De Gentse romans van Nikos Kachtitsis

In his novels The Balcony (1964) and The Hero of Ghent (1967), the Montréal based Greek author develops the character of Stoppakios Papenguss, an upperclass citizen of Belle Epoque Ghent, which is the centre of Kachtitsis’s private mythology. In the introduction I propose an analysis of what may be called Kachtitsis’s ‘Ghent diptych’, and an interpretation of the author’s Ghent mythology. This introduction is followed by a translation of the Notification and the first two chapters of The Hero of Ghent into the purported original language, Dutch (‘Flemish’). In this way, Kachtitsis’s literary game is completed in the sense that this translation becomes in fact the now lost original manuscript which was purportedly translated into Greek by the author’s friend, Realos Deloriés.