scholarly journals Regarding Symbolic Capital: Poetry Translators from Modern Greek into English

Author(s):  
Nadia Georgiou

   The research object of this study is the symbolic capital of poetry translators and how it shapes and is being shaped by the current practices and self-descriptions of translators of Modern Greek poetry into English. A number of case studies indicate that people who translate poetry come from a variety of backgrounds, including those of a poet and an academic, which often do not include any formal translation training (Hofstadter 1997; Waldinger 2003; Bullock 2011; Isaxanli 2014). It also appears to be common that translators of poetry have a number of complementary roles, with that of ‘poetry translator’ not always central. The study draws on data consisting of Modern Greek into English poetry translators’ responses to a survey, of paratexts created by Modern Greek into English translators and of ten interviews. Cultural and educational capitals are examined in their institutionalized, objectified and embodied form as bearers of symbolic capital. Three overlapping categories are explored: the translators’ connection to poetry and the source culture, translator education and translator self-description. The translators’ “extratextual visibility” (Koskinen 2000 as cited in Chesterman 2018: 446) is also analyzed as it forms part of the translators’ embodied cultural and symbolic capital. This empirical exploration offers insights into the variety of attitudes and approaches to poetry translation; the emerging patterns map out profiles of a group of contemporary poetry translators, investigate the realities of the craft and re-position poetry translation practitioners with respect to other translation professionals. 

Author(s):  
J. L. Watson

AbstractTwo major themes dominate the poetry of the Alexandrian poet, C. P. Cavafy: homosexual desire and Greekness, broadly defined. This paper explores the interconnectivity of these motifs, showing how Cavafy’s poetic queerness is expressed through his relationship with the ancient Greek world, especially Hellenistic Alexandria. I focus on Cavafy’s incorporation of ancient sculpture into his poetry and the ways that sculpture, for Cavafy, is a vehicle for expressing forbidden desires in an acceptable way. In this, I draw on the works of Liana Giannakopoulou on statuary in modern Greek poetry and Dimitris Papanikolaou on Cavafy’s homosexuality and its presentation in the poetry. Sculpture features in around a third of Cavafy’s poems and pervades it in various ways: the inclusion of physical statues as focuses of ecphrastic description, the use of sculptural language and metaphor, and the likening of Cavafy’s beloveds to Greek marbles of the past, to name but three. This article argues that Cavafy utilizes the statuary of the ancient Greek world as raw material, from which he sculpts his modern Greek queerness, variously desiring the statuesque bodies of contemporary Alexandrian youths and constructing eroticized depictions of ancient Greek marbles. The very ontology of queerness is, for Cavafy, ‘created’ using explicitly sculptural metaphors (e.g. the repeated uses of the verb κάνω [‘to make’] in descriptions of ‘those made like me’) and he employs Hellenistic statues as a productive link between his desires and so-called ‘Greek desire’, placing himself within a continuum of queer, Greek men.


Books Abroad ◽  
1951 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 71
Author(s):  
Herman Salinger ◽  
Rae Dalven
Keyword(s):  

1990 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 224-239
Author(s):  
Christopher Robinson
Keyword(s):  

Speculum ◽  
1952 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 260-262
Author(s):  
John P. Cavarnos
Keyword(s):  

2016 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 5-14
Author(s):  
Michał Bzinkowski ◽  
Rita Winiarska

The imagery of fragmentary sculptures, statues and stones appears often in Modern Greek Poetry in connection with the question of Modern Greeks’ relation to ancient Greek past and legacy. Many famous poets such as the first Nobel Prize winner in literature, George Seferis (1900-1971), as well as Yannis Ritsos (1909-1990) frequently use sculptural imagery in order to allude to, among other things, though in different approaches, the classical past and its existence in modern conscience as a part of cultural identity. In the present paper we focus on some selected poems by a well-known Cretan poet Giorgis Manousakis (1933-2008) from his collection “Broken Sculptures and Bitter Plants” (Σπασμένα αγάλματα και πικροβότανα, 2005), trying to shed some light on his very peculiar usage of sculpture imagery in comparison with the earlier Greek poets. We attempt to categorize Manousakis’ metaphors and allusions regarding the symbolism of sculptures in correlation with existential motives of his poetry and the poet’s attitude to the classical legacy.


2018 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 202
Author(s):  
Ott Karulin

In this article the popular is defined with the tools of field theory by Pierre Bourdieu, that is as production with high degree of outer-field economic capital (measured with the number of visits per production). It is also claimed that on some conditions these productions do not lower the degree of autonomy of the field since theatre manages to convert the economic capital to symbolic capital (nominations for annual awards give evidence of the latter). Such a production is called the Full Game. Based on the comparable data of new productions made in Estonia from 2010 to 2015 (1199 in total) the article will introduce a possible methodology of how to calculate the popular in theatre that considers both the number of visits per production in a year and the use of seating capacity. Following that methodology, there were only sixty-one produc­tions during the chosen period that could be titled popular in a sense that they have a very high degree of outer-field success (these productions are visited 2,4 times more often than the average number of visits per production in one calendar year and have the attendance rate of 95% and higher). Taking into account also the inner-field specific consecration (whether they have been nominated for annual theatre awards), only twenty-three popular productions – among them just one comedy, one musical and one operetta – remain in the list of what I have called the Full Game. That is two per cent of all the new productions of the respective time period.The list of Full Games suggests that the specific theatre, where the production is per­formed plays a significant role for a production to become popular. Only four theatres have had more than one Full Game in 2010–15 in Estonia and two of them – Theatre NO99 and Tallinn City Theatre – are used as case studies to find possible strategies of being popular without loosing specific consecration.


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