Language Questions: Diglossia, Translation and the Poetry of Nikos Engonopoulos

Abstract

I. Approaches Since 1976, writes Peter Mackridge in his book The Greek Language, Modern Greek diglossia has more or less ceased to exist (1985: 11). But while diglossia as a generative feature in Greek linguistic life may play a drastically reduced or nonexistent role today, evidence of its past impact, as Mackridge's book amply shows, abounds in contemporary colloquial Greek. Moreover, diglossia survives as a permanent feature of much of modern Greek literature, and as such continues to affect how Greek readers respond to specific literary works. These responses can be as baffling to the foreigner as are the subtleties of the Language Question itself. I remember, a few years ago, reading a favorite Cavafy poem aloud to a young Greek friend: IsI±I„I®I½I„I·IƒI± IƒI‡IµI´IŒI½ I±I½I­IƒI„I¹I?I‚ IoI±I¹ I€I­I½I·I‚. At the time I too was all but broke and on the streets (as I would provisionally translate that wonderful opening) of Athens, so the poem carried a particular freight for me. On this occasion, however, I got no farther than the first line. My friend cut me short with a groan of impatience and disgust. Obviously, she was not hearing the line the same way I was. Something— the language of the original—kept her from responding as I had expected. (In contrast, I had once known a Greek dentist who was only too happy to recite the poem in its entirety.) I‘I½I­IƒI„I¹I?I‚, I€I­I½I·I‚, the obsolete augment in IoI±I„I®I½I„I·IƒI±, triggered unpleasant associations in her mind, deriving from painful high school drills and ugly political situations, that I could only guess at.1 Non-native readers like myself are in danger of missing the tonal nuances and emotive impact of such passages. While it could be argued