Petros Markaris

Good morning, Mr. Markaris. We’re very happy that you are here with us and you agreed to give us this interview.

It’s my pleasure!

Of course, your writing and translation work is very extensive. Here, we will limit ourselves to translation issues, mostly.

Vey well. Okay.

So, apart from all other things, how did translation come into your life? How did you get involved in it?

Look, I was born and raised in Istanbul. At some point, my father decided not to send me to a Greek-speaking high school, that is, to the Greek minority high schools of the city, but to the Austrian high school of Istanbul. He did this because I had to go to high school in 1949 to start my high school education, and at the time the beginning of the German economic miracle took place. My father firmly believed that German would become the international business language. So I had to learn German, because his other goal was for me to take over his business in Istanbul. So I went to an Austrian high school. He was proved wrong on both issues; German didn’t become the international business language, and I wasn’t to take over the family business. But I did learn German. However he insisted on me studying economics, which I hated. You know, when you grow up in an ethnic minority in the ’50s, you have no chance of objecting to your father. He decides, you follow, that’s how it went. So he decided to send me to Vienna to study economics. I didn’t want to study economics, but I wanted to leave Istanbul, because I could no longer stand the life of the minority, this closed-knit, introverted, conservative, so to speak, life. So when I left Istanbul, I was trilingual. I spoke and wrote German, Greek and Turkish equally well. When I arrived in Vienna and for five years long, I spoke only German. This was not only, how can I put it, a compulsion, it was also my choice. But at some point in Vienna, I decided that I wanted to write – I always wanted to write, it was the only thing I wanted to do in my life – in my native language which was Greek. So I came to Greece because of the language. And here, I felt the need to somehow bring into contact and, within quotation marks, “to marry” the two languages, German and Greek. So the only possibility I had to do so was born, and that was translation.

What an amazing story.

That’s how it happened.

And through this trajectory, you’ve translated Faust, which is a huge play.

This story about Faust is quite funny.

Do tell us about it.

At some point – it was around the end of 1990, I don’t remember exactly when – the artistic director of the National Theater, Nikos Kourkoulos, who is also a friend, called me. He calls me and says, “Petros, I want to make you a proposal, are you standing or sitting?”. I said, “Nikos, what difference does it make if I’m standing or sitting?”. “No, I want you to sit down.” I knew how stubborn he was, may he rest in peace, so I said, “Ok, I”m sitting”, I wasn’t, but “I’m sitting”. He told me, “I want you to translate Goethe’s Faust, both parts”. My reaction was, “My friend, you are crazy, you are not well”. And he said the phrase, which, for any translator, author, creator, is a curse, “Petros, this is a lifetime’s work”. You’re toast. If they tell you that and you fall into the trap, you’re toast. I said, “He is right. How many times will I do a lifetime’s work?”. And I said, “Yes”, without knowing what I’ve got myself into. When finally after a year and a half I had finished the first part and I had started the introduction, the prolog to the second, he called me and said, “Petros, I’m very sorry, “the director who would stage the play regretted it, he doesn’t want to anymore, so I won’t have it staged”. So I was left with the first part translated and I didn’t know what to do. I talked about my troubles with my publisher, Gavriilidis, and he told me, “If you finish it, I’ll publish it”. I told him, “You’re crazy, you won’t even sell 50 copies of this huge piece of work”. I inform you that it has sold 6,000 copies so far and sells a steady 500 copies each year. This is the madness of Greece. I once said to the Germans, “You know, the Greeks don’t know how to manage their finances, but they read Faust“. This is the reality. And so the translation was completed and when I finished it and read it again, I said, “Oh my God. There’s no way the Greeks can understand this, unless I write comments”. It took me another year and a half, about 15 months, to write the comments. What is called the Early Faust has now also come out, the so-called Urfaust, there’s that, as well, I translated that, too. I translated it, because it is of great interest; the Early Faust is not just a draft, it is a complete piece of work based on the Storm and Stress movement [Sturm und Drang], while, on the contrary, Faust: a tragedy is a classical text, it is of classical writing. So, that’s how Faust came out.

What would you say was its greatest difficulty, that is, if we can name it?

Look, there’s not just one, there are many difficulties. The first and greatest one is the verse.

