[ilds] Pope Joan

[Panaiotis Gerontopoulos]

Thank you
Allyson and Bruce 
Allyson, I would like to stress the fact that my post of 12/30/2015 was not
intended to accuse Durrell for plagiarism in
general. I don’t have neither the capacity nor the ambition for such a huge
enterprise and as I have already pointed out before the good poet Durrell may
well have made the theft into something
better in other cases. I also think that Richard Pine’s view that all authors
steal is fundamentally correct. It depends on how you do it.


Bruce, Roidis stole from Byron (Don Juan) and Giovanni
Battista Casti (La Papessa Giovanna)
and was accused by his enemies to suffer from an unknown malady called castità.
Interestingly in the incipit of his translation-adaptation-transplantation text,
Durrell hints to Roidis’ borrowings from Byron


                 … Having offered love
sufficient sacrifice’…etc.  You know the tag.


Roidis did steal
from Byron but he did it in such a way to alert the reader about the theft. In his
times, plagiarism was legitimate if it was acknowledged, if the common reader
was familiar with the primary source, and if in the
new text the theft was improved [T.J. Mazzeo: Plagiarism and
Literary Property in the Romantic Period, PENN 2007]. Mazzeo discusses exhaustively
the topic and quotes various critics accusing Byron for stealing from the Papessa Giovanna of Casti.


Regarding the accuracy of my claim of ‘Pope
Joan’ being a carbon-copy of Kriton’s ‘Papissa
Joanna’ let me say that the number of the 10 given examples could be
easily brought to 30 or 40 but it would make a boring reading. Confusing the land breeze with the distant
winds of the wide world, the monastic practice with the expression
among monks, the ramparts of the fortresses with the quiet rooms of the castles, the
matins of the nuns with their evening prayers etc. do not show adaptations
from another source, but simply plagiarism at Kriton's expenses and, what counts more,
defacing the Greek original.


To realize
what happened to the text of the unfortunate Roidis’ one should read Anthony
Hirst’s article “The old poet of the city, Cavafy in Darley’s Alexandria” in
Deus Loci NS8: Durrell’s fictions have been sometimes mistaken for fact and his
translations for Cavafy’s poems. With the difference that while Cavafy’s
poems have been faithfully translated several times, Roidis’ book has never been
faithfully translated into English (I can give you a complete bibliography) and remains
totally unknown to the Anglophone reader unless he is able to read German: Paepstin Johanna, Eine Studie aus dem Mittelalter,
translated by Paul Friedrich, Julius Zeitler, Leipzig 1904. 

Coming to
Sokal’s Hoax, the parody “Transgressing the boundaries: Towards a
transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity” published in Social Text was soon after revealed by
the perpetrators. Durrell’s hoax survives after more than half a century since
its first public appearance. Lately, there has been a tardive protest against Durrell’s
appropriation of Roidis book (Mirto Loverdou, ‘To Vima’, July 15 2014, and
Giorgis Giatromanolakis, ‘To  Vima, July
16 2014)  calling for a return of our Literary
Elginians!!! For my part, I firmly believe that Roidis
would not enjoy at all seeing his name printed on the front page of Durrell’s
unintentional parody. 


Cheers, hoping
to meet you all sometime.


Panaiotis


Bruce, I thing you
live in California. Are you per chance somewhere near the UCLA? They conserve
an important archive of Durrell-Stephanides  correspondence concerning “The
Curious History of Pope Joan” copies  of
which I bought a long time ago and an exemplar  the not issued 1948 edition with
13  beautiful engravings by John
Buckland-Wright. Ι thumbed through it in a great hurry at the
British Library of London, and wonder if one could get copies of the engravings
for not commercial use. They are important in understanding the history of Durrell's book.   

P.G.



From: james.d.gifford at gmail.com
Date: Fri, 1 Jan 2016 16:24:08 -0800
To: ilds at lists.uvic.ca
Subject: Re: [ilds] Pope Joan

I think the standard procedure on this kind project today is to compile a sample set of similarities among translations (say, a body of works from Katharevousa to English) using a resource like Juxta or TaPoR to get a baseline of a normal range of duplication then contrasting a concordance of the differences among the Pope Joan translations.  I think I made a suggestion along those lines in 2004, back when I did more digital humanities work, but I've never heard about any results. It should be pretty straight forward for anyone with a digital copy of the texts in question, and there are plenty of models to draw on for it.
Cheers,James

Sent from my iPad
On Jan 1, 2016, at 9:03 AM, Bruce Redwine <bredwine1968 at earthlink.net> wrote:

Am I correct in summarizing P. Gerontopoulos’s argument as follows?  Lawrence Durrell took T. D. Kriton’s translation of Emmanuel Roidis’s Papissa Ioanna (trans. copyrighted 1935) and used it, with minor “adaptations,” along with its original errors, as the basis for his “carbon-copy” translation of the novel?  Briefly scanning the book, I do not see Durrell mentioning Kriton anywhere, even in the “Shorter Bibliography” at the end.  The title page of Pope Joan (New York:  Dutton, 1961) indeed contains “Translated from the Greek by Lawrence Durrell.”  Yes, I would call this an example of plagiarism, if Gerontopoulos’s claim is accurate.  (I’ll note, however, that translations will inevitably have similarities and that the examples below do not suggest a “carbon-copy," rather “adaptations” of another source.)  Gerontopoulos mentions that Kriton’s translation was “soon forgotten,” that is, fell into obscurity.  This fits Durrell’s modus operandi.
Bruce
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