Titika Dimitroulia and Alexander Kazamias
Three Egyptian-Greek women translators, Eleni Goussiou, Eleni Argyridou and Emilia Frangia, translated French fiction into Greek in the period 1865–87. That they were members of Egypt’s most promi-nent foreign resident community, demands an approach that considers the interface between gender, diaspora and translation. Locating their transla-tions in the wider intellectual milieu of Egyptian-Greek women’s writing 1860–901 we focus specifically on the cultural project of constructing a gendered notion of diaspora as inseparable from the acts and products of translation. By comparing their distinct cultural strategies, we highlight their common concerns and their contrasting approaches to translation, gender and notions of Egyptian-Greek identity. The chapter also explores how these translators interacted with influences from Europe, especially France; Greek sociocultural developments (including the emergence of a new gendered consciousness among Greek women); and the sparse yet important contacts with the Arab nahda. In contrast to prevalent scholarly views recently reaffirmed in studies on Greek women in the late Ottoman Empire, we contend that both Ottoman-Egyptian reformist policies and growing contacts with Europe encouraged the growth of an early feminist current in Egypt’s Greek community, especially in the interconnected fields of translation and literature. Moreover, we maintain that, far from
‘declining or being abandoned, since nationalist ideologies’ took hold in the 1870s, Greek Ottomanism survived in Egypt for another generation and throughout the period 1860–90 was linked to some of the most radical local feminist currents.2 In this respect, clear parallels can be found with the development of Arab feminist thought at that time in Egypt.
A sizeable Greek community began to emerge in the Nile Valley from the 1820s. By the 1882 British occupation, it had developed into Egypt’s largest and possibly most influential foreign ethnic group. Official
censuses show that between 1871 and 1882, 34,000–38,000 Greeks were living in Egypt, but their real numbers were certainly higher, possibly by up to one third, as these figures did not include the Ottoman-Greeks and those holding non-Greek nationalities.3 Contrary to some claims,4 Egypt’s Greek community was well-established before the advent of British colonialism and its demographics showed a strong upward trend.
Consequently, this ethnic group should be conceptualised primarily as a pre-colonial, late Ottoman diaspora community similar to other flourish-ing Greek colonies across the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. Indeed, with the onset of formal British control, the capitulatory privileges enjoyed by many of its members were significantly curtailed, as Egypt’s colonial authorities were determined to exercise firmer control over the country’s local foreign residents.5 In contrast to their clichéd image,6 Egypt’s Greeks were not merely a merchant diaspora community acting as a local agent of British imperialism. While an important section of its haute bourgeoisie and its supporters among the lower classes certainly did, beginning in the 1860s there was also a significant Egyptian-Greek working class, including thousands of islanders digging the Suez Canal alongside the indigenous fellahin.7 Indeed, in the 1880s–90s, the com-munity’s mainstream expressed a vocal opposition to colonialism and its leading newspaper, Tachydromos, marked the ninth anniversary of the British bombardment of Alexandria with the headline ‘When will Egypt get rid of the British Occupation?’8
Among the understudied aspects of this varied ethnic group is its cul-tural and literary production, which goes well beyond the celebrated case of C. P. Cavafy.9 Notable, but virtually unknown, is the pioneering work of Egyptian-Greek women writers, including translators. In the two major histories of Egyptian-Greek literature, Manolis Yalourakis’s The History of Greek letters in Egypt (1962) and Ioannis Chatzifotis’s Alexandrian Literature (1967), there is hardly any reference to Maria Michanidou (c.1830–1901),10 even though she is often considered the first female fiction writer in the Greek language with her Egyptian-themed novella The Phantoms of Egypt (1873).11 Both histories make only brief mention of Penelope Delta (1874–1941), who is known as the most widely read Greek female writer to date.12 Delta spent half of her life in Alexandria and based two of her children’s books, Mad Anthony (1932) and Mangas (1935), on her own childhood memories from Egypt. Yalourakis and Chatzifotis have little to say about the blind poet and translator, Eleni Goussiou (b.
