Emmanouil Roidis

Emmanouil Roidis ( Greek Εμμανουήλ Ροΐδης , born June 18, 1836 in Ermoupoli ; † January 7, 1904 in Athens ) was a Greek writer . His work includes novels , short stories , essays and translations.

Life

Emmanouil Roidis, 1866

Roidis was born in Ermoupoli on Syros as the son of a wealthy family of noble origin from Chios . His parents were Dimitrios and Cornelia Roidis (née Rodokanaki). In 1841 the family moved to Italy because of the father's profession , who worked there for a large trading company based in Genoa . He later became Consul General of Greece. At the age of 13, Emmanouil Roidis returned to his native Ermoupoli, where he later studied at the American-Greek Lyceum together with the later writer and first President of the International Olympic Committee Dimitrios Vikelas . Together they published the weekly handwritten newspaper Μέλισσα (Mélissa = bee). In 1855 he completed his studies and moved to Berlin to have the hearing loss that he suffered from throughout his life. During this time he devoted himself to in-depth literary and philosophical studies. After a year he moved to Iași , where he took over the correspondence of his uncle Dimitrios Rodokanakis, a trader based in Romania . There he also began to work on the translation of the Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem from Chateaubriand into Greek . He finally published the completed translation in Athens in 1860. He later followed his parents to Egypt and stayed there until his father's death. In 1862 he moved with his mother to Athens , where he finally settled. He decided to stop running his father's trading business and instead concentrate on writing.

In 1866 he finished his first novel, Πάπισσα Ιωάννα ( Popess Joan ), a satire on the clergy of the Western Church in the Middle Ages . In the following years he worked alongside his literary work for various French-language newspapers.

From January 1875, together with the cartoonist Themos Anninos, he published the weekly satirical magazine Ασμοδαίος , which he used for his criticism of current public and political life in Greece. In 1877 he got into an argument with the politician and writer Angelos Vlachos . The reason for this was an essay Roidis' entitled On Contemporary Greek Poetry ( Περὶ Συγχρόνου Ἑλληνικῆς Ποιήσεως ), in which he attacked the excessive romanticism and the literary competitions of the University of Athens .

Roidis was an ardent advocate of the Dimotiki , the Greek vernacular that is now the common language in Greece, but was subordinate to Katharevousa in his time . He himself wrote his works in Katharevousa, but advocated the use of the popular language Dimotiki in literature in several linguistic essays (but also in the prologue of the translation of Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem Chateaubriands). He saw the bilingualism in Greece at that time as a national disaster, for which he primarily blamed educated circles.

Between 1890 and 1900 he published the majority of his stories. Until his death he continued to work with numerous literary magazines and newspapers.

Works

Novels

• H Πάπισσα Ιωάννα (I Papissa Ioanna). 1866.
  • The Popess Joan. Your real story. Bastei-Lübbe, Bergisch Gladbach 2000, ISBN 3-404-14446-5 .
• Letters from an Agriniote. 1866.

stories

• The husband finds out last. Stories. Edited by Andrea Schellinger . From modern Greek by Gerhard Blümlein and Sigrid Willer . With an afterword by Tilman Spengler . Manesse, Zurich 2010, ISBN 978-3-7175-2198-3 .

swell

• The content of this article is based in its original form on the article on the Greek-language Wikipedia ( Εμμανουήλ Ροΐδης ) in the version dated June 29, 2006. The corresponding source literature is cited there.

Web links

• Literature by and about Emmanouil Roidis in the catalog of the German National Library

Footnotes

1. ↑ Hans-Joachim Simm: Fly love. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . August 27, 2010, p. 32 ( PDF; 165 kB ( Memento of the original from August 30, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove them Note. )