Greek audience.
The answer to French romanticism was to be found in Russian literature, which was promoted at the time as a model for everything that modern Greek literature aspired to be. In one of the first introductory texts on Russian literature in Greece, Russian literature was presented as an alternative to the ‘wrinkled’ and ‘exhausted’ literatures of European nations. Russian literature was praised for its ‘originality and national colour’; the ‘young and vivacious’ literature of the Russians, as the author described it, could be a prototype for an ideal national literature: inspired by the life of the common people, written in their language, with a stated purpose of social reform’. The dissemination of Russian literature in Greece could be ‘invigorating […] for [the] perishing Greek literature’, the author wrote. From the 1860s on, a steady rise in translations of Russian works attested to the fact that Russian literature was not only favoured by literary critics but also very popular with Greek audiences. The most translated Russian authors of the time were Ivan Krylov, Alexander Pushkin, Ivan Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy and Mikhail Lermontov. Of Dostoevsky’s works, only five works were translated in the 19th century: two Christmas short stories, two excerpts from A Writer’s Diary, and Crime and Punishment.
The first Greek translation of Crime and Punishment was published in April 14th, 1889 in the daily newspaper Ephemeris, translated into Greek as ‘To egklema kai e timoria’ [The Crime and the Punishment]. It was serialized in 106 instalments that run for four months. The translation was published on the first and second page of the newspaper following the format of French newspaper literary supplements. The source of the text was the first French translation of the novel by Victor Derély published five years before. Derély’s French translation was the intermediate text for many European translations of Crime and Punishment, among them the first translation of the novel in English by Frederick Whishaw published only three years before the Greek translation. The translator was not named, as was the usual practice at the time.
The translator would have remained unnamed and invisible, had he not turned out to be one of the greatest modern Greek writers. He was identified 16 years after the publication of the translation as Alexandros Papadiamantes. When Papadiamantes translated Crime and Punishment, he was thirty-eight years old and a rising young author. Although Papadiamantes is an author little known beyond Greek borders, in Greece his novels and short stories that focus on the everyday life of small island communities at a time when Greece was establishing itself as a young European nation are considered a landmark in the development of Greek national literature. During his lifetime, he had minor success as an author and supported himself by translating fiction for daily newspapers. […] After its publication in Ephemeris, Papadiamantes’s translation was not republished in book form, making the first translation of Crime and Punishment in Greek unavailable to readers and critics alike for at least a hundred years. A critical edition of the translation was published for the first time in 1992, when academic interest for Papadiamantes’s translations rose.
As I mentioned before, Papadiamantes’s Greek translation had as its source the first translation in French. Victor Derély, the French translator, did not make significant changes to the source text at the macro-textual level. However, in terms of style and tone, Derély’s French text was quite flat preserving one register throughout the text, a far cry from Dostoevsky’s multi-layered polyphonic text. Papadiamantes in the Greek text largely followed the French translation, but he made a lot of changes in terms of style taking advantage of Greek intra-language variations. At that time and until the 1970s, Greek language was characterized by the coexistence of two language variants. One resembling Ancient Greek in grammar and vocabulary (the ‘katharevousa’), and one more colloquial reflecting everyday speech (the demotic). Papadiamantes translated the descriptive parts of the novel using the archaic Greek dialect and the dialogic parts in the vernacular dialect. Within dialogues, he alternated between higher and lower register to render the idiolect and the social background of each speaker. The result was a stylistically rich translation where one could find reflected the whole history of Greek language from Homeric epithets to Modern Greek colloquialisms. In a way, it could be argued that Papadiamantes intuitively sensed the polyphony of the original rendering it into a stylistically rich Modern Greek. He later employed the same idiosyncratic style in his own fiction using his translations as a creative exercise.
While the translation was not available for many decades, Dostoevsky’s influence left an indelible mark on Papadiamantes’s fiction. Fifteen years after translating Crime and Punishment, Papadiamantes wrote the novel The Murderess (1903), whose spiritual predecessor is Crime and Punishment. […] The realistic depiction of Frankoyannou’s inner turmoil as she commits the murders and her attempts to rationalize her crime have led Greek critics to compare The Murderess to Crime and Punishment since the novel’s publication. […] The novel’s psychological realism, its treatment of social and moral issues, and Papadiamantes’s rich language make it one of the best texts written in Greek; a text that remains modern even today.
Strange to think that the first Greek translation of Crime and Punishment made so little impact on anyone but the translator! (If anyone is wondering, as I was, the stress on Karakepeli is antepenultimate: Καρακέπελη.)
I like the detail that the Greek intelligentsia who saw Russian literature as a natural ally in pushing back against Western decadence and frivolity didn’t actually know Russian and thus had to translate into Greek from a translation of the Russian into decadent/frivolous French …
Excellent point!
I always thought of Katharevousa as the modern descendant of the Atticist ideology of the days of Roman Empire, and not as an “archaic Greek dialect” — a description that is more appropriate for Homeric Greek or the Old Lesbian dialect of Sappho and Alkaios.
It wasn’t just French translations of Dostoyevsky that were stylistically “flat”. In Germany, Swetlana Geier’s translations of the major novels were the first to explicitly break with this tradition. She was also the first to translate Преступление и наказание as “Verbrechen und Strafe” (instead of the usual “Schuld und Sühne”); some reviewers didn’t like this change at all.
