Short stories
Το αμάρτημα της μητρός μου
Not translated into English
Georgios Vizyinos · 1883
Opening lines
Ἄλλην ἀδελφὴν δὲν εἴχομεν παρὰ μόνον τὴν Ἀννιὼ. Ἤτον ἡ χαϊδεμμένη τῆς μικρᾶς ἡμῶν οἰκογενείας καὶ τὴν ἠγαπῶμεν ὅλοι.
We had no other sister but Annio. She was the pet of our little family and we all loved her.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from el.wikisource.org
Synopsis
The narrator looks back on his childhood in Thrace, when his mother watched night and day over his little sister Annió, wasted by illness. She drags her from church to church and from healer to healer, promises everything she owns, forgets her sons. The child he was does not understand what drives his mother and believes himself abandoned.
Context
The order of the first two publications is unusual: the French version by the Marquis Auguste Queux de Saint-Hilaire appeared in the Nouvelle Revue of 1 March 1883, before the Greek text, which the journal Estia published the same year; this had hardly been seen before for modern Greek prose. Hélène Zervas retranslated the story for Actes Sud in 1995, with the French Institute of Athens; the publisher Aiora reissued in Athens in 2015 the 1883 translation, revised and introduced by Gilles Decorvet and followed by Le Pommier de discorde. William F. Wyatt put it into English in 1988, with a preface by Roderick Beaton.
Who it is for
A long short story of some sixty pages, available in French in two versions. There is nothing to know in advance: the reader learns what there is to learn at the same time as the narrator.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as the birth certificate of the psychological narrative in Greek letters, and its author as the country's Dostoevsky.