Michael Paschalis, Professor Emeritus of Classical Philology, is also a systematic scholar of Modern Greek literature. In his book Ο αινιγματικός ποιητής Ανδρέας Κάλβος, he continues, complements, and strengthens the research project that he developed in his earlier Ξαναδιαβάζοντας τον Κάλβο. Ο Ανδρέας Κάλβος, η Ιταλία και η αρχαιότητα (2013). Both books represent an important effort towards a new reading of Kalvos’ Greek-language poetic oeuvre.

P.’s undertaking develops along two interconnected lines of inquiry. The first concerns the relationship between Kalvos’ poetry and the Italian language and poetic tradition; the second concerns the relationship between the Greek poet’s work and Greek and Roman antiquity, particularly literature. As regards the first line of inquiry, P. demonstrates very persuasively – taking up once more the question of Kalvos’ relationship especially with the poetry of Foscolo – that the Greek poet’s attachment to the Italian language and Italian neoclassical poetry remained strong even during the period when he was composing his Greek-language poems. Indeed, this connection is not merely part of Kalvos’ literary inheritance; it constitutes an operative condition of his conception of his Greek poems, since it is reflected in numerous aspects of their linguistic structure, stylistic construction, and imagery.

With respect to the second line of inquiry, P.’s earlier book demonstrated, equally convincingly, that Kalvos did not possess the extensive knowledge of Ancient Greek literature that had previously been assumed or argued. Nor did he read the source texts themselves. Rather, whatever contact Kalvos had with Ancient Greek texts – primarily linguistic – was based, on the one hand, on dictionaries and, on the other, mediated through Italian literary works, themselves links in the long chain of dialogue with Ancient Greek and Roman literature. In other words, according to P., the direct dialogue between Kalvos and the Ancient Greek texts claimed by earlier and some contemporary scholars does not in fact exist. The notion of such a dialogue stems instead from the Hellenocentric orientation of Kalvos scholarship – that is, from the desire that Kalvos should be regarded as ‘Greek’.

In Ο αινιγματικός ποιητής Ανδρέας Κάλβος, P. makes use of the edition of Kalvos’ works published by the Benaki Museum (2016–21), continuing his research in four complementary directions corresponding to the four parts of the book. After the Preface (‘The Italian and Italianising Poet Andreas Kalvos’, pp. 15–19) and the Introduction (‘The Enigmatic Poet Andreas Kalvos’, pp. 21–37), the nine chapters of Part I, ‘The Enigmatic Language of the Odes’ (pp. 39–162), which occupy almost half the book, focus on nine specific passages from the Odes. Paschalis re-examines their meaning (and consequently their poetic function), tests and rejects earlier and more recent interpretations offered by Greek philological criticism, corroborates and substantiates his own interpretations through primarily Italian sources and Kalvos’ Italian intertexts, and ultimately demonstrates, very persuasively, that Kalvos not only lacked knowledge of Ancient Greek but was also not fully proficient, at least not deeply, in Modern Greek.

In the two chapters of Part II, ‘The Enigmatic Kalvos as Translator’ (pp. 163–208), P. re-examines two of Kalvos’ translation works: his translation of the Psalms of David and his translation of lines 1–9 of Book 3 of the Iliad. He revisits earlier critical views concerning the terms, prerequisites, and aims of these translations while also, through Kalvos’ translation practice, posing the question of which languages Kalvos knew and how well he knew them. The answer converges with that of the first part: Kalvos knew Italian and English better than Modern Greek, and it is on the basis of this linguistic foundation that he produced his translations.

In Part III, entitled ‘The Enigmatic Kalvos and Criticism’ (pp. 209–328), the focus shifts from Kalvos’s Greek-language texts (both poems and translations) to selected aspects of the critical reception of the Odes and of Kalvos as a poetic figure in Greek poetry. P. discusses everything from the earliest French-language reviews of the Odes to the essays of George Seferis and Giannis Apostolakis, and the poems referring to Kalvos by Karyotakis (‘To Andreas Kalvos’, 1927), Theotokas (‘The Old Eagle’, 1934), and Sikelianos (‘Andreas Kalvos’, 1942). Although these texts have been extensively studied, what matters is the perspective from which P. reinterprets them. He shows that critical approaches emphasizing Kalvos as a poet who was not necessarily Greek and national in character – but rather Italian – were overshadowed and marginalized because the Hellenocentric interpretation of Kalvos came to dominate, either for ideological reasons or because of a failure to recognise the conditions under which his Greek-language work was shaped as a product of Italian literary culture. At the end of the third part, P. offers a detailed commentary on the complex intertextual framework surrounding Kalvos’ decision to use as the epigraph of Lyra (1824) lines drawn from a contemporary poem by the French poet Casimir Delavigne.

Finally, in the fourth and shortest part, ‘Instead of an Epilogue’ (pp. 329–48), the author, drawing particularly on his training as a classical philologist, refutes with convincing arguments the view advanced in 2007 that a collection of six anonymous Latin odes from 1823, entitled Olympic Odes for the Struggles and the Freedom of the Greeks, together with certain accompanying texts, can be attributed to Kalvos.

Having outlined the contents of the book, I shall now offer a general assessment, prompted by what I regard as one of P.’s most important statements: ‘Philology is above all a matter of method: in understanding the problem, in collecting the evidence, and in substantiating interpretation’ (p. 278). This principle forms the basis of P.’s method of reading and interpreting the Greek-language poet Kalvos.

Throughout his studies on Kalvos, P.’s interpretative method does not rely primarily on questions of poetic style or rhetorical analysis. Rather, it is founded on a careful comparative reading of Kalvos’ Italian-language and Greek-language poetic works, as well as on the reading of the Greek poems – indeed, sometimes of individual words – alongside Italian, French, English, or Latin texts that P. securely identifies as sources or intertexts. In the case of the classical philologist P., his investigation of Kalvos’ work, as well as of other figures and texts of Modern Greek literature, gains particular sharpness and depth from his extensive knowledge of the modern Western literary tradition, especially the Italian tradition.

In other words, the principal virtue of both of P.’s books on Kalvos lies in their philological positivism. By this I mean that P., taking account of and engaging critically with previous Kalvos scholarship – while revising and rejecting earlier views when necessary – interprets Kalvos’ Greek-language work and his translations on the firm ground of demonstrable and carefully verified textual relationships. Consequently, his individual interpretations are either securely established or at least persuasively argued.

The result is that even when his analyses enter into great detail, they never become pedantic. Rather, they remain illustrative and ultimately exemplary: they reveal what Kalvos knew and how he knew it, how he thought, and how he worked as a Greek-language poet (and translator). In my view, P. rightly refrains from entering directly into the question of Kalvos’ artistic intentionality – that is, from attempting to determine the degree and nature of his self-consciousness regarding the choices he made while composing his Greek-language poems. P.’s method seeks – and succeeds – in enabling us to understand what Kalvos knew and how he came to know it in order to write the poems as he did.