Essay
Το ταξίδι μου
Not translated into English
Yannis Psycharis · 1888
Opening lines
Ἕνα πρωῒ στὴν ἐξοχή, ποὺ μυροβολούσανε οἱ πεδιάδες καὶ ποὺ τὰ δέντρα κελαδούσανε, πουλιὰ γεμάτα, βγῆκα καὶ γώ — κάτω στῆς δυτικῆς Γαλλίας τἀπόμακρα τὰ παράλια ὅπου βρισκόμουνε τότες — νὰ σεργιανίσω ὄξω στοὺς κάμπους καὶ νὰ λούσω στὴ δροσιὰ τῆς ἀβγῆς κορμὶ καὶ ψυχή.
One morning in the countryside, when the plains were fragrant and the trees were singing, full of birds, I too went out (down on the far-off shores of western France where I was staying then) to stroll in the fields and bathe body and soul in the coolness of dawn.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from archive.org
Synopsis
A Greek from Paris sets out for the East: Constantinople, then Chios, where his family comes from, then Greece. He recounts the stages, the encounters and the conversations, and interrupts his narrative with digressions on language, literary allusions and jokes. Everything is written in the Greek that the people speak, and every page aims to show that this language is enough to say everything, including science.
Context
The author wrote this narrative entirely in demotic, the spoken language, at a time when everything learned that was published was in katharevousa, an artificial Greek purged of its foreign words. The journey itself dates from 1886, the book from 1888, in Athens, from S. K. Vlastós. It demanded nothing less than the immediate abandonment of the learned language and forged, for the words that were missing, forms drawn from the popular speech alone. The quarrel it opened lasted a century: in 1901, the publication of the Gospels in demotic by an Athens newspaper stirred up the city, and the spoken language became official only in 1976.
Who it is for
A short travel narrative, in which the stakes are language more than travel. Knowledge of the context of the quarrel is necessary.
Prizes and reception
A founding text of written modern Greek, it opened a conflict that sociolinguistics studies everywhere as a textbook case.