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).

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.

THANOS VEREMIS is currently the Constantine Karamanlis Professor in Hellenic and Southeastern European Studies at the Fletcher School of Diplomacy, Tufts University and is Professor of Political History at the University of Athens. He has taught as Visiting Professor at Princeton (Woodrow Wilson School and Hellenic Studies), Harvard, and Oxford. He earned his D.Phil from the University of Oxford and has written or edited over 30 books on the diplomatic and political history of Europe and Greece; security studies; Greek-Turkish relations; and Balkan affairs. His most recent books in English include Greek Security: Issues and Policies (Adelphi paper, IISS, London,1981); Greece's Balkan Entanglement (ELIAMEP, Athens,1995); The Greek Army in Politics: From Independence to Democracy (C.Hurst &Co, London, 1997); coauthor with Mark Dragoumis, Greece: An Annotated Bibliography (Clio Press, Oxford, 1998); and, coauthor with John Koliopoulos, Greece: The Modern Sequel (C.Hurst & Co, London, 2002). A member of the National Advisory Research Council of Greece and co-editor of the Journal of Southeast European and Black Sea Studies (Frank Cass, London), he is founder and President of the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy (ELIAMEP: http://www.eliamep.gr), the leading foreign policy research center in Greece. Cosponsored by the Committee on European Studies and the Council on Regional Studies _________________________________________

riter-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 (nrm@princeton.edu) 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).

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.

58 Prospect, Room 107
Cosponsored by the Program in Jewish Studies

I shall discuss the construction of the Jew in a number of texts by Greek prose writers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. A close reading of these texts reveals a dichotomy of feelings towards the Jews. The Jew, in the words of the leading poet Kostis Palamas "can be, according to the circumstances, the highest prophet, and the most ignominious usurer."

My aim is to examine this ambivalence not on a basis of eternal myths of the Jew, but in relation to writers literary and political concerns, as well as to their inner conflicts.I shall examine works of fiction related to the "evraika," an accusation for ritual murder in Corfu (1891), followed by a riot in the jewish quarter: Xenopoulos relates this tragic event in order to put forward the problematic symbiosis between Greeks and Jews; Papadiamantis recounts it as relevant to the dark and mysterious area of human mind: while an anonymous writer refers to it in a virulently antisemitic popular novel published in Thessaloniki in 1930.

I shall argue that the presence of a jewish character in a narrative can signal not only antisemitic or xenophobic feelings, but also the author's concern with his or her own identity. For some writers the fluidity of the image of the Jew parallels that of Greek national identity, participating in the West in a very ambiguous way, as nation-state under formation and as cradle of Western civilization. Some writers working with biblical and oriental myths are expressedly judeophilic, ascribing Greek and Jewish cultural identity to common ancient origins. Others express antagonistic feelings towards the Chosen People, using explicit or implicit scapegoating techniques. In conclusion, I shall examine strategies of writers who deconstruct the binary opposition between Greeks and Jews in highly reflexive works, by representing national identities as equally mutable, approximate and relative.

FRAGISKI AMPATZOPOULOU is Professor of Modern Greek Literature, University of Thessaloniki. She is the author of several books on the Greek avant-garde and surrealist movements. Since 1990, she has worked on the image of the Jew in modern Greek literature and on the study and publication of testimonies of Greek Jewish Holocaust victims. The results of her research are included in her most recent book, The Other Persecuted: The Image of the Jew in Modern Greek Literature, in which she also discusses the representation of the Holocaust in fictional works of Greek writers. Her works include studies on women's voices in Holocaust testimonies.

(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 Heaneys 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 Heaneys 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 (nrm@princeton.edu) 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).