A jobbing translator himself for almost thirty years, Papadiamandis was no stranger to such textual conundrums as make translators sweat. Yet he seems to have contrived to booby-trap his own fiction against ready translation, larding it liberally with jeux de mots, culture-bound locutions, abstruse local words and intertextual resonances. This is not to mention his signature idiosyncrasy of allowing the narrative to waver eclectically between different registers of modern Greek (mainly puristic, but with regular infusions of demotic and dialects). And lest they pass unnoticed, many of these snares are highlighted with strident quotation-marks or ellipses. One would like to think that an excess of humility, not uncollegial indifference, was what made Papadiamandis a translator's nightmare: the guileless ascetic probably never imagined that his quirky diction would ever need to be accommodated in foreign tongues. In the event though, not only did inter-lingual translation of his works begin while he still breathed, but, more controversially, so did renderings into more amenable forms of modern Greek. Intra-lingual translation of Papadiamandis has continued to raise philological hackles beyond the 2011 centenary of his death—when, incidentally, he even made it on to BBC Radio 4 in English, thanks to the anthology The Boundless Garden: Selected short stories by Alexandros Papadiamandis (Limni 2008) from the crusading publisher Denise Harvey.
Englishing Papadiamandian fiction can only be described as an exercise in extreme translation, and Peter Mackridge is brave indeed to risk proferring a nit-picker's picnic in the guise of a bilingual edition of Around the Lagoon with facing text and translation. His confidence is doubtless born of two decades’ engagement with the fine detail of this short text, starting with his long analytical article «Ολόγυρα στη μνήμη»: ο χώρος, ο χρόνος και τα πρόσωπα σ’ένα διήγημα του Παπαδιαμάντη (Ελληνικά 43 [1993]: 173–187) and continuing with his first translation of this story for The Boundless Garden (200–222). Happily, the gamble with the format pays off quite handsomely: the facing texts, translator's notes and introduction combine to make this slim volume a veritable one-stop masterclass in literary translation, a boon to teachers and students of the discipline. Accuracy is balanced with elegance to produce a close translation that nowhere reads like a translation. Certainly, making the story seem at home in English has necessitated some restructuring of the Greek syntax and rationalisation of tautological phrasing, but most English-readers will not regret being spared the occasionally laboured amplitude of Papadiamandis's narrative. In dealing with the abstruse vocabulary sprinkled throughout the story, Mackridge has taken the trouble to hunt down Papadiamandis's trademark botanical arcana (chaste-trees, thorny burnet and glasswort inter alia), and among the nautical terminology he memorably renders the verb αβαράρω as ‘to punt’ (60 ff.), as one might expect of an Oxonian translator. It is interesting to note, à propos, that between editions of his translation, the translator has resiled from repeated reference to the vessel involved as a ‘punt’ (perhaps fearing lest Skiathos lagoon sound too much like the Cherwell); he also turns the fateful flowers called ίτσια from the ‘violets’ of the first version into ‘narcissi’, so that the heroine Polymnia becomes ‘that narcissus in human form’ (17). The abundance of technical terminology from other domains (shipbuilding, ploughing, traditional costume, communal festivities) is also painstakingly handled. Perhaps some of the phrases that Papadiamandis holds up in the tweezers of quotation marks are somewhat undercooked in translation: ‘sat down for a drink’ (55) diminishes the sweet sorrow of the carousal in είχαν καθίσει […] ‘να το κλάψουν’ ολίγον (54) and ‘fanciful songs’ (57) unduly subdues the passion of ‘μερακλίδικα’ τραγούδια (56). Regrettably too, but perhaps sensibly, there is no attempt to match in translation the highly suggestive differentiation between dialectal and standard phonology (mostly in the form of swallowed unstressed syllables), with the single exception of ‘D'you’ (57). The translator acknowledges elsewhere (Mackridge 1993: 178) the role of language in distancing the narrator from the narratee; it also sets him apart from the various villagers with whom the callow youth is linguistically assimilated. Perhaps the translation could have given a sense of this ironic distance at least in the single instance of the hero's direct speech: Κ'στοδουλή, βρε! (44) with ‘Hey, K'stodoulis!’. Or again where the narrator, ever unpredictable, appears to drop his linguistic guard and ‘goes native’, allowing dialectal elements (e.g. Κ'βούλι [22]) to infiltrate the narrative surreptitiously. The translator's introduction does, however, helpfully explicate the significant but untranslatable wordplay which abounds in the story, notably the alliterative chiming of λίμνη, μνήμη, ανάμνηση (the ‘reminiscences’ of the subtitle) with the proper name Polymnia, all of which reinforces the heroine's centrality to the lagoon as a site of memory. But Mackridge does not surrender all of Papadiamandis's playful puns to untranslatability: the distorted wish καλό μπλέξιμο (34), instead of καλό πλέξιμο, is very cleverly rendered as ‘good failing’ (35), instead of ‘good sailing’, and then neatly picked up again later when the pun κακό μπλέξιμο (50) is translated as ‘a good flailing’ (51).
