The Swedish writer recreates the life of Timandra, the lover of Alcibiades, who philosophized with Socrates or Euripides. She returned to Greek, her mother tongue, after writing in it for half a century in the Scandinavian language.
2,500 years ago, the most brilliant and powerful minds of Athens passed through Timandra’s bed and house. Of legendary beauty, this courtesan lay with Alcibiades and philosophized with Socrates and Euripides. “She was not a prostitute, as we understand this term today,” says Theodor Kallifatides, the Swedish writer of Greek origin, born 84 years ago in Molaoi, in the Peloponnese, and who has recreated the life of this highly regarded hetaira in ‘ Timandra’ (Gutenberg Galaxy).
«Since the dawn of time there have been women and men who did with their bodies what they wanted. They were called servants of Aphrodite, but they do not coincide with what a prostitute would be. Timandra, she would be a kind of ‘geisha’ that she chooses with whom she shares her body », explains Kallifatides.
“She was highly respected, like Aspasia. He was at the center of Athenian life and had a lucid relationship with power”, he says of a character who lived through the heat of the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, and who went down in history for being, as historical sources indicate , “the splendid ether that lived with the hero Alcibiades, covered his corpse with his dress and collected his ashes.”
Two and a half millennia later Kallifatides believes that “prostitution is horrible.” “The word itself contains a concept of abuse that justifies something that you know is wrong, but that enables some people to do with a woman, or with a man, what they don’t want you to do,” says the writer. “Prostitution is, in essence, an abuse of the weak, and throughout history power has used the weakest, who always suffer, at will,” he adds.
Kallifatides assures that it has been “a real challenge to write as a woman”. “Especially when she talked about her breasts and her sensations,” explains the narrator with a laugh, who got into the skin of the character “to unravel her life, her desire and his absence.” For him, Timandra “is the paradigm of the dream of freedom, of how to reach the most intimate truth, which is nothing more than being who you are.” “Intelligent, active, interested in philosophy and politics, Timandra is today a model for a demanding citizen,” he says.
Writing about such a rich character was liberating. “With Timandra I discovered my gender and unloaded all the machismo that men carry in our backpacks,” he confesses.
global phenomenon
In just five years Theodor Kallifatides has become a literary phenomenon, and not only in Spain. The author of more than forty books of fiction, essays and poetry, he emigrated to Sweden when he was 26 years old and adopted the Scandinavian language as his literary language. He wrote for fifty years in Swedish and, in his seventies, returned to Greek and began to write his books, many autobiographical, in his ‘buried’ mother tongue.
“I left my country and I abandoned my language, a language that I did not trust, in which democracy could mean dictatorship and the word justice had lost all its meaning,” explains Kallifatides about his linguistic migration. “Writing in Swedish brought me closer to my ideas and feelings: it was quite a liberation,” confesses the narrator, who learned his adopted language “on the street.”
Since that unusual return, he has achieved worldwide success with autobiographical works such as ‘Another life to live’, ‘Mothers and children’ or ‘The past is not a dream’, or his versions of the myths of classical Greece, such as ‘The Siege of Troy’.
He considers his literary career “completed”, but his Spanish readership continues to grow to the satisfaction of his publishers, who rescue his work at a rate of two titles a year. “I can’t write anymore. I am old and tired, although it is possible that I will write something of value, since in recent years I have only written tweets, articles and stories”, says again with irony a prolific author who started publishing poems in Swedish “by accident”.
Also a translator, Kallifatides has translated Ingmar Bergman and August Strindberg from Swedish into Greek, and Giannis Ritsos or Mikis Theodorakis from Greek into Swedish. Winner of the Greek National Prize for Testimonial Literature for ‘The past is not a dream’ and the Cálamo in Spain, for ‘Another life to live’, he has just received the Gutun Zuria in Bilbao.
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