1840), whose collection Small Bunch of Flowers (1861) is heralded as the first work of Egyptian-Greek poetry, yet whose important contribution to translation in the 1860s is practically unknown.13
We conceptualise translation as transcultural mediation and negotia-tion which, on one hand, reflects relanegotia-tions in a given social context (in our case, the Greek community of Egypt) and, on the other hand, seeks to reshape these relations around a programme formulated by the agents of translation themselves, the translators. Following André Lefevere, we define translation as one of the most important forms of rewriting and literary manipulation. The notion of translation as ‘rewriting’, which refers to a variety of intra- or inter-lingual practices, involves processes of re-interpreting, altering or manipulating an original text. These forms of manipulation provide the translator with considerable power in informing the culture in which he/she operates, often creating different images of the same work or writer or even different literary, intellectual and social movements.14
The context in which this process takes place is a structured matrix of interconnected social positions which, following the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (with whom Lefevere entered into dialogue), we regard as ‘a field’.15 Internally, fields are marked by antagonistic relations among agents who compete for the acquisition and retention of power, domina-tion and capital; and, externally, they interact with other fields to claim autonomy. On this basis, the Egyptian-Greek field is seen here as a social arena constituted around a common minority language, Greek, and whose underlying rules (nomoi) consist of constructing shared community rela-tions and a collective diasporic identity. At the same time, Egypt’s Greek community interacted regularly with three other fields: (1) mainland and diaspora Greek culture and society; (2) Egyptian society and culture, including its Ottoman political and social institutions; (3) European modernity at the historical juncture of the French and British colonisation of the Middle East.16
Gender and Literature in Egypt’s Greek Community, 1860–90 From its rapid expansion during the cotton boom of the 1860s, Egypt’s Greek community became increasingly polarised around two sociocultural trends.17 The first articulated a discourse that was critical of European individualism and colonialism and called instead for the construction of a communitarian Egyptian-Greek identity in the context of a multicultural Ottoman Empire. The second adopted an elitist discourse, which praised European modernity and colonialism, and dismissed Arab and Ottoman culture as backward and uncivilised. Although these trends sometimes overlapped (because many Egyptian-Greek notables and intellectuals chose to operate across them), in most cases their differences were tangible. This
tension was partly linked to an ongoing socio-political conflict between the old interior bourgeoisie, which drew much of its authority directly from the Ottoman Khedivial Court (Zizinia, Dranet Pasha, Rally, Averoff) and the comprador class of cotton merchants and financiers who arrived after 1860 and became aligned to British financial and political interests (Choremi-Benaki, Salvago, Goussios). This dispute continued into the period of the British occupation, when the mainstream of the Greek com-munity, led by the old, so-called ‘first-class families’, resisted Cromer’s policies, while the ‘second-class families’ and the Greek Consulate in Alexandria supported the local colonial authorities.18
Ever since Stratis Tsirkas’s acclaimed study on Cavafy in 1958, it has become apparent that the social antagonisms within the Greek community after 1860 had a marked influence on its writers.19 When we turn to the literature of Egyptian-Greek women, we find that this conclusion is no less valid. These influences usually emerged through an artistic or cultural desire to set a poem or novel in the landscape of contemporary Egypt, which formed the writer’s immediate material environment. The cultural hybridity engendered in the process of presenting Egyptian themes in the Greek language gave rise to questions of diasporic identity, namely, what it meant to be a Greek living in Egypt. Such questions, in turn, drew these writers closer to intra-community cultural and political debates.
Although this process was never linear, as it was usually mediated by strong European influences,20 in the case of women authors it was further compounded by the additional concern of linking questions of diasporic identity with diverse gender issues. In this sense, the leading Egyptian-Greek women writers of this period seldom discussed the role of women in abstract, decontextualised terms. Usually, they raised such issues in the hybrid context of diaspora and, especially, the milieu of Egypt’s Greek community.
All these tendencies were already developed in the first Egyptian-Greek literary work published by a woman, Eleni Goussiou, whose poetic collection Small Bunch of Flowers appeared in 1861. Born in 1840 on the Greek island of Naxos, Goussiou settled in Alexandria at the age of nine, when her father, a customs official for the Greek government, moved there ‘in search of a job’. As an infant, Goussiou lost her eyesight and although she could not read or write, she started composing poems when she turned eighteen, with the help of her younger brother who wrote them down for her.21 Of the twenty-one poems in Small Bunch of Flowers, at least nine focus strongly on gender-related themes, as could be inferred from their titles: ‘Weeping mother’; ‘Orphan woman’;
‘Philostorgy’; ‘Homage to Lady R.A.K’.; ‘Woman lacking love’; ‘Young
Spanish woman, or Betrayal’; ‘Requiem to the Virgin Athina Tzoumou’;
‘Women. A satire’; ‘Abandoned young woman’. In a fashion reminis-cent of the early feminism of Mary Wollstonecraft (whose work she might have known, given her familiarity with leading eighteenth-century French feminist writers), Goussiou treats gender and class as inextricable questions of social justice,22 especially when she criticises Alexandria’s bourgeois aristocracy. For example, her poem ‘Women. A satire’ is a counterpoint between an itinerant vendor who struggles to earn a living and an affluent woman of ‘foolish ideas’ who cares only about the latest Parisian fashions.