Any translation masterclass using this handy bilingual edition might find it instructive to ponder some apparent slippage at the interface of translator and publisher. First, there is a divergence between Mackridge's phrase ‘woven from linen and silk’ (41), which seems to render λινομέταξος (as per N.D. Triandafyllopoulos's critical emendation of the text in Αλέξανδρου Παπαδιαμάντη Άπαντα Athens 1997, vol.2: 389), while the facing Greek text gives the unemended form λειομέταξος (40). Then the Greek text's punctuation comes adrift on pages 34 and 58 where Triandafyllopoulos's angle brackets morph disconcertingly into dashes (—των— and —και— respectively), while the translation is oblivious to this punctuation. Again, one wonders if the inclusion in this edition of four photographs of the lagoon and boatyard from the Merlier Archive (20 f. & 28 f.), by way of visual illustration of the adjacent text (which is also quoted in captions to the pictures), betokens an attenuation of Mackridge's earlier reservations about the use of the same images in another publication and his concern that such emphasis on superficial topographical realism threatens to detract from the subtler psychological and symbolic content of literary texts (1993: 175 and fn.5—cf. Introduction, 7).
Finally, while Mackridge rightly stresses ([8] and 1983: 176 f.) the significance of Around the Lagoon in the history of European fiction as a pioneering example of second-person narrative, it might further be noted that earlier examples of this technique in prose fiction date from at least 1835 when Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story ‘The Haunted Mind’ first appeared. Moreover, Papadiamandis was translating a novel by Hawthorn's son Julius for Akropolis Editions in 1893, and it may be that Hawthorn père was also in the suite of American authors that he was reading around the time of writing this story (1892).
Unsurprisingly, the greater length of the novel The Murderess (1903) bedevils the translator not only with significantly more of the challenges seen in the short story, but also a broader range. Thus, to his repertoire of registers, Papadiamandis now adds variously sub-standard Greek, including the solecisms of semi-literates (η μάχαιρα ήτον του παθόν [sic]), childish lisping (ζ’λειά for δουλειά), baby-talk (κοι, μαμ, νάνι), and even rhyming slang (χαμπέρι for μαχαίρι). Then the enlarged cast of characters comes with a plethora of significant sobriquets, so that the murderess Hadoula is mainly known as ‘Mrs Yiannis-the-Frank’, while her hellhound of a son Dimitrios has half a dozen nicknames, including ‘Mulberry’ and ‘Mush’. Even the protagonist's default name, Hadoula, is a nom parlant: it denotes a caress, and how might a translation retain the pervasive irony of its application to a serial strangler? Or indeed render the derogatory associations of heterodoxy embedded in her surname Frangoyiannou? To complicate the nomenclature further, Papadiamandis himself appears to ‘nod’ in chapters 6 and 13, losing track of some of the names he assigned to Hadoula's progeny and victims. (Xenophon Kokolis gives a succinct overview of this confusion and its possible causes in Για τη «Φόνισσα» του Παπαδιαμάντη: Δυο μελετήματα Thessaloniki 1993: 33, fn.13, & 54). Consummate linguistic skills and cultural understanding are clearly needed for the tour de force of capturing in translation the complexity of this classic of modern Greek literature.
Liadain Sherrard displays both admirable prowess and finesse in her attempt to do the novel (overdue) justice in English. Her translation, The Murderess. A social tale, was published just in time for the 2011 Papadiamandis centenary, but came regrettably too late to head off the New York Review of Books re-issue in 2010 of the late Peter Levi's highly unsatisfactory translation The Murderess (London 1983). The occasional flashes of inspired brilliance in Levi's version do not redeem the multitude of egregious howlers, nor the cavalier proofreading (which allows ‘wells’ to become ‘walls’ and ‘the street’ to become ‘the shit’), nor the woefully sloppy page-compilation that vitiates the climax of the novel in chapters 16 and 17. NYRB adds its own infelicity in the cover-illustration, replacing the caricature of Frangoyiannou of the 1983 edition with a sketch of her outstretched strangling hand, which unfortunately is raised in that open-palm gesture of opprobrium known to Greeks as μούντζα.
