Monte-Christo in Modern Greek and the Ottoman context

The beginning of a journey

Abstract

The version of Le Comte de Monte-Christo in Modern Greek (O Κόμης του Μοντεχρίστου), translated by the Constantinopolitan Greek teacher Ioannis Patroklos, and published between 1845 and 1846 in five volumes by the French printing-house Cayol in Beyoğlu, occupies a special place in the translation and adaptation history of Dumas’s novel in the “East”, as it was translated almost parallelly to the first publication of the original French work serialized in Le journal des débats (1844-46). It thus represents the very first “entry” of the novel to the multicultural Ottoman literary panorama, though it soon fell into oblivion being outpaced by another translation that appeared in the 1860s in Athens. The contribution tackles the reception of European prose literature among Greek readers in the Hellenic Kingdom and the Ottoman Empire during the nineteenth century, referring especially to the works of Alexandre Dumas père, it further presents the first Greek translation of Le Comte de Monte-Christo and its translator Ioannis Patroklos, and, eventually, it analyzes selected issues of language and cultural transfer related to the denotative concepts of “Greek”. Patroklos’s largely “faithful” translation can be put into a foreignizing and didactic framework corresponding to the educational background of the translator.

Key words: literary translation, modern Greek novel, Ottoman Greek society, Alexandre Dumas père.