Rebetiko > Arghile mou > Hasiklidika Preface

Hasiklidika Rembetika

By Suzanne Aulin & Peter Vejleskov

Preface

This study is based on the work that we submitted in the Department of Modern Greek and Balkan Study of Copenhagen University in January 1989. Our decision to choose the Rebetika Hashish Songs as the subject of our work was influenced by the seminar on the rebetiko song that Ole L. Smith gave in the spring term of 1988. Already when we began, in collaboration with certain advantages, Lisbet Torp and Ole L. Smith, transferred songs that were already written, titled "The Forbidden Rebetika". We continued also however the work of transcription for the final form with which we present here the songs we are solely responsible for.

From the beginning we had shared the work between us: Suzanne Aulin had already written all the songs of caf-Aman and made the analysis of their style and themes. Also she wrote section 4, "Disks". Peter Vejleskov attended to the Pireotika songs and wrote section 3, "About Rebetology". The formal requirements from academic working Copenhagen impose, with regard to collaboration, it appears shared the work. In our case the result was inter alia section 7, "Analysis", which contains a lot of repetitions. Consequently we were forced to re-compose a large part of the text, while we translated it from Danish.

We owe warm thanks to Birgit Olsen for her advice in the subject of recombining and to Sysse Engberg and Sofia Skopetea for the help that they gave us in various stages of the translation. Also we thank Xenofondas A. Kokoli for the corrections and proposals that he so willingly made for us. If the result resembles proper Greek, this is owed to a large extent to Olga Anastasiadou who finally read all our text correcting our linguistic expression. We thank her very much for her friendly help.

In the content of work we only made few corrections and improvements, certain of which Ole L. Smith proposed to us. We added however to the elements that we report for each song of the anthology with regard to the music, which Lisbet Torp recorded for us. (Lisbet Torp is preparing an extensive treatise on the music of rebetiko song). We want on this occasion to express our gratitude to her.

Finally, we warmly thank Ole L. Smith, who oversaw with effervescent interest the initial work and, after he had convinced us that it deserved to see the light of publicity, he watched our work with friendly sympathy.

Introduction

The text above was translated from the Greek in the book, which in turn was translated by the authors from the Danish in which the work was originally written. I freely admit my translation skills are not as good as the results of my translation might make them seem to be.

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