How does a novella written more than one hundred years ago help to illuminate pressing issues in Greece today? Karkavitsas’ Archeologist, an allegory for the contestation of antiquity’s role in Greek modernity, was published at a time when Greece’s ancient past was emerging as a modern national industry. Major excavations were tied to the establishment of foreign schools in Greece, while the sheer quantity of new archeological inspired a boom in museum construction. This talk will explore some of the early critiques that the work offered of the early Greek antiquity industry, and of the mentalities – both foreign and domestic – that drove it. In the spirit of National Translation Day, this talk will also consider the work’s many reflections on the Greek language (and the “Language Question”), as well as the complications the work itself presents for translation on both linguistic and cultural levels.

Johanna Hanink is Professor of Classics at Brown University. She is the author of Lycurgan Athens and the Making of Classical Tragedy (Cambridge 2014) and The Classical Debt: Greek Antiquity in an Age of Austerity (Harvard 2017). She is also a translator of Ancient and Modern Greek.

This lecture is offered on the occasion of International Translation Day, in collaboration with the Embassy of Greece in Washington, DC, the UCLA Department of Classics, and the Archaeological Institute of America, Los Angeles Chapter. The discussion will be co-moderated by Professor Sarah Morris (Classics; Cotsen Institute of Archaeology) and Dr. Simos Zenios (UCLA SNF Hellenic Center).

View a recording of this talk here.

For further information about The Archeologist and Selected Sea Stories, visit the publisher’s site.