Copyright

Eleni Philippou

Published On

2023-11-14

Page Range

pp. 368–397

Language

  • English

Print Length

30 pages

6. Commissioning Political Sympathies

The British Council’s Translation of Jane Eyre in Greece

Chapter of: Prismatic Jane Eyre: Close-Reading a World Novel Across Languages(pp. 368–397)
The first book translation of Jane Eyre was translated into Modern Greek by Ninila Papagiannē, and published in 1949 by Ikaros publishers under the aegis of the British Council in Greece. This translation, published at the end of the Greek Civil War, was part of a wider political and ideological strategy conducted by Britain to make Greece conducive to British influence. In the wake of the Cold War, Britain was conscious of Greece’s significant political and geographic importance, and adopted a policy of soft power that included the translation of English classics, such as Jane Eyre, to cultivate political sympathy towards Britain.

Contributors

Eleni Philippou

(author)
Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation Research Centre at University of Oxford
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0211-8673

Eleni Philippou is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation Research Centre at the University of Oxford. She is also the Principal Investigator of the AHRC-funded Prismatic Jane Eyre Schools project, which follows on from her postdoctoral work on the OWRI-funded Creative Multilingualism project. Her monograph, Speaking Politically: Adorno and Postcolonial Fiction (2021), explores the implications of Adorno’s philosophy for literary studies, particularly in relation to texts that emerge from situations of political extremity. Her key research interests are postcolonial and world literature, contemporary poetry, critical theory, comparative literature, and translation studies. Furthermore, she is an award-winning poet, with a number of poems published in both British and international anthologies and journals.