Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies

(Nobel Laureate in Literature,1995; Harvard University)
Location: Helm Auditorium, McCosh 50
(Open to the public, free admission)

The Program in Hellenic Studies, the Program in Creative Writing, and the Council of the Humanities have jointly invited the eminent Irish poet Seamus Heaney, the 1995 Nobel Laureate in Literature, for a short-term visit to Princeton, April 15-18, 2002. Heaney is currently the Ralph Waldo Emerson Poet in Residence, Harvard University and has previously held academic appointments at the Universities of Dublin and Oxford.

An exhibition has been organized in connection with Heaney's visit:
Exhibition: "Seamus Heaney: An Irish Poet in Greece"
Location: Lobby, Firestone Library
Dates: April 12-30, 2002

Seamus Heaney has made repeated visits to Greece, where he was found at the time of the announcement of his Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995. His most recent volume of verse, Electric Light (2001), includes several poems in which Heaney draws on his observation of the modern Greek society and people, as well as on his knowledge of classical Greek literature.

An abstract of Heaney's talk, received in advance of the lecture, proposes that "Greece and Ireland have much in common: two nations with ancient mythologies and interrupted histories; two nations that achieved independence through the growth of romantic nationalism, both political and cultural; two nations where a prophetic or at least a public role is always available to the poet."The abstract states that Heaney "will consider the parallel situation of the Greek and Irish poet in modern times and talk about some representative achievements."

Heaney has long divided his time between Dublin and Harvard, where he teaches each year. In 1995 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for his "works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past." Among his many volumes of verse, special attention may be drawn here to Death of a Naturalist (1966), North (1975), Field Work (1979), Station Island (1984), and Opened Ground : Selected Poems 1966-1996 (1999). He has also authored numerous translations, including Sweeney Astray: A Version from the Irish (1984), an adaptation of Sophocless play Philoctetes entitled The Cure at Troy (1991), and Beowulf: A New Verse Translation (2000). His books of literary criticism and essays include The Government of the Tongue (1988), The Place of Writing (1989), The Redress of Poetry (1995), and Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971-2001 (2002).

Please see the workshop website for a complete schedule and list of participants.

The Program in Hellenic Studies is organizing a one-day workshop on the history of archaeology of Greece. The purpose of the workshop is to establish a new forum for the study of the relationship between modern western and ancient Greek culture, an interaction traditionally at the core of the Program's interests. The history of archaeology represents a most promising line of inquiry: by its very nature, archaeology allows us to explore the ways in which the strong modern investment in the past is firmly rooted in and shaped by specific contemporary conditionsfrom practices of excavation organization to theories of interpretation of material culture.

The aim of this workshop is to prompt new questions and explore the alternative approaches to the history of archaeology. The title we have chosen reflects our hopes for open lines of inquiry: "History of Archaeology of Greece." Does it include the archaeology practiced in Greece by foreigners? Is "archaeology of Greece" the investigation of material culture excavated within the boundaries of modern Greece or does it extend to all of the Greek world in antiquity? When and how does one begin to categorize archaeology as a discipline? How ancient do the objects of a discipline have to be before it qualifies as "archaeology?" What forms of historical inquiry and periodization are proper and fruitful for the practice of history of archaeology? These questions, elicited by attempts to define the "archaeology of Greece,"disclose the many different areas of interest that are touched upon by these proposed lines of inquiry.

Recent years have witnessed a growth of interest in the history of archaeology; this inquiry appears to be developing into a field in its own right. The situation is fascinating: work is being produced which finds itself at the crossroads of different disciplines, and a dialogue is starting among archaeologists and historians of both the modern and the ancient world. While focussing on Greece, this workshop will also address these broader issues and bring them together in the hope of promoting further scholarly discussion.

This year's workshop is a follow-up to last year's.

Place: 58 Prospect, Room 101

58 Prospect Avenue, Room 107
Cosponsored by the Program in Linguistics

In my lecture I shall talk about the separation between literary and non-literary writing that is one of the most significant and lasting consequences of Greek diglossia. In order to do this I shall focus on developments at the turn of the nineteenth century and on the situation at the turn of the twenty-first.

I shall try to dispel three fallacies: first, that the conflict between demotic and katharevousa was a conflict between spoken and written varieties of Greek rather than between two varieties of written language; second, that whereas katharevousa was artificial, demotic was "natural;" and, third, the labelling by Ferguson (1959) of katharevousa as "High" and demotic as "Low."

