Manto Aravantinou’s Joycean archive

Abstract

This article focuses on the work of Manto Aravantinou (1923–98), a Greek poet, critic and translator of Joyce, mainly active in the 1960s–80s. Specifically, it discusses her 1977 monograph Ta Ellinika tou Tzeims Tzois (James Joyce’s Greek) in which she explores Joyce’s connection to the Greek language, culture and people. This book is based on her archival research on Joyce’s Greek notebooks (1916–17), a small and underexplored part of the Zurich notebooks (1915–19), which contain notes from what she claims are the Irish author’s Greek lessons with Pavlos Phocas. This article examines Aravantinou’s reading of the Greek part of the Joyce archive, how she uses it to interpret and translate Joyce, and how that introduces new modes of reading Joyce’s work. Contrary to negative reviews she received about misreading and misinterpreting Joyce, I argue that Aravantinou’s approach to the Greek notebooks considers the note as a productive space of meaning, and takes into account the invitation to etymological speculation as well as the singular multilingualism of Joyce’s later work. Finally, considering recent discussions about the ‘weird’ as a mode that is based on the creation of an archive, I argue that Aravantinou reconstructs the Joyce archive in such a way that she introduces the weird as a possible way of reading Joyce.