Aegean Notebooks - Reflections by Sea and Land in the Archipelago by Zissimos Lorenzatos (1915-2004) - 2012

Translated into English by Liadain Sherrard.


Soft cover, 19 cm, 138 pp.; with a fold-out map of the Aegean. In one of his Notebooks, Zissimos Lorenzatos says: "The present text does not require footnotes". I have taken this as a statement of intent: even though he eventually published these journals, he is careful to emphasize that they were written under sail, and that they are above all the expression of a present that was being lived moment by moment, not recollected in tranquillity at a later date (apart from some subsequent insertions which he specifically identifies). In order to be read as such, it has been decided to minimize the footnotes as far as possible, limiting these to the couple he provides himself plus a few definitions of the Greek words which appear. Nevertheless, as many of the Greek themes that are touched upon may be largely unfamiliar to the foreign reader, these have been marked by an asterisk which indicates an endnote where the reader will find them explained. In addition, there are half a dozen phrases in the Greek text which I have omitted to translate altogether. These are chiefly where the writer uses dialect words to make a point, or where he throws in an allusion that is instantly understandable to a Greek person but which would require a lengthy and laborious explanation for a non-Greek, and would -in my judgement- obstruct the flow for the reader. I should stress that in none of these cases has the meaning of the text been compromised.