Sophia Papaioannou Translating Homer in 20th century Greece: the 'Silent' Voice of a Revolution

     The burden of the past, the glories of classical antiquity haunted Greece even before the official political existence of the Greek nation.(1)  As early as the mid-eighteenth century, at a time when the movement for Greek independence was first taking shape among the Greeks of the Diaspora, the construction of a link with Greek antiquity appeared as an imminent necessity.  The earliest attempts to bridge the gap between the Greek nation that was emerging from a four-century long period of slavery and the legendary ancients could be best summarized by the sketch that not surprisingly decorated the title page of Adamantios Korais' (for many the intellectual forefather of the Greek nation) nationalist pamphlet, Martial Trumpet-Blast (1803): a picture of Hellas as a woman in torn clothesóher slave status prominently expressed by the nearby presence of a sword-wielding Turkówith a piece of parchment beneath her feet labeled "HOMER."  Moreover, the whole picture was captioned by a cento of two Homeric verses.

     Homer: among other things, the forefather of "everyone who know reads and writes in the West,"(2)  the ultimate poetic ancestor and model for the poetry of Greece since the times of  Foscolo, Kalvos and Solomos, a source equally of nationalist propaganda and of protest against the status quo. Yet these numerous expressions and the fuller dimensions of the Homeric presence in Greece have by and large been neglected.
 
    Only a few years ago (1989), David Ricks, responding to a long-standing need for an examination of Homer's presence in Greece, discussed in an acute and highly readable study the influence of Homeric poetry and the worlds and heroes of the Iliad and the Odyssey on Greek poetry of the 19th and 20th centuries, focusing on certain distinguished Greek poets that could be characterized in one way or another as representative of the poetic trends and intellectual currents of their times: Kalvos, Solomos, Palamas, Sicelianos, and Seferis.(3)