And I say that because, besides other things, while translating Faust, I somehow acquired a masochistic tendency. This masochistic tendency was expressed through my completely irrational obsession to have in the translation exactly the same number of verses as in the original, not more, not fewer. They have the same number, I did it! But it was a terrible torture, it was not easy at all. There are 12,111 verses both in the original and in the translation. This is very difficult in Greek. German is a condensed language, on the contrary, Greek is an expanding language, it has an extending way of expression and to match these two when you keep the same verse number is a torture, it’s not easy.

And what is it like to combine this dual identity?

Pardon?

What’s it like to combine the dual identity of translator and literary author?

Look, I think translation has helped me a lot. For many reasons. One of the basics I say when I give seminars or master classes, is that a writer can live in one language, a translator should know many languages. What do I mean by that? If you are a writer and write novels whose subject is society and the petit bourgeoisie, it’s enough that you know the petit bourgeois idiom. But when you translate, that’s not enough. I’ll give you an example. I was translating Wedekind’s Lulu – Lulu is basically a German bourgeois play and it was written in 1896. If I had been looking for or had found a time period match with Greek, I would never have translated it, because in 1896, the archaising form of Modern Greek was used in Greece [katharevousa]. So I had to find a language idiom that socially suited the play’s time period. And what was that? The generation of the ’30s. I used the language of the ’30s generation! Furthermore, there are some other things that are of great interest. E.g. while translating Mother Courage [And Her Children], in the first scene of the play, where Mother Courage appears with the wagon and her two sons and daughter, there’s also a corporal officer. And he asks them, “Where do you come from, Bagage?” “Bagage”, is “baggage”, a very well known French word. I listen to it, I read it, and I’m puzzled. I think, it cannot be “baggage”. If he meant that, he would have said “Gepäck”, which is the German word for it. Why does he say “Bagage”? It means something else. I read other Greek translations, “Where do you and your baggage come from?” I say “Leave me alone, this is not it”. I start searching and I find that in Middle High German “Bagage” meant “bums”, “trumps”. In order to refer to the time the plot takes place, Brecht uses this word. So these are difficulties that a writer never faces, why should they? If something doesn’t work for them, they find another solution. In translation, you can’t find another solution, this is it! These difficulties make translation an excellent language exercise. When I came to the decision that the novels I write should be in spoken discourse and not in written, I was no longer interested in the written genre, I was interested in modern spoken discourse and how it is uttered by various characters, which also expresses a social status. I can’t do that in translation, it’s not possible. I owe fidelity, to the extent it can be achieved, because there’s no absolutely faithful translation. If one does an absolutely faithful translation it won’t be read or played in the theater. This can’t be done. Many say, “this is not faithful”. It’s not a matter of fidelity. I always say, a translator must be faithful both to the language of the original and to their own at the same time. They can’t be unfaithful to their own language. They cannot sacrifice their own language to remain faithful.

Regarding your own novels, which have been translated into many languages, also in German – we’ve talked about German earlier and they are also a huge success anyway – so do you cooperate with your German translator?

Yes, I do cooperate with her, in the sense that not only do I answer questions, but many times she sends me the text to read, to comment on, in case I think of another solution, or let’s say, a modification. We have a very close collaboration with my translator. This concerns, of course, the German translation, it cannot be done in other languages. Because, as much as I know other languages, I don’t know them in as much depth as German.

And what would you say “to translate” actually means to you?

Pardon?

What does ” to translate” mean to you?

For me “to translate” means to transfer, but also to recreate a text which is written in a foreign language, in my native language. That’s it. It’s not only a transfer, it’s also a recreation. There’s no other way. There are things, to which you must find a solution. E.g. in Faust, in the Cathedral scene, Margarita is pregnant and tends to faint and cries to the woman next to her in German, “Nachbarin! Dein Fläschchen!” [Neighbor, your small bottle!]. She means the small bottle with perfume, with spice, that women carried with them to inhale if they were suffering from this shortness of breath or this distress. If I write “your small bottle”, no one will understand anything. So I can’t say “Fläschchen” and translate absolutely faithfully, because it will not be understood. I said, “Neighbor! Your spice! “. One understands the word spice, there’s no problem. These are, let’s say, details, but they are crucial, they are pivotal in many places in a text.

And a closing interview question, what advice would you give to a young person, a student, whose dream is to translate, to become a translator?

