Ares Alexandrou: The Balancing Act of Translating Dostoevsky into Greek

Abstract

Ares Alexandrou (1922-1978) is the central figure in more than a century of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s translation history in Greece. Since their publication in the 1950s, Alexandrou’s Crime and Punishment, Demons, The Idiot, and The Brothers Karamazov have been the authoritative editions of Dostoevsky in Greek, achieving the status of “classic texts” in Modern Greek translated literature. The aim of this article is to provide an argument for translation as a lens through which one can examine Fyodor Dostoevsky’s reception within a foreign culture, by stressing the role of individual agents in this process. In the case study presented here, my focus is on Ares Alexandrou due to his lifelong intellectual engagement with the Russian author’s work and his centrality in Dostoevsky’s translation history in Greece. First, I examine the publishing house Editions Govostes and the entrepreneurial publisher Kostas Govostes (1904-1958), who employed Alexandrou and commissioned the translations. I then turn to Alexandrou’s biography focusing on the way Dostoevsky was tied in the Greek translator’s memory with crucial moments of his own biography. Next, I discuss Alexandrou’s translational credo and idiolect, first, by examining his monograph The Dramatist Dostoevsky where Alexandrou lays out his understanding of Dostoevsky’s poetics and how it determined his discursive translation style; and finally, by analysing his translation strategies in his Greek versions of Dostoevsky.

Keywords: Dostoevsky's Reception in Greece, Traductology, Ares Alexandrou, Govostes Publishing House, The Dramatist Dostoevsky