Nebojsa Todorovic, Yale University
Two conceptual territories bracket Europe’s imaginary geography: Greco-Roman Antiquity and the modern Balkans. According to Artemis Leontis, an “abstract principle of territorial identification” ties the political and cultural life of both modern Hellas and Western Europe to ancient Greek civilization. Rome has similarly been at the center of “a long and ongoing tradition of appropriating classical history and literature” to foster imperialist “narrative[s] of the exceptional progress” (Barnard). In comparison, the space of the Balkans seems peripheral to the project of European identity. Livy and Herodotus already described the inhabitants of Paeonia and Illyria (regions roughly corresponding to contemporary Balkans) as turbulent savages living on the edges of their world, seafaring people with a reputation for piracy. In more recent years, the erasure of the Balkans from the European geocultural map was exacerbated by the poor understanding of the “U.S.-led West” (Longinović) of the violent breakup of the Yugoslavia (1992-2003).
In this paper, I propose that Yugoslavia (and the Balkans more generally) stands simultaneously outside an imagined “West” and neatly enclosed inside of it, flanked as it is by Italy to the northwest and Greece to the southeast. The erstwhile federation of Yugoslavia and its disintegration represent a fraught object of European identification whose vector runs counter to a notional geo-cultural continuity with ancient Greece rooted in the neo-Hellenizing narratives of the Western imagination—i.e., the Hellenisms of Northern and Western Europe and the “North Atlantic.” My argument focuses on a selection of mostly unpublished plays by Italian, Yugoslav, and Greek playwrights who turned to plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides in order to narrate and work through the violent disruption of former Yugoslavia.
The goal of this paper is twofold. One the one hand, I am eager to present this growing archive of “balkan(izing)” adaptations to classicists interested in the reception of the ancient Greek tradition in contexts of political urgency, forced displacement, and historical trauma. In recent years, several scholars have troubled the imagined space occupied in “Western” society by Greco-Roman antiquity and the epistemological gaze through which ancient Athens and Rome have been approached for decades in the academy. This archive challenges the fantasy that Greece and Rome are the birthplace of everything that is civilized about the Western world from a unique perspective insofar as it puts into focus the supposedly “no man’s land” connecting the Greek and the Italic peninsulas.
One the other hand, offering a bird-eye view of these adaptations’ titles, performance contexts, and themes functions as a springboard for establishing a dialogue between ancient texts and contemporary plays that collapses old models of centers and peripheries; rethinks the debate around community, identity, and trauma in a postcolonial/Third-Worldist framework; and advances a theory and practice of translation. In so doing, this dialogue materializes a wider frame of reference, one that transcends the geohistorical context of the wider Balkans and engages the epistemological perspectives of communities around the world experiencing today what former Yugoslavia suffered thirty years ago.