To passionately read texts in the language from which they want to translate and in the language into which they want to translate. This is the most serious, if I may say so, exercise they can do. And, of course, when I say read, I mean to do endless exercises. Starting from small things, from short things. It is very easy to translate a modern text into today’s modern language. It is much more difficult to translate an old text into today’s language. It’s not possible. I’ll refer to Early Faust as an example. There is a translation by Konstantinos Hatzopoulos. As for the fidelity of the text, Hatzopoulos is absolutely faithful, that is, he doesn’t make mistakes in the translation. Not at all. So where’s the problem? The problem is the language in Greek. Hatzopoulos was a supporter of the vernacular, Demotic Greek and belonged to this generation of demoticists, who believed that you can say everything in Demotic Greek. You can’t, therein lies his mistake. You can’t say everything in Demotic Greek, when Goethe himself created a personal language tool to write Faust. There is a dictionary in German, called Goethes merkwürdige Wörter, Goethe’s strange words. 80 out of 100 words are from Faust! And they are words he created himself in order to write. So what can Demotic Greek alone do? Impossible. So this is an ongoing exercise. And when I say that they should read, they should not only read what is written today, they should have a picture of the evolution of the language both in Greek and in the language from which they will translate. There’s no other way. Otherwise it’s impossible. They must have, so to speak, a developmental knowledge of the language. It can’t be done otherwise. Let me give you another example. In the first scene, Faust meets Margarita, and Margarita leaves. She tells him, “I am not lovely, nor the lady you detected” and she leaves. Faust tells Mephistopheles, “Du musst mir die Dirne bringen” [You must get this girl for me]. I read the German “Dirne” [prostitute] and think he cannot mean “prostitute”. No way! First of all, Goethe went to Weimar in 1775 and wrote both the Early Faust and the whole text there, which was regularly read in the Weimar court, in front of the Duke and his family, in front of the aristocracy and the court ladies, hence one of them had preserved Urfaust, that’s how it was found. It was found among her papers. So would Mr. Goethe as a secret adviser – which at the time corresponded unofficially to the rank of prime minister – say to this audience, “I want you to bring me that whore“? No way! He means something else. Besides that, there’s something else I know. In Goethe’s time, the word for “prostitute” was not “Dirne” but “Hure”, and for the pejorative “whore”, it was “die Hur”. So I’m sure he means something else. I start searching like a maniac. In whatever dictionary I looked up “Dirne” I found the definition “whore”. I thought, impossible, there’s something I miss. So, in my despair, I start reading the comments of the most meticulous scholar of Faust‘s tragedy, Albrecht Schöne – what Schöne hasn’t commented on is nowhere else commented on, it’s as simple as that. And at one point, he writes that Goethe had Adelung’s dictionary on his desk while he was writing Faust. Where could I find Adelung’s dictionary? If I were in Germany, I’d go to a library and find it, Goethe Institute in Greece didn’t have it. So I start searching, until I discover on the internet that there’s a publishing entity called Digitale Bibliothek, and they have Adelung’s dictionary. I order it, it is sent to me, I look up the lexical entry, and what do I see? “Dirne: unverheiratetes junges Mädchen”, “unmarried young girl”. So not a “whore”, but a “virgin”, you know? A translator – I always say that – who does not doubt at all times, is a bad translator. They must constantly doubt. “This doesn’t sound right, “it may not mean that, how can I be sure?”. Well, what I’ve told you about Brecht’s “Bagage” and about Faust, always happens. And, many times, dictionaries do not help, because they don’t always take into account the evolutionary course of language. Middle High German actually ended in 1800, when the orthographic dictionary of German Language was published by Konrad Duden, which materialized the Standard German language. This happened in 1800, there was no longer Middle High German, it was over. Fine. But when you come across a text that refers to Middle High German, what do you do? You search like a maniac, that’s what you do. What gave me great joy last year, last March, was a seminar I did in the Department of German Language and Literature in Athens about Faust. And I told them the story about the “Dirne”. Mrs. Petropoulou, who is an assistant professor, called me on the phone and said, “Petros, you won’t believe what I saw today”, I asked her “What did you see?”. “One of my students”, she said, “wrote to me that she had found a 19th-century Greek dictionary, she looked up “Dirne” and saw the definition of a young girl”. You see? This means that you have to search and never be certain. Certainty is a disadvantage for the translator.

Thank you very much.

It was my pleasure.