It looks like this line of inquiry is part of the author’s Ph.D. dissertation, so there will probably eventually be an interesting monograph covering the subject in detail. (However, I know better than to hold my breath waiting for the final versions of humanities students’ theses. I have mentioned in the past how one of the teachers at my high school was also working on a Ph.D. dissertation about translations of Dostoevsky, which he finished the same year as I finished my own Ph.D. degree—although of course, he was working full time as a secondary school teacher though the whole period.)
Separately: I was puzzled here a bit by the the author’s use of nation, as in, “At that point, the Greek nation was no more than half-a-century old.” If that were news copy I was editing, I would probably have changed it to say, “the modern Greek state.” I wonder whether this is a nonnative infelicity or whether the word choice is indicative of Christina Karakepeli adopting a specific sociopolitical viewpoint. She seems to refer a lot to “national literature.”
Also a good point. I didn’t even notice that.
Verbrechen und Strafe translates straightforwardly 1 : 1 as “crime and punishment”. Schuld und Sühne is more like “guilt and penance”, sounding more religious or philosophical and perhaps fitting Dostoyevsky’s intent better – but I haven’t even read the book (in any language).
Mr. Jansen (op. cit., supra) said “consequences” was perhaps a more faithful translation than “punishment” in the title, but it would not be as pithy.
Verbrechen und Strafe translates straightforwardly 1 : 1 as “crime and punishment”. Schuld und Sühne is more like “guilt and penance”, sounding more religious or philosophical and perhaps fitting Dostoyevsky’s intent better – but I haven’t even read the book (in any language).
No, the Russian is straightforwardly “crime and punishment” — nothing religious or philosophical about it.
the usual “Schuld und Sühne”
Huh. Should I understand the title of Jean Amerie’s book Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne as in some way evoking this?
Should I understand the title of Jean Amerie’s book Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne as in some way evoking this?
It will evoke that to every German with at least a rudimentary literary education.
I believe Amery is invoking the Dostoyevsky title (in German) only in passing; he is more concerned with philosophy, in particular with a critical reshaping of the concepts of guilt (Schuld) and atonement (Sühne) in the spirit of Nietzsches reshaping of good and evil in Jenseits von Gut und Böse. The secondary title of the Amery book is Bewältigungsversuche eines Überwältigten. He appears to be signalling here that his idea of Vergangenheitsbewältigung is very different from that of his contemporary intellectuals on the Left, with whom he would identify on most of their consensus views. He also departs from Nietzsche in validating feelings of outrage, which Nietzsche scorns as originating from people who are powerless due to their own personal failings, whereas Amery would maintain that the powerlessness is imposed by an external political or social environment.
Nietzsche’s style is brilliant but his ideas are essentially adolescent and have, unfortunately, inspired generations of angry adolescent males ever since (and in many cases helped them justify and hang onto their adolescent anger). I wonder if a vision of the future drove him mad.
Thank you! My understanding just increased. That’s what I come here for (well, one of the things I come here for).
Oh yes, atonement is the word I remembered and then forgot again last night. That fits better than penance, which I’d probably render Buße (as in “sacrament of”).
That seems to have stopped in the 70s or so. Nietzsche himself has become unpopular because his work (especially as posthumously edited by his sister) contains antisemitic tropes.
But yes, Spengler already pointed out that Nietzsche, as sure as he was about wanting to “revalue all values”, hardly had anything to offer on the question of what the new values and the new philosophy should be, just some waffling on “the eternal return of the same”…
Nietzsche himself has become unpopular because his work (especially as posthumously edited by his sister) contains antisemitic tropes.
Unpopular among those opposed to antisemitism, you mean. As we’ve all learned in recent years, that’s not the vanishing minority some piously hoped it was.
Point taken, but I don’t think those who believe in space lasers read all that much philosophy.
Separately: I was puzzled here a bit by the the author’s use of nation, as in, “At that point, the Greek nation was no more than half-a-century old.”
It’s less puzzling when you realize that the people of this nation thought of themselves as Roman and indeed referred to themselves as Rhomaioi well into the 19th century. And understandably so – they had far more in common with the Byzantine Romans than they did with ancient pagans. In time, “Hellene” became the preferred nomenclature – in particular during the War of Independence when it was deployed to foster a patriotic sense of history (a little too successfully – it led to the fetishization of ancient Greece and the neglect and disregard of the Byzantine period, as evidenced, for example, in the hideous desecration of the Acropolis).
Another good point.
the hideous desecration of the Acropolis
You’re singing my song!
The Acropolis has been turned into a Romantic ruin. That was the time when rich people built ruins in their parks so they had something to get melancholic over.
Oh, I heard someone young say what was translated as “we’re all Romans after all”* on TV something like 20 years ago. The context was conflict between Greeks autochthonous to non-North Macedonia and the descendants of Greeks from Asia Minor.
* voiceover: wir sind doch alle – significant pause – Römer
didn’t actually know Russian and thus had to translate into Greek from a translation of the Russian into decadent/frivolous French
It was French literature that was perceived as superficial and morally detrimental not the French language.
The occasional English novel that made it into Greek in those days also transited via French. But I’m sure the Greeks could tell their Walter Scott from their Balzac.
Translations into English too sometimes came via French, the first version of Anna Karenina, for example.
These days I’m told Greek is better served with direct translations from Russian – an indirect consequence of the left losing the civil war it seems.