A woman’s character, no matter how good Does not care a whit
If I am running around under the sun or in the water.
All she wants are crinolines and feathered hats
She couldn’t care less if I am selling cheese, oil and sardines All she wants are her scarfs and a pointed cap.
Her poem ‘Railway’ expresses admiration, but also scepticism, about the new Cairo-Alexandria rail link (inaugurated in 1859) because the train had
‘gold plated engines and ashtrays’ and the entire project cost too much.
A mirror image of this critique is given in ‘Homage to Lady R.A.K’., where the eponymous woman is praised for her classless qualities of
‘beauty’, ‘spirit’ and ‘charm’ which, we are told, are the envy of ‘ladies’
in the theatre audience.23 In such poems, the feminine as a repository of moral and aesthetic values is contrasted with the material obsessions of Alexandrian high society.
More explicit connections between gender and diaspora can be found in her poems ‘The most serene prince, Khedive Said’ and ‘The Square of Alexandria’. The former is an encomium to Egypt’s ruler, who is praised for making Egypt attractive to immigrants with his liberal and modernis-ing reforms:
You beautified the cities everything is renewed From what I hear, through You Egypt has been rescued.
Your people enjoy abundant freedom and everyone rushes here for this reason.
The open Ottoman society described here is portrayed as a fitting environ-ment for a thriving multiculturalism. The crossing of ethnic boundaries
encouraged by the Khedive is warmly welcomed in a verse that calls him ‘the new Ptolemy’.24 Besides drawing a historical parallel with the hybrid culture of Hellenistic Egypt (a commonplace in Egyptian-Greek literature well before Cavafy), the title ‘new Ptolemy’ also served as a cultural device linking Egypt’s Ottoman court with a ‘local’ past that is dear to Greek nationalism, which dominated the official discourse of Egypt’s Greek community.25 The emphasis on Said’s reforms and beauti-fication projects is on full display in the poem ‘The Square of Alexandria’, which praises ‘Said Pasha’ for the recent renovation of the famous Place des Consuls. The poem describes how ‘the waters of the Nile’ sprang out of fountains built by the Greek marble sculptor Yakoumis who used
‘white marble from Tinos’; it also refers to the marble seats ‘from our friendly Italy’ and marvels at the nearby buildings, headed by the mansion of the founder of Alexandria’s Greek community, Mikhail Tositsas. In other words, the revamped Place des Consuls is portrayed as a genius of Ottoman multiculturalism, in which the local Greek community occupies centre stage. In a surprise twist, the poem’s finale reveals the essence of this innovation for Goussiou, which is none other than the opening of a magnificent new public space suitable for women: ‘In our splendid square, many people walk/Ladies and young women wander around at night’.26 Here, the feminisation of social space is portrayed as the culmination of cosmopolitan modernity.
The same connections between diaspora, gender and Ottoman com-munitarianism were developed at that time in the prose of Michanidou, whose ideas are aptly summarised by Frangiski Abatzopoulou:
She is chiefly afraid of plutocracy, subservience to foreign ways of life, the big loan of . . . [Anglophile Prime Minister] Charilaos Trikoupis . . . An enemy of big capital and the banks, she emerges as a guardian of the poor, especially children . . . and seeks a new balance of forces between West and East, which she finds in a new alliance with the Sultan.27
Abatzopoulou also remarks that Michanidou believed women were intel-lectually inferior to men and points out that she disagreed with the leading Greek feminist of her time, Kalliroi Parren, who urged women to seek paid work outside the home.28 However, it would be inappropriate to view Michanidou as nothing but a mere reactionary; her early writing displayed progressive elements in its treatment of gender issues. Also, her views on women’s intellect appear to be more complex insofar as she believed, in the words of one of her heroines, that ‘women are more cunning than men’, meaning ingenious, resourceful, astute.29
Much of the above can be seen in her play Extreme Poverty: Greek
Aristocracy and the Vampire (1879), set in the Greek community of Marseille, which satirises the patriarchal plutocracy in charge of its affairs.