I shall argue that the language controversy reached its peak in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries precisely because demotic presented a serious challenge to katharevousa as an alternative written language, especially in areas outside poetry. I shall sketch out the conceptual worlds that each variety of Greek was linked to: katharevousa put readers and writers in touch with modern western European concepts, while demotic connected the writer and reader with the conceptual worlds of Greek folk culture and traditional native rural values.

I see the language controversy at the end of the nineteenth century as being a conflict between linguistic purism (keeping the two varieties of language apart) and linguistic compromise (the enrichment of demotic through katharevousa). Today, despite the unification of the Greek language since 1976, the separation of discourses still persists, demotic words and forms appearing in literal and everyday use, while semantically equivalent katharevousa words and forms are used in figurative and scientific discourse. I end by asking whether the use of the Greek language today presents a picture of variety, richness and freedom, or chaos, inflation and anarchy.

PETER MACKRIDGE is Professor of Modern Greek, University of Oxford, and Fellow of St. Cross College. He is the author of The Modern Greek Languag: A Descriptive Analysis of Standard Modern Greek (Oxford University Press, Oxford 1985); Dionysios Solomos (Bristol Classical Press, Bristol 1989) and coauthor (with D. Holton & I. Philippaki-Warburton) of Greek: A Comprehensive Grammar of the Modern Language (Routledge, London 1997; reprinted 1999). He has edited a number of volumes, including Greece: The Modern Voice (Review of National Literatures, vol. V, no. 2, Fall 1974); Kosmas Politis, Eroica (Ermis, Athens 1982, reissued with corrections, 1986, 1988) ; Kosmas Politis, Stou Chatzephrankou (Ermis, Athens 1988); Ancient Greek Myth in Modern Greek Poetry: Essays in Memory of C.A. Trypanis (London: Frank Cass, 1996); (coeditor with Eleni Yannakakis) Ourselves and Others: the Development of a Greek Macedonian Cultural Identity since 1912 (Oxford and New York: Berg Publishers, 1997); and Dionysios Solomos, The Free Besieged and other Poems, translated by Peter Thompson, Roderick Beaton, Peter Colaclides, Michael Green and David Ricks; edited with an introduction by Peter Mackridge (Nottingham: Shoestring Press, 2000).   [Last Updated 2002]

Johannes Foufopoulos (Cleveland H. Dodge Fellow in Population and the Environment, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology/Princeton Environmental Institute) and his students in EEB 398/ HLS 398 "Humans and the Environment: Ecology, History and Conservation of the Mediterranean Region" will present their findings from their recent field trip to Cyprus. The aim of this trip, which was supported by the Program in Hellenic Studies, was to explore interractions between humans and the natural environment in a Mediterranean setting.

58 Prospect Avenue, Room 101
Cosponsored by the Program in Linguistics

Because languages change over time, it stands to reason that scholars interested in the Indo-European (IE) heritage of Greek focus almost exclusively on the ancient stages of the language, from Mycenaean to classical Attic. Yet as the Indo-European language with the longest recorded history, Greek provides the historical linguist with opportunities for tracing the preservation of archaisms as well as the evolution of new forms and grammatical categories. For instance, many typical features of medieval and modern Greek, such as the generalization of endings containing -a- in the aorist or the disappearance of the dative case, are attested already in the Hellenistic or even classical period.

In this paper I examine several examples of archaic features in modern Greek and its dialects which are of wider relevance for IE historical linguistics. Within phonology, the accent of pa'ra in the adverbial expression pa'ra poly' 'very much' is probably an isolated survival of the original accentuation of pa'ra, e'pi, and other preverbs/prepositions, preserved in tmesis in Homer and continuing the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) place of stress. In Pontic Greek, the generalization of initial stress in o-stem masculine nouns such as me'galos 'big', po'tamos 'river' finds a parallel in ancient Attic insults in -ros, and may be due to the influence of initial-stressed vocatives (cf. ancient a'delfe 'brother!').

Among morphological archaisms, the modern imperatives in -s (pe's, bre's, de's, pie's, mpe's, bge's) indirectly continue an ancient pattern which suffixed -s to short-vowel monosyllabic imperatives, e.g. in do's, 8e's, a'f-es. This -s was originally a variant of -8i and goes back to the PIE 2sg. imperative suffix *-dhi'. Similarly, the Homeric and ancient East Ionic imperfect in -ske- ~ -sko- may be reflected in modern Macedonian, Cypriot, and Cappadocian, which would shed light on the origin of those dialects. Finally, the contrast of indefinite o-stem and definite n-stem nouns in certain dialects of Pontic, e.g. Ophitic (i'nas) li'kos 'a wolf' vs. o li'ko(n), tu li'konos 'the wolf', represents the grammaticalization of a pattern attested for adjectives in ancient Greek (e.g. Stra'bvn 'the squinting one', to strabo's 'squinting') and other IE languages, in particular the Germanic "weak" nouns and adjectives.

