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AGM with guest speaker Stathis Gauntlett

Thursday 26 May, 6.30-8.30pm

The Last Varlamis

Kathleen Syme Library, 251 Faraday St, Carlton, VIC

Those present at the AGM discussed  upcoming events, debated some new ideas and voted in a new committee for 2016-2017. Details to be circulated soon.

We heard Stathis talk on the PLEASURES AND PITFALLS OF ENGLISHING GREEK FICTION. He discussed three of his translations from Greek published over the last twelve years. The most recent was The Last Varlamis by Thanasis Valtinos, ‘a contemporary text of indeterminate genre, to be launched with some fanfare in London on 13 May’. The others were ‘the Cypriot novella “The Gangsters” by Lefkios Zafiriou and Erotokritos by Vitsentzos Kornaros, a 10,000-verse Cretan Renaissance romance that took three of us five years to translate and annotate’. Stathis reflected on the experience of ‘Englishing’ these texts and the issues they raised about translating from Greek and dealing with reviewers.

Stathis Gauntlett is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and currently a Senior Research Associate of the University of Melbourne, where he was first appointed to the foundation lectureship in Modern Greek in 1973.  He retired from the Dardalis Chair of Hellenic Studies at La Trobe University in 2006.  Among his publications are books on rebetika (‘Greek blues’), articles on Greek literature and oral traditions, and literary translations.
A recording of Stathis’ presentation will be available here soon.
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