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Konstantinos Hadzopulos is one of the most famous representatives of the Greek symbolism. He is an author of poetry, prose, theater translation and literary criticism. His work is still almost unknown in Bulgaria. The poems presented here are translated by me from his collections „Songs of the Desert“, „Elegies and idylls“, „Simple ways“ and „Evening legends“.
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An interesting narrative about a revenant found in the first chapter of the “Mirabilia”, a collection of marvelous stories by Phlegon of Tralles (2nd century AD), has been examined and interpreted by many. Scholars usually discussed the narrative’s origin, composition, and style, and also the vague identity of the main character of the story, a girl by the name of Philinnion, and her affiliation with ghost-lore. No one of them, however, attempted to locate Philinnion within the category of the restless dead which she seems to belong to, namely, ἄωροι – the prematurely dead. This distinct type of the dead, as is inferred from numerous ancient literary and non-literary sources, was believed to be especially prone to interaction with the living. In this article I attempt to examine the figure of Philinnion in the context of beliefs in the prematurely dead by means of which I hope to better explain crucial problems encountered by modern readers by answering questions regarding Philinnion’s identity and her rationale for returning to the world of the living.
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Man kann die dadaistische Kunst aus zahlreichen Perspektiven entdecken und deuten. Sie gilt als große und bedeutsame Quelle für die ewige Interpretation. Die Vorstellung der Fiktion und Wahrheit bei Dadaisten ist kein heufiges Thema, besonders wenn man die dadaistischen Werke mit der Antike vergleicht. Die bis zum neunzehnten Jahrhundert geltenden antischen Normen, die von Aristoteles und Platon eingeführt wurden, werden in der dadaistischen Kunst kaum sichtbar. Dadurch bekommt man eine neue Perspektive, durch die man die neue Kunst des frühen zwanzigsten Jahrhundert deuten kann. Die neue Deutung wird am Beispiel der prosaistischen Werke von Kurt Schwitters gezeigt werden, in den einige Modelle der literarischen Wahrheit dargestellt worden sind.
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The paper displays and analyses the characteristics of the writing of two authors from the Balkans who immigrated to France in the 1960s and 1970s – Vassilis Alexakis (of Greek descent) and Dumitru Tsepeneag (of Romanian descent). The study traces their critical reception in both France and the lost motherland and outlines certain peculiar features of the immigrant mentality and the complicated self-perception of the immigrants in the context of the dual reality of their existence. It also addresses the causes of the inability of the writers themselves and their literary characters to belong fully to one cultural heritage, and the identity issues that arise from this fact.
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According to Book 6 of the Nicomachean Ethics, the primary task of phronēsis (practical wisdom) is to deliberate about the things that are good in general for each person. However, phronēsis concerns not only individuals but also the community: practical wisdom is a political virtue as well. In my paper, I argue that the intellectual excellence called sunesis (comprehension) by Aristotle opens up the social dimension of practical wisdom, and thus provides an important means for the political application of phronēsis (EN 6. 1142b34−1143a32). To support my argument I interpret two further passages where sunesis appears in a clearly political context: in relation to legislation (EN 10. 1181a18) and to political deliberation (Pol. 4. 1291a28).
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Notre analyse est constituée d’une première partie à caractère théorique illustrant la méthodologie comparatiste de notre choix, et d’une deuxième partie consacrée à l’analyse comparée concrète de quelques aspects de la poétique grecque et de la poétique arabo-islamique. Le thème que nous développons plus en détails est celui de la condamnation et de la successive réhabilitation de la poésie en Grèce et en terre d’islam. Malgré le décalage qui sépare la Grèce platonicienne de l’islam des origines, un même problème est posé et résolu de manière fort semblable par ces deux civilisations. Ceci conforte aussi notre hypothèse d’une unité culturelle fondamentale des civilisations qui, à partir de bases hellénistique communes, fleurissent autour de la méditerranée au moyen age.
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One of the founding postulates of postmodern poetry is intertextuality – the idea that every text communicates with pre-existing texts, and thus that at heart the author is in no way wholly innovative, but original merely in style, in the way in which they shape a particular work from its components. Bible lore offers a rich theological culture with thematic and characterological elements sufficiently fertile for the development of literature, and specifically what is termed second degree literature (intertext, hypertext, hypotext). Transformed by literary context, diverse parts of the Bible are instrumentalized to portray universal truths with mankind as transition through psychological and social dimensions. The Last Temptation by Kazantzakis is a work that, having as its template the biography of Jesus as told by the four Evangelists of the New Testament (The Gospels according to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John), constructs a broad history of Jesus’ journey from youth to crucifixion as the Son of Man. Here the author demythologizes, rendering familiar, humane and twisted with vices and virtues a figure usually painted as untouchable – remaining suspended in the sublime details of churches and in the crevices of Christian souls. With fact and fiction interwoven, the work reveals a finely-drawn history of the Israelites, probing on the one hand religious identity, profaneness, class differences and the consequences of such distinctions, and on a broader psychological plane the conflict between dualist forces in mankind – good and evil, misanthropy and philanthropy, body and soul.
