Landscapes/language-scapes: the amphilogicalities of vision. Starting with the Greek-Australian literature but not being limited by it.

Abstract

This paper examines various imaginative translations of the Australian, in particular, landscape through its verbal re-configurations in contemporary prose, poetry and autobiographical literature. Contemporary recognised Greek writers, like Antigone Kefala, S. Tsaloumas, Dim. Tzoumakas, S.S. Charkianakis and prose writers, known or unknown, like Katerina Kizilos or Olga Alfa, struggle with the process of re-framing and re-inventing the strange and alien landscape of Oceania into the familiar forms and the symbolic recognition that poetic language allows them to articulate. Vision and the other senses foreground the irregularities and the tribulations of such process; how can the sensory and the empirical become the ambiguous or polysemous significations of the poetic text? How can language shelter a vision of being which is beyond its capacity to transfix the ultimate meaning of such forms? Is it possible that the landscape which becomes a language-scape is, in the poetic world, a language-escape? Can language designate the ultimate fear and trembling in front of the mysterious natural flow which we encounter when look at the great unknown continents of our inner Australia?