In their attempt to construct their identity in opposition to European one, non-Western new nations with alphabets such as Greek, Hebrew, or Cyrillic, used them as a way of emphasizing difference, and thus provide sym...In their attempt to construct their identity in opposition to European one, non-Western new nations with alphabets such as Greek, Hebrew, or Cyrillic, used them as a way of emphasizing difference, and thus provide symbolic spaces for the newborn nations. The illegibility of these alphabets for Western people, along with the ancient prestige of at least Hebrew and Greek, fostered the illusion of temporal continuity and provided legitimacy to their atomization projects. Odysseas Elytis （1911-1996）, Nobel Prize for Literature winner in 1979 and the last national poet of Greece, blends this old tendency in Greek culture and the broader claim of modern European poets for the essential autonomy of art and literature. His efforts to reinforce the walls separating Greece from Latin-Western culture by reinforcing the illegibility of both Greek and poetic idioms, aim at constructing a more essential Greece, founded on aesthetics, language, and writing instead of politics, institutions, or geographic borders. In this paper engaging mainly in the fields of literary and postcolonial studies, the author intends to analyze the mechanisms by which language, writing, or literature can be used to （re）cipher once again the already exclusive concept of nation, and thus to undermine every possibility of deciphering and translatability. He concludes that in “conceptually colonized” nations such as Greece, this process implies and anticolonial movement still caught nevertheless in a colonial discursivity.展开更多
文摘In their attempt to construct their identity in opposition to European one, non-Western new nations with alphabets such as Greek, Hebrew, or Cyrillic, used them as a way of emphasizing difference, and thus provide symbolic spaces for the newborn nations. The illegibility of these alphabets for Western people, along with the ancient prestige of at least Hebrew and Greek, fostered the illusion of temporal continuity and provided legitimacy to their atomization projects. Odysseas Elytis （1911-1996）, Nobel Prize for Literature winner in 1979 and the last national poet of Greece, blends this old tendency in Greek culture and the broader claim of modern European poets for the essential autonomy of art and literature. His efforts to reinforce the walls separating Greece from Latin-Western culture by reinforcing the illegibility of both Greek and poetic idioms, aim at constructing a more essential Greece, founded on aesthetics, language, and writing instead of politics, institutions, or geographic borders. In this paper engaging mainly in the fields of literary and postcolonial studies, the author intends to analyze the mechanisms by which language, writing, or literature can be used to （re）cipher once again the already exclusive concept of nation, and thus to undermine every possibility of deciphering and translatability. He concludes that in “conceptually colonized” nations such as Greece, this process implies and anticolonial movement still caught nevertheless in a colonial discursivity.