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This article discusses the relations between the most known Albanian novel, The General of the Dead Army, Greek myths, Homer’s Iliad, and especially Aeschylus’s tragedies, Agamemnon and The Persians. Here we analyze how Greek texts (myths, epic poems, tragedies) have served as models to the Albanian author Ismail Kadare to write his novel. Moreover, we discuss even a function of an alternative catharsis. Therefore, the Greek mythology and literature model as an architext in relation to Kadare’s hypertext is seen in several plans: theme, motive, idea, function, etc.
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Fan Noli, this Albanian eminent personality in the field of politics, literature and religion tells us in his Autobiography that when was still a student at the Adrianopolis Greek high school, during the summer holidays in his village Ibrik - Tepe, read two of the most precious books recommended by '"uncle Tassi": The New Testament translated by Kristoforidhi and a history of Scanderbeg, written and published in Greek. The biography of the Albanian hero in Greek impressed him so much, that the personality of Gjergj Kastrioti would continuously lead him throughout his life.
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The essay Symploke as a figure of mimesis in Plato’s philosophy is an attempt to reconstruct two different models of mimesis in Plato’s thought. The first model (Repulic) is ontological and based on the notion of truth as manifestation of real being (eidos or physis). Here, a copy or imitation is but a non-being, an appearance, or „a weak being” that participates in the true being only to a very small extent. The second model (The Sophist) is epistemological and based on the notion of truth as resemblance between an object and a copy. Here, an image is good if it is perfectly similar to the object it represents. Both models of mimesis cannot be treated separately. Their subtle interpenetration can be seen in the Platonic figure of symploke (a „plexus”) from The Sophist, in which being and non-being, truthfulness and falsity unexpectedly show their paradoxical unity.
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Two fragments of a vase painting by the Kleophrades Painter are examined, showing a satyr and a sleeping maenad, respectively. The visionary exclamation of the satyr (“[I see] two suns!”), recorded by a fragmentary inscription above his head, shows him in a state of joyful trance, induced primarily by the sight of the woman and the autoerotic activity he is just engaged in. These words, very likely a colloquial expression of any overwhelming experience in early classical Athens, match closely those uttered by Pentheus in v. 918 of Euripides’ Bacchae. In view of this remarkable correspondence between image and play, apparently not taken into account by Euripidean scholarship, the study seeks to reassess earlier assumptions about the psychological and ritual background of Pentheus’ words.
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Essay is an inter-disciplinary approach to the problem of Plato's view of poetry: trying to seize it both in the semantic depth of the platonic text itself and in its cultural context. Poetry is deeply rooted in the divine – its sacerdotal dimension is one of the main problems both in the philosophical aim to compete with poets and in their attempt to understand the poetic phenomenon in the logical terms. Ambiguity of Plato's criticism is equally visible in the poetical quality of his own text and in the constant identification of the intra-textual voices with poets. This essay is trying to enlighten some of that ambiguity's aspects and implications.
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”The Ascension” of Nikos Kazantzakis represents a kind of founding pattern, situated between a novel of initiation and a travelogue, crossed by passion and an unrepressed tendency towards a special form of soteriology. Somehow balancing certain artistic, civic, and spiritual inclinations, the volume belongs to a paradigm that illuminates most of Kazantzakis’ writings. This vast spiritual confession expresses the author's profession of faith, that writing is a healing act, necessary and, above all, very audacious. The opus is also a kind of literary manifesto, representative of the memory of the XXth century, as well as an illustrative landmark for what, nowadays, meta-modernity means. The whole book consists of a wide and apparently Hamletian monologue on the fragility of existence, on the inconsistency of the thinking reed, on the fragility of the human condition.
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The study examines the use of the term φύσις and its semantic relationship with νόον, ἔθος, ἦθος and νόμος in classical poetry. The task of the research is to determine the pre-philosophical meanings of φύσις through the analysis and comparison of verses by Aeschylus, Pindar, Sophocles and Euripides. At the same time, the context in which the first mention of the word stands in Homer's Odyssey was taken as the basis for further development of the term. The results of these analyzes should open the way to a more correct understanding of the concept of φύσις in philosophical thought in which critical argumentation relies heavily on the previously given meaning in Hellenic poetry.
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The letters collected here touch on some aspect of Kazantzakis’s rich and tumultuous life, and show the genius of a man who was deeply attuned to the artistic, intellectual, and political events of his times. These love letters were posted to his Eleni, to whom he married later.
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Autofiction, as one of the subgenres of postmodernism, occupies an important place in literature due to its introspective form. This genre breaks the boundaries between autobiography and fiction and integrates the writer's personal experiences, memories and reflections within the novel. At the core of autofiction, there is the exploration of identity, as authors explore their own lives and experiences to construct a narrative, in which the real and the fictional merge. Some intriguing questions arise in relation to autofictional novels, mostly related to selfexpression, memory, language, and the role of place. Melpo Axioti's “Kadmo” is one of the examples of autofictional novels that presents multiple aspects of identity. Axioti is known for her introspective and lyrical prose, she reflects in her texts the complexities of personal identity, elements of her own life and experience and manages this using a fictional narrative. In "Kadmo" is presented the issues of identity, memory, language and self-determination.
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