The relevance of the artwork (‘Story of the Tree’) on the cover of Sherrard's translation eludes me, but her translation is certainly far superior to Levi's in every respect and, though not perfect, is a most welcome corrective. She seems to be at pains to avoid Levi's phraseology even where it plausibly renders the Greek, so that his ‘folds and steadings’ become her ‘pens and byres’ (91). Her botanical terminology seems carefully researched, whereas Levi sometimes resorts to specious calques unknown to the OED. Rarely do their versions coincide verbatim—inexplicably in banal expressions such as ‘he added in self-justification’ (88) and ‘[she] asked her by gesture rather than by speech’ (95). Sometimes both translators get the same thing wrong: γελώσι μαζί των means ‘laugh at them’ not ‘with them’ (40). And they both struggle with some proverbs and idiomatic expressions, botching, for instance, the irony in Ας έλειπαν αι περιποιήσεις… (meaning ‘She could well do without the pampering [in store for her if arrested]’) (92) and failing to capture the ominous pun in Hadoula's repartee ahead of her first strangling (14): —Σκασμός! …—Και πλαντασμός! (meaning ‘—Shut up! … —And choke!’). Occasionally Sherrard mistranslates where Levi doesn't: e.g. she renders ‘subsequent’ as ‘preceding’ (24), ‘whip’ as ‘cudgel’ (25), ‘without fail’ as ‘without delay’ (38), ‘indentation’ as ‘projection’ (54). Unlike Levi, she repeatedly spares the English reader the graphic detail of Hadoula's tongue hanging out as she pants (ξεγλωσσιασμένη 91 & 107). She sometimes misreads syntax (as in the penultimate sentence on page 37 where Hadoula, not her neighbours, produces the pretence and the forced laugh). Sherrard almost always airbrushes the narrator's stilted digressions and clumsy resumptions, but when she follows him into syntactical thickets, the result can be even clumsier than the Greek (eg [82] ‘the two constables, who to get to where the shepherd was had to go down and cross the stream, […] reached Lyringos's side’). Elsewhere she needlessly links poignantly staccato phrases to form a smooth single sentence (21). However, such occasional lapses do not significantly detract from the sustained sophistication of Sherrard's translation, which is especially evinced in the lyrical set-pieces (notably the ‘indescribable harmony’ of the colours and sounds of successive dawns: 78, 101, 106), but also in mundane expressions such as ‘Mustn't ever let go of the name, oh no!’ (15), ‘Where are my old clodhoppers?’ (44 and 107), and ‘Are you back?’ (91—for Ήρθες;). Like Mackridge, she mostly standardizes dialect words and phrases (whereas Levi occasionally breaks into regional brogue: ‘It's Himself [Γεραμπής] sent you!’, and he resourcefully renders the rhyming slang for ‘knife’ as ‘strife’). Sherrard does render the infantile lisping (52, 60), but eschews the baby-talk (85), apart from κοι, for which the narrator disobligingly offers an etymology—she adeptly renders it as ‘ssh’ and parallels his pedantic digression with a reference to the ‘peculiar suggestiveness and magic’ of the related word ‘hush’ (87).
Of the paratextual material, Sherrard's endnotes usefully gloss cultural, geographical, historical and intertextual references. Some notes are imperfect: (113 n.4) misses the innuendo that the brigands were in league with the kleptocratic government of the day and in (117 n.45) the Bavarian doctor's initial should surely be W, not V (cf. Kokolis 1993: 26 f.). The Introduction by Lambros Kamperidis neatly discusses some of the novel's moral issues and intertexts; this involves retelling the story and might perhaps be prefaced with a ‘spoiler-alert’ for anyone wanting to savour the suspense of the plot. Lastly, it is touching to see that Papadiamandis's irrepressible partiality for puns has rubbed off on the compilers of the same biographical note used in both books reviewed here: his education on Skiathos and Skopelos is described as ‘sporadic’!
