Dialect

Yesterday

Robert Chandler

Return of the war-weary: Gjak, by Dimosthenis Papamarkos, reviewed

The Second Greco-Turkish War (1919-22) ended catastrophically for Greece and led to a massive population exchange: аt least 1.2 million Orthodox Christians were expelled from Turkey and around 400,000 Muslims from Greece. Gjak: Tales in Blood, a collection of short stories published in Greece in 2014, shows us the aftereffects of this war as experienced by the inhabitants of a small village north of Athens. The word gjak has a broad range of meaning: blood, bloodline or blood feud. Each story is a monologue by a returned soldier, spoken in heavy dialect with a sprinkling of Albanian. Dimosthenis Papamarkos shows us the difficulty of these soldiers’ homecoming with great subtlety. All have been traumatised, but this manifests itself in often unexpected ways.

Wednesday

Barnaby Rogerson

Waging war through poetry

From our US edition

Poetry is politics in the Yemen. When the last imam of Yemen, who was also the hereditary ruler, was deposed in a coup in 1962, it was a local poet who announced the change of regime on the radio, in verse of course. And the current al-Houthi regime in the north of the country, like all its predecessors, asserts its legitimacy, confounds its enemies and rallies its supporters through poetry. As an aspect of their cause, they have consciously avoided high-Arabic poetry — a literate, urban cultural form — and have made use of the zamil tradition, which immediately speaks not of the palaces of emirs and princes, but takes the listener to sit beside the farmers and Bedouin shepherds in the villages and hills.

poetry