On Discovering My Aunt Eleni’s Place in Queer Greek Literature

My new novel, Archipelago, is narrated by a translator who’s translating a novel she hasn’t read before. In this way, she is both experiencing the story and writing it at once.

I’ve attempted many translations before, as practice, though I haven’t yet published a translation of a complete work. The project that really started me thinking about the philosophy of translation was translating my aunt Eleni’s book, My Friend Mrs. Dora Rosetti, a work I’d discovered years after it was published in Greece, and more than a decade after her death.

But I never knew her as writer. My aunt made her living as a tour guide. When I was writing my first book, a novel set during the late 1960s and early 1970s in Athens, when Greece was under a military dictatorship, Eleni took great interest in the project. She sent me detailed letters of her memories of the period: from the student insurrection at the Polytechnic, whose gates were crashed down by a tank, to a pair of clogs to the details of a train to a harrowing experience with a police officer. The way we remember things is as much a part of history as the facts themselves, after all, and these details she shared with me were invaluable.

It was through Eleni, who lived her whole life in Greece, and not my father, who emigrated to the States in his twenties, that I began to experience the country: its language, its literature, its cultural icons. I took her interest then as something more maternal, nurturing, and perhaps it was; what I failed to understand was her intellectual investment in the creation of literature itself.

Eleni was often described by my family as “private,” but that I did not ask her more about her life when she was alive is its own ghost that haunts me. It was, for me, a failure of imagination.

Imagine my surprise then, at a Modern Greek Studies symposium, when I listened to a scholar named Elisavet Pakis presenting on the work of a queer activist and independent scholar who had founded one of the first lesbian activist groups in Greece, whose archival work had helped to confirm the identity of the author of a foundational work of queer Greek fiction. Yet even though she shared Eleni’s name, it wasn’t until Eleni’s smiling face appeared on the presentation screen that I comprehended that this scholar was my aunt.

The presentation I attended had to do with a Greek novel called Her Lover by an Alexandrian Greek who wrote under the pseudonym Dora Rosetti. Two friends of Rosetti’s, male writers, found the novel’s writing exquisite and insisted it deserved an audience. Rosetti was only eighteen at the time, and these two writers, well-intentioned, published the work without her permission, not bothering to remove key photographs or other details that identified both the writer and her lover, a relationship that was certainly not public. For some reason they felt they had a right to it, had a right to decide who might see it.

This was 1929 in Alexandria, Egypt, and its author never intended the manuscript for public consumption. And for understandable reason: upon its publication, it caused an uproar in their families, was met with scandal in Greece, and most of the copies of the book were destroyed. As far as it’s known, Dora Rosetti never wrote another novel, and her true identity remained a mystery. In 2005, a scholar named Christina Dounia unearthed a copy of Her Lover in a private library on the Greek island of Lesvos, and also a copy in Cavafy’s personal archive, and re-released the book.

This is where Eleni enters the picture.

The re-publication of Her Lover lead Eleni to reveal, in the pages of the Greek newspaper To Vima, that, in 1983, she had not only read a copy of Her Lover that had been circulating among her friends but had been so moved by it that it led her to begin a long, arduous investigation to uncover the identity of this Dora Rosetti.   One year later, in 1984, the two women met and shared a friendship and correspondence. Rosetti entrusted my aunt with all of her writing that she had not destroyed: her juvenilia, early diaries, and letters, with the understanding that my aunt would not publish anything about them until long after her death. She also shared her story, orally, which Eleni transcribed.

Sixteen years after Rosetti’s death, and six years after her own, Eleni’s book, My Friend Mrs. Dora Rosetti, was published. Along with Eleni’s own narrative is the curated and edited collection of Rosetti’s papers, letters, drawings, diary entries—think a compilation like Elena Ferrante’s Frantumaglia. One section contains the testimony Rosetti gave to Eleni, a story of her life: “I was born in Alexandria in 1908,” it begins. “My father, before he’d married my mother, had been married twice before, the first when he was seventeen.” And so on.

You might think such a project would have Eleni listed as the editor of this book. But she’s presented as the author, as if she has resurrected and recreated the character Dora Rosetti, as a novelist would, by shoring up all these old fragments. It’s not called “The Papers of Dora Rosetti.” It’s presented as a work of literature, maybe autofiction, My Friend Mrs. Dora Rosetti, by Eleni Bakopoulou, with the subtitle as almost an afterthought: juvenilia and scrapbook.

What about her own self was Eleni constructing, and performing, through this book? What part was she annihilating? The assemblage of these most-private papers, the letters, the drawings and the diary entries, feels as much an ethnography as it is an autoethnography, Eleni’s reclamation of a self or story that might have been previously denied. A fight against erasure, a re-creation of not just public life but a private one too. To self-narrate not because of the demands or expectations of others, but because of one’s own desire to tell a story.

Elena Ferrante has noted in an interview: “[T]he female “I”… with its long history of oppression and repression, tends to shatter as it’s tossed around, and to reappear and shatter again, always in an unpredictable way. Stories feed on the fragments, which are concealed under an appearance of unity and constitute a sort of chaos to depart from, an obscurity to illuminate.”

“To reappear and shatter again.”

