Greek Dialogues - Nikos Kazantzakis in Ukraine | Cambridge Centre for Greek Studies

Date and Time: Thursday, 25th January, 2024 at 18:00h GMT

Happy New Year! The fourth Greek Dialogues seminar of the 2023-24 season features Professor Svitlana Pereplotchykova (Lewis-Gibson Visiting Fellow and Kyiv University) streaming live from Kyiv! Join Svitlana as she reveals insights into the reception of Nikos Kazantzakis within Ukraine and the wider Soviet hegemon.

This year we celebrate exactly 140 years since the birth of Nikos Kazantzakis (18.02.1883 - 26.10.1957), the world famous Greek writer renowned for his unusually wide range of work across many genres. Some of his more accessible writings have been translated into around 40 languages, and the Kazantzakis’ 'phenomenon' has made him the single most translated Greek writer in many countries around the world, including Ukraine.

Until recently Ukraine remained largely terra incognita for many, and certainly so as a contributor within the field of Modern Greek Studies. But this is emphatically not the case for Kazantzakis himself within Ukraine, as testified by his towering presence in Ukrainian intellectual and cultural debate from the end of the 1950s right up to the present.

My lecture discusses a key selection from the existing translations of Kazantzakis’ works into Ukrainian, and is based on a careful textual and conceptual analysis of those peculiar features of Kazantzakis’ writing that present the translator with complex decisions of choice and execution. The solutions offered specifically by his Ukrainian translators are then assessed, along with the distortions in some of the earlier translations occasioned by the “close” reading of Kazantzakis’ novels by Soviet censors.

No knowledge of Ukrainian is assumed or required!