These examples underscore the need to consider the Greek language in its entirety as a historical unity, with respect to retentions as well as innovations. Despite the rich documentation of ancient Greek, the postclassical language and modern dialects exhibit a number of fascinating archaisms which deserve the attention of Indo-Europeanists and historical linguists in general.
 

Writer-in-Residence, Program in Hellenic Studies

ABSTRACT:
Andreas Kalvos (1792-1869) spent many decades outside of Greek-speaking lands, and Greek was not the tongue in which he was most fluent. Nonetheless, he came to identify strongly with his roots in the island of Zakynthos, then called Zante. In 1824 and 1826, he produced two collections of poetry in Greek, praising Zakynthos and other parts of Greece, and exhorting the Greeks to triumph in a united rebellion of the spirit against domination by foreign powers. Entitled He Lyra and Lyrika, they were published in Geneva and Paris; both appeared simultaneously in French prose translations.

Consisting of ten odes each, with an additional prefatory poem to the first volume, Kalvos's little books received some slight notice in Europe and in the Ionians, but they failed to capture the attention of a wider Greek audience. Later in the nineteenth century, the poet Kostis Palamas revived Kalvoss name and gave him a new reputation as an innovator in the use of demotic Greek for poetic purposes. This new appreciation of the value of Kalvos's odes was further advanced by the commentary of modernists such as George Seferis and Odysseas Elytis. Greeks now commonly regard Kalvos as the second poet of revolutionary Greece, after his compatriot Dionysios Solomos, who also came from Zante ( though the two, quite possibly, never met).

The odes are peculiar texts. Avoiding the conventional forms of literary Greek that were then available to him, Kalvos wrote his poetry in a macaronic style, arbitrarily mingling Homeric and classical words with terms from his own demotic dialect and from contemporary dictionaries. He also cast them into a meter and stanza-form of his own invention, one based on a compromise between demotic rhythms and Italian principles of versification, with an eye to ancient Greek and Latin models. In part because of these special linguistic difficulties, the odes were never translated completely into English until a few years ago (appearing some time after I had already begun work on this translation). I am producing an English version in which I attempt to convey some of the archaic, Pindaric effect of the originals through the use of iambic meter, while remaining mostly true to our colloquial American vocabulary -- yet always giving first priority to the sense, and to Kalvoss poetic and rhetorical composition of his subject matter. A reading of several odes in English, with the Greek texts available for immediate comparison, shall be followed by comment and discussion.

NICK MOSCHOVAKIS received his Ph.D. in English Literature from Princeton in October 1999. He has taught at the University of the South (a liberal arts college in Sewanee, Tennessee) and at Occidental College in Los Angeles, where he will begin his next research fellowship later this year at the Huntington Library. A published critic of Shakespearean drama, with an article forthcoming in Shakespeare Quarterly, he is also a co-editor of works by Tennessee Williams, including the Collected Poems (New Directions, 2002).   [Last Updated 2002]

Speaker: Thanos Veremis (Fletcher School of Diplomacy, Tufts University; University of Athens)

Respondent: Robert Hutchings (Woodrow Wilson School)

Thanos Veremis (http://fletcher.tufts.edu/staff/tveremis/Default.htm) has taught a policy task force at the WWS and is founder and President of Board of Directors of the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy (ELIAMEP, http://www.eliamep.gr/), the leading research center and foreign policy think tank in Greece.

Abstract: The misreadings of western entanglement in Yugoslavia are of different kinds. Greece's battle for the name "Macedonia" between 1992-94, was clearly carry-over of cold war perceptions into the post-cold war period. The NATO 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia is a more complex miscalculation of an organization in search of a new vocation.The US operates on the basis of deciminating multiculturalism, although the American political system is eminently unicultural.