An “obscurity to illuminate.”

As I began to translate Eleni, these lines of Ferrante stayed in my mind.

*

Before I received a copy of Eleni’s book, Elisavet, the scholar whose presentation I attended at that conference, shared with me one of Eleni’s essays, an excerpt of what would become Eleni’s book. It was called “The Ancient Sacred Mysteries” and was published in the Greek literary journal Odos Panos the year of her death—six years before the book was published and eleven years before it fell into my hands. As if this was what she wanted to world to read when she’d left it.

As I read I felt uneasy, felt as though I wanted to read more quickly than I could comprehend. I felt I was missing something. I had to slow myself down. I had to translate her, and I felt compelled to do it as I was reading: word by word, line by line, I was casting her into a new text as I read the one she’d written. As Kate Briggs writes in This Little Art, translation is a “process of discovery, this adventuring into the writing of a sentence, with no clear idea of what will happen when I start to try, that makes for the real, lived-out difference between reading a sentence … and the concrete task of writing it in my own language, again.” Eleni began to appear to me, sentence by sentence, word by word.

The piece, though it didn’t have much context otherwise, is dedicated to the memory of Dora Rosetti and epigraphs Cavafy’s “Hidden Things”: “But perhaps it’s not worth squandering so much care and trouble on puzzling me out. Afterwards—in some more perfect society— someone else who’s fashioned like me will surely appear and be free to do as he pleases.” (trans. Daniel Mendelsohn).

The short piece, written in third person, opens with a woman—I read it as an imagined Rosetti— going through her old mementoes and photos and destroying them, the “small artifacts of a full, complete life.”

Look, toss away, goes her refrain. Look, toss away.

But when reading I only saw Eleni, casting not Rosetti but herself into the third person, using another woman’s life to tell something of her own. To combine their stories, perhaps, or maybe simply telling her own story. Even alone, she hides, censoring herself, burying these mementoes deep in the trash. As Judith Butler would tell us, the distinctions between public and private are fictions, and even in our most private spaces the outside world acts upon us.

“Our artifacts tell more about ourselves than our confessions,” Joseph Brodsky writes, and here, the artifacts are being documented, catalogued, confessed, translated, all before being thrown away. To live on not in physical form, but in language, given another layer of narrative control.

As if she only wants the words to remain.

Another of her essays epigraphs other lines of Cavafy’s “Hidden”: “The most unnoticed of my actions and the most covert of all my writings: from these alone will they come to know me.”

I am one of these they.

*

Eleni notes in her book that when she came across Her Lover, she thought it was a foreign novel not only translated but transposed into Greek: “Paris could become Athens; the Latin Quarter, the neighborhood of Neapoli; the Champs Elysée, Alexandras Avenue. When, however, I began to read more carefully I noticed, to my great surprise, that in my hands was a work of Greek literature.”

“Sapphic literature in post-Sappho Greece?” she continues. “It was, wasn’t it?”

Dora Rosetti, she notes, “was, without doubt, a voice who’d come from the future.” Eleni continues: “I felt I had to meet this so-called future with flesh and bone. …To research it, to know it.”

I suppose I do too. By translating her, I write her into the future.

Or, as Sappho writes, and Anne Carson translates: Someone will remember us / I say / even in another time.

Translation links the past and the future; the translator carries not only across language but time. When I write, there’s a tension between the I who is writing and the I who appears on the page. When I translate, I reappropriate the role of translator and narrator. In the same way Eleni stepped into Rosetti’s words, I step into Eleni’s.

Would Eleni have wanted me to read this, have wanted to have her work translated? It’s the question any translator might ask, if the writer is no longer living, but for me, it’s particularly fraught because I am not in a relationship with Eleni in a purely textual sense. I have not chosen to translate the work because I know it well but precisely because I do not. I only knew the woman—though only a small part of her, it turns out—and the woman is gone.

From these alone they will come to know me.

Translation complicates the authorial position, Kate Briggs notes in This Little Art: sharing it, usurping it, dislocating it. Eleni has shared—and certainly complicated—the authorial position with Dora Rosetti in the act, say, of curation. At the end of her book’s first chapter, right before she shifts into the first-person voice of Rosetti’s testimony, Eleni notes that she had, for some time, forgotten this testimony. When she returned to it, she was happy to see her own voice merging with that first-person narration. In fact: from time to time she felt as though she was “Dora Rosetti herself, brought back to earth.”

Shortly before she died, Eleni dropped off My Friend Mrs. Dora Rosetti with her publisher, saying that she was going to visit her brother—my father—in America. But as far as I know, she never had plans to do this—she was already far too ill, and she died shortly after.

When I carry Eleni over from Greek to English, her voice passes through me and emerges as something combinatory. By translating Eleni, I’m coming to know her through her “most unnoticed of actions.”

Eleni’s dedication reads: “To the women writers whose work was destroyed before I ever knew them.”

I don’t know if Eleni would want to be translated, or if she would have preferred to remain in the private space of her mother tongue, but her dropping off her manuscript before she died, to her publisher, makes something feel very clear:

She wanted it to exist after she was gone.

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Archipelago by Natalie Bakapoulos is available via Tin House.