Re-wr\'ıting hegemony in 'Babel': a Greek transiation of T. S. Eliot's 'Four Quartets'
Target: International Journal on Translation Studies, (1999)Abstract
This paper seeks to determine the ways in which the translation of T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets by the post-war Greek poet A. Decavalles challenges the hegemony of this major text of the Western canon. Four Quartets is considered an anti-local poem, expressing the desire for the creation of 'classic' English, which presupposes a transcendental linguistic essence and a 'universal' perspective. Decavalles evinces an active attitude towards translation both in his reference to it as 're-creation' and in his creation of a target text which is at points not fluent, and even problematic. The opacity of the rewriting of Four Quartets in Greek, a language of a peripheral European country, constitutes a political act of resistance to Western (modernist) hegemony as it undermines the metaphysical certainties of Eliot's text