(Nobel Laureate in Literature,1995; Harvard University)
Richardson Auditorium
(Open to the public, free admission)

The Program in Hellenic Studies, the Program in Creative Writing, and the Council of the Humanities have jointly invited the eminent Irish poet Seamus Heaney, the 1995 Nobel Laureate in Literature, for a short-term visit to Princeton, April 15-18, 2002. Heaney is currently the Ralph Waldo Emerson Poet in Residence, Harvard University and has previously held academic appointments at the Universities of Dublin and Oxford.

An exhibition has been organized in connection with Heaney's visit:
Exhibition: "Seamus Heaney: An Irish Poet in Greece"Location: Lobby, Firestone Library
Dates: April 12-30, 2002

Seamus Heaney has made repeated visits to Greece, where he was found at the time of the announcement of his Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995. His most recent volume of verse, Electric Light (2001), includes several poems in which Heaney draws on his observation of the modern Greek society and people, as well as on his knowledge of classical Greek literature.

An abstract of Heaney's talk, received in advance of the lecture, proposes that "Greece and Ireland have much in common: two nations with ancient mythologies and interrupted histories; two nations that achieved independence through the growth of romantic nationalism, both political and cultural; two nations where a prophetic or at least a public role is always available to the poet." The abstract states that Heaney "will consider the parallel situation of the Greek and Irish poet in modern times and talk about some representative achievements."

Heaney has long divided his time between Dublin and Harvard, where he teaches each year. In 1995 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for his works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past. Among his many volumes of verse, special attention may be drawn here to Death of a Naturalist (1966), North (1975), Field Work (1979), Station Island (1984), and Opened Ground : Selected Poems 1966-1996 (1999). He has also authored numerous translations, including Sweeney Astray: A Version from the Irish (1984), an adaptation of Sophocless play Philoctetes entitled The Cure at Troy (1991), and Beowulf: A New Verse Translation (2000). His books of literary criticism and essays include The Government of the Tongue (1988), The Place of Writing (1989), The Redress of Poetry (1995), and Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971-2001 (2002).

Writer-in-Residence, Program in Hellenic Studies

ABSTRACT:
Andreas Kalvos (1792-1869) spent many decades outside of Greek-speaking lands, and Greek was not the tongue in which he was most fluent. Nonetheless, he came to identify strongly with his roots in the island of Zakynthos, then called Zante. In 1824 and 1826, he produced two collections of poetry in Greek, praising Zakynthos and other parts of Greece, and exhorting the Greeks to triumph in a united rebellion of the spirit against domination by foreign powers. Entitled He Lyra and Lyrika, they were published in Geneva and Paris; both appeared simultaneously in French prose translations.

Consisting of ten odes each, with an additional prefatory poem to the first volume, Kalvoss little books received some slight notice in Europe and in the Ionians, but they failed to capture the attention of a wider Greek audience. Later in the nineteenth century, the poet Kostis Palamas revived Kalvoss name and gave him a new reputation as an innovator in the use of demotic Greek for poetic purposes. This new appreciation of the value of Kalvoss odes was further advanced by the commentary of modernists such as George Seferis and Odysseas Elytis. Greeks now commonly regard Kalvos as the second poet of revolutionary Greece, after his compatriot Dionysios Solomos, who also came from Zante ( though the two, quite possibly, never met).

The odes are peculiar texts. Avoiding the conventional forms of literary Greek that were then available to him, Kalvos wrote his poetry in a macaronic style, arbitrarily mingling Homeric and classical words with terms from his own demotic dialect and from contemporary dictionaries. He also cast them into a meter and stanza-form of his own invention, one based on a compromise between demotic rhythms and Italian principles of versification, with an eye to ancient Greek and Latin models. In part because of these special linguistic difficulties, the odes were never translated completely into English until a few years ago (appearing some time after I had already begun work on this translation). I am producing an English version in which I attempt to convey some of the archaic, Pindaric effect of the originals through the use of iambic meter, while remaining mostly true to our colloquial American vocabulary -- yet always giving first priority to the sense, and to Kalvoss poetic and rhetorical composition of his subject matter. A reading of several odes in English, with the Greek texts available for immediate comparison, shall be followed by comment and discussion.

NICK MOSCHOVAKIS received his Ph.D. in English Literature from Princeton in October 1999. He has taught at the University of the South (a liberal arts college in Sewanee, Tennessee) and at Occidental College in Los Angeles, where he will begin his next research fellowship later this year at the Huntington Library. A published critic of Shakespearean drama, with an article forthcoming in Shakespeare Quarterly, he is also a co-editor of works by Tennessee Williams, including the Collected Poems (New Directions, 2002). [Last Updated 2002]