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Book Review: (Greek title)

1998; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 16; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/mgs.1998.0008

1086-3265

Sarah Ekdawi,

Balkans: History, Politics, Society

Reviewed by: Grãmmata thw EÊaw Palmer SikelianoÊ sth Natalie Clifford Barney Sarah Ekdawi Eva Palmer Sikelianou. Grãmmata thw EÊaw Palmer SikelianoÊ sth Natalie Clifford Barney. Edited and translated by Lia Papadaki. Athens: Kastaniotis. 1995. 1000 drachmas. The potential interest of these letters is threefold since the material they contain may provide new insights into three different lives: those of Natalie Clifford Barney, Eva Palmer Sikelianou, and her husband, the poet Angelos Sikelianos. However, insofar as Barney is the recipient, Sikelianou the author, and Sikelianos merely the occasional subject of a few of the letters, most of which date from before Eva met him, it is a reasonable assumption that the letters’ real interest will be to scholars concerned with the life and work of Natalie Barney and Eva Palmer Sikelianou. Why, then, have these letters—written in English and French—appeared in Greek translation, with no mention of a planned edition of the originals? Another issue also needs to be addressed before the manner of presentation of these letters can be discussed. Apart from who benefits from this Greek edition, there is the more delicate question of the extremely private nature of this correspondence, much of which consists of passionate love-letters. Sikelianou herself, as Papadaki mentions, deliberately excluded the affair with Barney from her autobiography and preserved no documents relating to it. Her letters to Barney belong to the Bibliothèque Doucet in Paris. Under French law, the letters of deceased persons may be read only with the permission of the author’s estate. Such permission was obtained by Papadaki from Sikelianou’s son, Glafkos Sikelianos. Papadaki alleges that access to Barney’s side of the correspondence (preserved in the Center for Asia Minor Studies, Athens) was blocked in accordance with the wishes of the poet’s second wife, Anna Sikelianou. If this uncorroborated allegation has any substance, Papadaki would seem to have contravened the wishes of both of the poet’s wives by publishing these letters. [End Page 152] Let us now consider how she has served scholarship in her edition. Although the edition is not bilingual, the few samples of the original English and French that are provided make it clear that Papadaki is by no means a competent translator. Two examples will suffice to demonstrate this. Barney’s book The One Who Is Legion is rendered as «O yrulikÒw eautÒw maw», while her collection of verse plays and shorter verse “diversions,” Actes et entr’actes, is rendered as «Prãjeiw kai diale¤mmata». In both these cases (and there are many more), one wonders what kind of surreal relationship the translator imagined between the titles of these works and their contents. A comparison of the only letter partially represented by a photograph (30) with the corresponding translation (278) reveals a very hazy grasp indeed on the translator’s part of what is going on: she transposes subjects and objects in a way that makes complete nonsense of Sikelianou’s text. Elsewhere, she admits that she had difficulty reading Sikelianou’s writing because it is “miniature” (28; yet neither the photograph included nor any other manuscript of Sikelianou’s that I have seen bears this out); however, she adds that “chance misreadings . . . do not significantly alter the text”! She also states that she had no opportunity to return to the archive and check her transcriptions (12). In short, the translated versions of Eva Sikelianou’s letters presented in this volume have been arrived at by a process of Chinese whispers: misread, mistranscibed, and mistranslated. One wonders who will benefit from this. Significantly absent from the introduction to the edition is any discussion of how this selection of 163 letters was made from a total of 185; nor is there any indication of how undated letters were dated. The footnotes do not fully correspond to the bibliography, and dates in the chronography conflict with some of the dates in the footnotes. Papadaki’s discussion of the friendship between Sikelianou and Barney is largely cobbled together from the more scholarly account in George Wickes’s The Amazon of Letters: The Life and Loves of Natalie Barney (New York: Putnam, 1976). Overall, there is...