«Κελαδήματα» by Tianyi Liu (MSt. Modern Languages 2023/24)

For my History of the Book project in Hilary term 2024, I worked on an early 20th century Modern Greek poem called «κελαδήματα» [Birdsongs]. It was published in 1919 in the Greek journal «Ο λόγος», a physical copy of which is available in the Greek Reading Room of the Taylor Institution Library. Because of the poor quality of paper and inking problems of the post-war years, the journal is fragile and making its content digitally available is a way to bring the poem “Birdsongs” back to life.

My project was divided into transcription of the source text, translation from Modern Greek into English, French and Chinese and the encoding part. With the help of Prof. Kostas Skordyles, I transcribed the poem including the historic spelling with diacritical marks and corrected spelling errors in the source text.

To increase the accessibility of the poem, I provided multilingual translations. With the help of Kostas, I firstly translated it into English, and then sent the English translation to my friend Ausra for a French translation which was proofread by Kostas. Meanwhile, I translated it into Chinese and asked my Chinese classmates to improve the translation.

The English translation

The French translation

The Chinese translation

The original text and all three translation were encoded according to TEI standards, using XML encoding, following the Digital Editions course by Emma Huber. It was a really fun experience to learn a little bit about encoding and I also showed it to my friends who are studying computer science.

The digital version of both the source text and translations can now be viewed online on the Taylor Edition website https://editions.mml.ox.ac.uk/editions/keladimata/. It gives me a huge satisfaction to see what I have done being published and to have woken the Greek poem from its library sleep.