Dear list members,
This is a reminder for the lecture by Dimitra Amarantidou (Shandong) on
“Dao in Greek Soil: Seferis's Translation and Transplantation of the Daodejing’s 道德經 Imagery of Growth”. The lecture will take place online on Thursday 2 July.
Please note that this lecture will exceptionally take place at 07.00 New York / 12.00 London / 14.00 Athens / 19.00 Beijing / 20.00 Tokyo.
Abstract
What happens when Dao 道 is transplanted into Greek soil? This talk approaches Giorgos Seferis’s (1900–1971) unpublished Greek translation of the Daodejing 道德經 or Laozi 老子as the site of a transcultural encounter between two distinct philosophical and poetic
worlds. It explores how Chinese and Greek philosophical vocabularies interact, negotiate, and reshape one another. At the centre of this encounter lies the Daodejing’s understanding of sheng 生—not simply as biological life or growth, but as an immanent process
of emergence through which Dao 道 and the myriad things (wanwu 萬物), including humans, animals, and plants, continuously unfold together. Focusing particularly on Chapter 4 and related chapters, I examine how this generative vision is rendered into Modern Greek
through Seferis’s translation and how his Heraclitean philosophical inheritance informs that process.
Michael Konaris
Research Centre for Greek and Latin Literature
Academy of Athens