Iuli Tsakalou writes
The story of a translator on the border between reality and fiction. A free and allegro spirit with a passion for life, with a passion for words, their dark well, their desperation. A little-enlightened face of Greek letters, Stella K., a well-bred daughter, a bold woman who claims love and in adverse times manages to gain a special status. The author talks to “ET” for her book.
How was “Body Erotic’?
Like all my books, it took shape from a deep personal need for expression and communication, but also from a spontaneous source of emotion. The central heroine of my fiction, the translator Stella Vourdoubas, I met in my pre-adolescence and brought her out of oblivion in the last decade. So “Erotic Body” is a novella, a fiction partly based on real people and events.
What are the topics that most appeal to you as writers?
I don’t have a specific direction. My first novella “This One Aristos”, published in 2014, had as its main character a modern Greek student who returns to his hometown of Crete in search of finding himself, while my second book the collection of short stories “Mikra Peismata “, published in 2017, focused on the economic and social crisis we experienced in our country. But also the human soul, the various manifestations of life, as depicted in the novel “The Culprit” in 2019, as well as the places and their influence, as presented in the novel “Days of Kifissia” in 2021.
“Erotic Body” (Kastaniotis publications)
In a Europe of inequalities your heroine Stella K. records the tragedy of human life through the thoughts of the heroes of the books she reads and translates.
My heroine Stella K. is a translator of the last century, who, despite having gone through the forty waves of two World Wars, maintains an unquenchable thirst for life, for love, for letters. She is presented as an independent free personality who, laughing and mocking her own life, creates and moves forward. She has no trace of seriousness, nor does she brag regarding her work. I translate for a living, she replies to her persistent interlocutors. But she remains until the end of her life a woman traumatized by her mother’s abandonment and the conservative environment of her Cretan father. Her love passion for her ten-year partner Sotiris Tsakanikas and her separation from Sotiris, who remains in the Czech Republic as a political refugee, idealize this relationship that becomes her obsession.
The translator is the mediator between author and reader. Can it enhance or “ruin” a book?
The translator performs a very important task. It is not enough to understand in depth the book, the historical and social context that composes the narrative, but also all its particularities, the verbal arrangements of each author. For this reason, in many cases the cooperation of translator and writer is necessary.
Tell us regarding your heroine, regarding the plot of the book.
I will tell you two words regarding Stella’s young years, the beginning of the fairy tale: The central figure of our story, Stella, was born around 1907 in Chania. Her father comes from an old, well-to-do family from Chania and her mother, Zoe, is the daughter of a doctor from Constantinople. When she turns eight, she loses her father following a short illness. Her mother does not show much interest in raising her daughter and so her grandmother Evlampia Lampidi takes over her guardianship and takes her granddaughter to Athens to take care of her. In Athens, now a teenager, she will continue her education at the French School of Nuns as a boarding student. Shortly before coming of age, she will fall in love with the French music teacher Claude Dubois, whom she will secretly marry from her grandmother and indifferent mother and follow him to Paris. Although her marriage will not last many years, Stella takes advantage of the freedom of a married woman and the financial comfort of the capital she had inherited from her father, matures and completes herself. Paris will become for her a big school, a mobile celebration as Hemingway described it, opening the paths of art, literature and even translation… The continuation in the book!
Can the great world of world literature books that shaped the post-war generations sustain the vision of a better tomorrow?
Literature and more broadly Art is a good that was formed over the centuries, sometimes with small and sometimes with big steps. We all followed the paths opened for us by previous generations, our forefathers. Because man can live with little, but without freedom and civilization he cannot exist. I had recently read regarding a painting exhibition with photographs of Picasso’s works organized in the prisons of Corfu by prisoners during the German Occupation. This is the vision. Even in our day when many of the human values and social achievements are questioned, literature can work its miracle. Thousands of pages of books, even some written and forgotten, are waiting to show us once more the way of true life, knowledge and imagination.
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