Alexandros Papadiamantis
Encyclopedia
Greek language
Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...
: ; 4 March 1851 - 3 January 1911) was an influential Greek
Greece
Greece , officially the Hellenic Republic , and historically Hellas or the Republic of Greece in English, is a country in southeastern Europe....
novelist and short-story writer.
His life
Papadiamantis was born in Greece, on the island of SkiathosSkiathos
Skiathos is a small Greek island in the northwest Aegean Sea. Skiathos is the westernmost island in the Northern Sporades group, east of the Pelion peninsula in Magnesia on the mainland, and west of the island of Skopelos.-Geography:...
, in the western part of the Aegean Sea
Aegean Sea
The Aegean Sea[p] is an elongated embayment of the Mediterranean Sea located between the southern Balkan and Anatolian peninsulas, i.e., between the mainlands of Greece and Turkey. In the north, it is connected to the Marmara Sea and Black Sea by the Dardanelles and Bosporus...
. The island would figure prominently in his work. His father was a priest. He moved to Athens
Athens
Athens , is the capital and largest city of Greece. Athens dominates the Attica region and is one of the world's oldest cities, as its recorded history spans around 3,400 years. Classical Athens was a powerful city-state...
as a young man to complete his high school studies, and enrolled in the philosophy faculty of Athens University, but never completed his studies.
He returned to his native island in later life, and died there. He supported himself by writing throughout his adult life, anything from journalism and short stories to several serialized novels. From a certain point onwards he had become very popular, and newspapers and magazines vied for his writings, offering him substantial fees. Papadiamantis did not care for money, and would often ask for lower fees if he thought they were unfairly high; furthermore he spent his money carelessly and took no care of his clothing and appearance. He never married, and was known to be a recluse, whose only true cares were observing and writing about the life of the poor, and chanting at church: he was referred to as "kosmokalogeros" (κοσμοκαλόγερος, "a monk in the world"). He died of pneumonia
Pneumonia
Pneumonia is an inflammatory condition of the lung—especially affecting the microscopic air sacs —associated with fever, chest symptoms, and a lack of air space on a chest X-ray. Pneumonia is typically caused by an infection but there are a number of other causes...
.
His work
Papadiamantis' longest works were the serialized novels "The Gypsy Girl," "The Emigrant," and "Merchants of Nations." These were adventures set around the Mediterranean, with rich plots involving captivity, war, pirates, the plague, etc. However, the author is best remembered for his scores of short stories. Written in his own version of the then official language of Greece, "katharevousaKatharevousa
Katharevousa , is a form of the Greek language conceived in the early 19th century as a compromise between Ancient Greek and the Modern Greek of the time, with a vocabulary largely based on ancient forms, but a much-simplified grammar. Originally, it was widely used both for literary and official...
" (a "purist" written language heavily influenced by ancient Greek), Papadiamantis' stories are little gems. They provide lucid and lyrical portraits of country life in Skiathos, or urban life in the poorer neighborhoods of Athens, with frequent flashes of deep psychological insight. The nostalgia for a lost island childhood is palpable in most of them; the stories with an urban setting often deal with alienation
Social alienation
The term social alienation has many discipline-specific uses; Roberts notes how even within the social sciences, it “is used to refer both to a personal psychological state and to a type of social relationship”...
. Characters are sketched with a deft hand, and they speak in the authentic "demotic" spoken language of the people; island characters lapse into dialect. Papadiamantis' deep Christian faith, complete with the mystical feeling associated with the Orthodox Christian liturgy, suffuses many stories. Most of his work is tinged with melancholy, and resonates with empathy with people's suffering, regardless of whether they are saints or sinners, innocent or conflicted. His only saint, in fact, is a poor shepherd who, having warned the islanders, is slaughtered by Saracen pirates after he refuses to abandon his flock for the safety of the fortified town. This particular story, "The Poor Saint," is the closest he comes to a truly religious theme.
An example of Papadiamantis' deep and even-handed feeling for humanity is his acknowledged masterpiece, the novella "The Murderess." It is the story of an old woman in Skiathos, who pities families with many daughters: given their low socioeconomic status, girls can not work before marriage, cannot marry unless they provide a dowry, and are therefore a burden and a plight to their families. After killing her own newborn granddaughter, gravelly ill with pertussis, she crosses the line from pity to what she believes is useful and appropriate action, the "mercy killing" of young girls. She kills three young girls in succession, by throwing them into wells and then pretending to trying to save them in order to justify her presence there. As coincidences keep piling up, she is confronted with a stark fact: her assumption that she was helping was monstrously wrong, and she gradually slips into mad torment. She flees arrest and tries to hide in the wilderness, but she drowns in the sea while trying to escape two policemen on her trail; as Papadiamantis puts it, she meets "death half-way between divine and human justice". The character of the murderess is depicted with deep empathy and without condemnation. "AS a child, she served her parents. Once married, she was her husband's slave ... when she had children, she served them, and when they had children, she became their slave". Even her name tells the story of women in 19th century rural Greece: her birth name, Hadoula, "tenderling", is all but forgotten; she now is the "Fragkoyannoú", i.e. the widow of Yannis Fragkos, her whole existence referenced only to the name of her late, good-for-nothing husband.
His work is seminal in Modern Greek literature: he is for prose what Dionysios Solomos
Dionysios Solomos
Dionysios Solomos was a Greek poet from Zakynthos. He is best known for writing the Hymn to Liberty , of which the first two stanzas, set to music by Nikolaos Mantzaros, became the Greek national anthem in 1865...
is for poetry. As George Seferis wrote: "I commemorate Dionysios Solomos, I commemorate Alexander Papadiamantis". It is a body of work, however, that is virtually impossible to translate, as the magic of his language is founded on the Greek diglossia
Diglossia
In linguistics, diglossia refers to a situation in which two dialects or languages are used by a single language community. In addition to the community's everyday or vernacular language variety , a second, highly codified variety is used in certain situations such as literature, formal...
: elaborately crafted, high Katharevousa for the narrative, interspersed with authentic local dialect for the dialogue, and with all dialectical elements used in the narrative formulated in strict Katharevousa, and therefore in forms that had actually never actually existed.
Translations
- Tales from a Greek Island, tr. E. Constantinides (1987)
- The Murderess, tr. P. Levi (1983)