The male notables are castigated for caring more about sponsoring a war to retake Istanbul from the Ottomans than about helping a destitute single mother of four, Margarita, who lives in their own community. The action soon turns into a comedy of manners when Margarita’s friend, Clio, imper-sonates a French bourgeoise, Mme d’Orient, to charm the Greek notables into offering her gifts that she could later sell to feed her friend’s starving children. ‘If they see that you are a Greek and a poor woman, they will not even speak to you’; but ‘if they see you are wearing expensive clothes . . . and are French . . . even if you are the worst kind of woman . . . they will give you the best reception’, says Clio. Predictably, the notables fall into her trap as the fictitious Mme d’Orient fascinates them with stories from her travels to Alexandria. There, she tells them, the local Greeks ‘compete against each another about who will come across as more French’.30 The interconnected issues of diaspora and patriarchy reappear in conversations between Margarita and Clio, in which the latter complains that all Greek notables abroad are the same. ‘When I was in Alexandria, I heard that one of the disreputable ballerinas hooked up with a filthy rich pig and he bought her a country mansion in Italy . . . How, I wondered, could they sacrifice so much money . . . If he could give . . . for the fatherland . . . or . . . the widows and orphans, the hospitals, the schools’, she complains.
Interestingly, Margarita corrects her, stressing that, in contrast to those in Marseille, the Greek notables in Egypt are less inhuman because they have kept something of the communitarian spirit of ‘the East’. ‘At least in Alexandria, as well as in the rest of the East, if they spend on their vices, they also spend on many charities’, she remarks.31
Michanidou’s communitarian proto-feminism also features in the novella Beautiful Ottoman Woman (1888), set in the alleys of Fatimid Cairo. In what could be the first work of modern Greek fiction featuring an all-Muslim cast,32 the story narrates the ploys of Eminé, an educated Turkish young woman, who succeeds in making handsome Mahmoud, an Egyptian merchant at Khan El-Khalili bazaar, leave his lover in order to marry her. Eminé falls in love with Mahmoud because she finds him physically attractive. She studies him ‘from head to toe’ and thinks ‘a more handsome man could not exist’.33 Eminé’s father is an enlightened bey from Istanbul, who educated his daughter and gave her ‘absolute power to choose the husband she likes’.34 Michanidou, whose anti-Semitic views in her other works have been appropriately criticised,35 is remark-ably open-minded toward Islam. She quotes directly from the Qurʾan, using the recent translation of the Alexandrian Gerassimos Pentakis, in an
interesting example of Egyptian-Greek intertextuality.36 Overall, despite their striking differences, both Goussiou and Michanidou project a posi-tive image of Ottoman multicultural communitarianism as an ideal envi-ronment for better gender relations. They praise ‘enlightened patriarchy’
as a modern institution capable of reforming the status of women in Egypt through encouraging their education, granting them choice in marriage and giving them greater access to public space.
Translation in the Emerging Literary Field of Egypt’s Greek Community, 1860–90
Besides Goussiou, Frangia and Argyridou, whose translations will be ana-lysed extensively below, the Egyptian-Greek literary field in this period was marked by a strong male presence. Between 1863 and 1890, at least thirty-eight translations were published by Egyptian-Greek men and another thirteen by anonymous translators,37 not to mention dictionaries, language learning manuals38 and translations from Ancient Greek. Of those fifty-one titles, twenty-nine or thirty were translations from French, eighteen from Italian, two from German, one from Arabic (and, interestingly, none from English).39 This intense activity, which for the 1860s and 1870s was proportionately five times greater than the average production of Greek translations worldwide,40 is typical of both diaspora communities and newly formed literary systems.41 Clear connections with Egyptian-Greek themes can be found in S. K. Pantelidis’s 1868 translation of Alexandre Soumet’s play, Cléopâtre, Miltiadis Lants’ Aigyptiakoí Kódikes (1880) (Egyptian codes, from French) and, from German, The Most Ancient Merchant of Alexandria (1888) by an anonymous translator.42 Other evi-dence also shows that Egypt’s Greek translators formed a kind of literary community through which they learned from one another and encouraged each other’s work. For example, in the list of pre-ordered copies of N. A.
Abbet’s 1869 translation of Jean-Henri Ferdinand Lamartelière’s Robert, chef de brigands, we find the names of almost all the leading Alexandrian
Abbet’s 1869 translation of Jean-Henri Ferdinand Lamartelière’s Robert, chef de brigands, we find the names of almost all the leading Alexandrian