Translation as transexuality in Greek Modernism

Abstract

This essay attempts to show how the classical approach that examines relations between source and target text in translation may prove to be only a basic one. Indeed, many different texts related or not to the original, may play a fundamental role in shaping the final product of a translation. Therefore, the consideration of a net of associations between a rich hypotext and a final hypertext leads to a more complex study of the translation process, the analysis of which is not merely reduced to the description of the traditional operations of addition, suppression or substitution, but is enriched with the recovering of intertextual references. Furthermore, the notion of transtextuality, seen as the amount of texts involved in this process, helps to give a broader understanding of translation as a practice capable of including and preserving some traces of preceding texts. The Greek version of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land written by the poet Giorgos Seferis, firstly edited in 1936, represents a useful case study that can help to clarify how different texts from other languages may influence the translation of a literary work.