Konstantinos (Kaisarios) Dapontes [1713/14–1784], one of the most intriguing figures of the Greek eighteenth century, does not fit easily into the categories applied when discussing intellectuals of the period: supporters vs adversaries of the Enlightenment; clerical vs lay; premodern vs modern. Dapontes had impressive careers both as an administrator for members of the Phanariot elite and as a travelling monk collecting alms. He spent time in jail and exile, and was an informed reader and copyist of manuscripts. An author of compilations and long original texts (in verse and prose), he managed to have only a small proportion of his immense textual output published during his lifetime (and complained about his publishers). A prolific writer, with previously unknown texts still being discovered to this day, he presents us with copious literary reworkings of his life story and numerous copies of letters sent and received, but a biography remains a desideratum. A complete list of his works and, likewise, critical editions are lacking, so that despite continuous interest — Dapontes must be one of the most discussed Greek authors of the period — his texts are barely taught.
Tsalicoglou's bilingual edition of a small selection of this prolific author's works constitutes a great service to teaching Greek early modern texts in translation. T. has an intimate knowledge of the complexities of translating Dapontes and his contemporaries. Research for her 2004 Oxford doctorate, ‘Satire in the Greek Enlightenment 1750–1821’, supervised by the late Peter Mackridge, generated an early experiment in translation. In the same year she was awarded the MGSA Elisabeth Constantinides Translation Prize for an early version of the Canon of Hymns Containing Many Exceptional Things, included now in a new version in the current edition (pp. 64–81). Her introduction (xiii-lii), accompanied by a well-informed bibliography (liii-lxii) and a chronological list of works (lxiii-lxviii), initiates the reader into Dapontes’ life and work and presents his eclectic approaches to both traditional and modern forms of knowledge — a path not as unusual in this period as sometimes postulated in literature about the Greek eighteenth century. We get to know Dapontes’ accounts of princely courts and of important monasteries, of extended travelling, of meeting the khan of Crimea and being a guest of the Porte. Exile and jail might be seen as experiences of marginalization. But the intricate narration of these experiences has secured their author a high degree of posthumous remembrance; and he does not really seem to have been ‘an individual who lived for the most part in the margins of his society’ (p. l).
The choice of texts to be translated is obviously a difficult task, when confronted with long and insufficiently edited, or even unedited, texts. T. has set out to include a range of genres and forms and to cover as many creative periods of the author as possible (Preface, p. ix). Understandably, this being a short anthology of extracts for the English-speaking reader, there is a slight preference for texts whose content is considered more accessible to the reader of today (Mirror of Women, Garden of Graces, Canon of Hymns). Perhaps one of the lives of neo-martyrs composed by Dapontes (Paschalidis Reference Paschalidis2012), an extract from the detailed eye witness account of the Russo-Habsburg-Ottoman wars of 1735–9 in the Dacian Diaries (or Dacian Journals), or of the recently discovered text against the 18th century religious movement of the Kolyvades (Karanasios Reference Karanasios2016) might have added to the panorama of forms, genres and linguistic diversity. (At the end of the text I reference the two editions mentioned here).
The Greek texts presented here follow the Leipzig and Venice first editions (1766 and 1778), the Legrand edition of 1881, and Anteia Frantzi's Μισμαγιά of 1993. Written in a non-standardized early modern Greek, these are difficult exercises in translation and T. is to be lauded for producing an attractive English text (Texts and Translation pp. 1–95). The reader with no knowledge of Greek will perhaps miss the joy of some puns. The effect of the words σπουδαῖοι (‘important’, but also ‘educated’) and χυδαῖοι (‘lowly’, but also ‘vernacular’) is lost, for example, in the verses about the moderns vying with the ancients (pp. 52–3): κ᾽ ἔχομεν μίαν ἔπαρσιν ἡμεῖς μὲν οἱ σπουδαῖοι, πώς καὶ αὐτόν τον Πλάτωνα περνοῦμεν οἱ χυδαῖοι translated as ‘We have the arrogance to think that we/ Surpass in greatness Plato’). Again, should one for example not have translated Μοσχοβία as ‘Muscovy’ (i.e. Russia) instead of ‘Moscow’ (pp. 50–1)? Yet generating such questions about translation choices into English in relation to a Dapontes text is in itself a great achievement of the translator. Notes (pp. 97–125) and an index (pp. 127–8) complete the edition.
The Harvard Early Modern and Modern Greek Library aims to render accessible ‘to scholars and general readers […] major works of Greek literature and thought produced in the last millennium’. Following volumes on Cavafy, Elytis, and Engonopoulos, Konstantinos (Kaisarios) Dapontes is perhaps a surprising choice. T.'s compact and knowledgeable introduction to his colourful world and her enjoyable translation of even just a small sample of his texts in this well produced bilingual hardback in elegant type will, one hopes, attract readers to an author who still remains unknown outside the Greek speaking world — and even among Greek readers. It would be a pity, for example, for anyone to miss out on such verses as these from the Canon of Hymns Containing Many Exceptional Things (p.71): ‘Little tunny of Chios, bluefin tuna of Euboea, Venetian cuttlefish and Smyrna's prawns; the crayfish of Moldavia and Wallachia, eels of Ioannina and mackerel from the Sea of Marmara are all magnificent things.’
