Abstract

Recent years have brought about a rise in gothic subcultures, a revisiting of older fiction with diverse elements, an increase in classic gothic fiction studies and an interest in the analysis of its elements. One of the less researched novels, in Greece, is Carmilla (1872) by Irish writer Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, which involves elements of gothic horror and queer sexuality. This study analyses two target versions of the novel that are around thirty years apart (1986 and 2015). It examines how translation has handled the gothic and queer elements over time. Greek respondents confirm that the latest version tends to focus on the psychological and more violent aspects of the self, whereas the first one highlights the supernatural element and is generally less threatening. Likewise, the latest version highlights queerness where the earlier arouses a much friendlier connotation between female protagonists. The significance of the research lies in that the study on Carmilla demonstrates a gap in horror studies in terms of its reception as a genre in the Greek context and its exploration of queer sexuality. Furthermore, the research highlights how societal values impact translation practice with respect to certain themes and become reflective of their eras. Last but not least, the study leaves space for further work on psychological elements in target versions, which signal a shift in perspective.

Keywords: horror, queerness, Carmilla, psychological aspects of self, lesbian readings in translation

1. Introduction

With the emerging love for classic gothic fiction that mixes the horrific, the romantic, the religious and the psychological, lesser-known literature of the Georgian and Victorian period is gaining recognition and is being more and more analysed in its themes, its language and its values. One such story that should receive more attention is Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. A gothic vampire tale pre-dating Dracula, a story full of darkness and passion and the spikes of old mansions and churches (Haefele-Thomas 2012, Dobson 2014), Carmilla is a sensation, and yet still not as known as it should be by audiences that are just dipping their toes in horror literature, especially of the 19^th century.

Many literary critics have spoken of the multitude of themes Carmilla embodies. In his ‘Gothic Literature’ book, Smith (2007) writes that Carmilla was a theme of the double exploring themes of lesbianism and sexual discovery, as well as self-identification and loneliness. Laura is away from her mother, and lives isolated with her father, with barely any chance to connect with people of her age. To her, Carmilla is both dangerous and attractive, the promise of something but also the recognition of her own desires. Furthermore, as Russett (2007) claims in her ‘Recent Studies in the Nineteenth Century’, Carmilla is also an interesting trichotomy of the sacred, the scary and the desirable. There’s a sense of identity conflict in terms of nationality in the book, as Laura grows up in Styria, Austria, but is of English descent. Laura is trying to find herself in more ways than one, and this psychological turmoil is visible in the story. This makes the enigmatic figure of Carmilla seem like an oasis in a world of darkness, but also creates problems that Laura could never imagine, as Carmilla is a vampire bound on seducing young females and then killing them by repeatedly feeding on their blood.

Bleiler (1963), editor and critic of science fiction and fantasy works, suggested that Le Fanu’s obsession with folktales and urban legends, like the one of the vampire, is exactly a product of Le Fanu’s own sentiments in dealing with his suffering country, Ireland, that is stuck in the past, as well as England, the big coloniser, who is stuck in the present and develops an ever growing nationalism. Le Fanu, as Bleiler (ibid) claims, wanted to experiment with the abject theme, the things that people feared or refused to directly acknowledge in the era, like death, darkness, psychological collapse and female sexuality. Carmilla contains all of these themes, which is why it is a work of importance and influence on a lot of modern horror, and especially the rising notion of queer horror, exploring sexuality in a world that might not be as accepting, and the various metaphors that this can create, like the seductive but cold vampire, or the youthful and monstrously angry werewolf. Vampire horror, after all, was diachronically a way for multiple authors to experiment and explore the theme of desire and sexuality, from Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula’ (1897) and his multiple brides, to Anne Rice and her metaphors for gay intimacy and sexual intercourse in Interview with the Vampire (1976). At the end of the story, patriarchal order is reestablished: “when Carmilla is stabbed in the heart with a stake, the violent reassertion of patriarchal order is set in place with her death. The stake is phallic shaped and confirms heterosexuality as the dominant and morally correct sexuality” (Little 2020: 73). Carmilla, as a lesbian vampire, is a story that gives “a voice to those who will never desire to live inside the normal” (Nagle 2021: 74). It demonstrates both the terrible price to pay for being different sexually, challenging conventions, and the necessity of those challenges” (Wisker 2017: 123).

A question that arises is how much of that vampiric history has passed to the translation of Carmilla in Greek. To study the elements of horror and sexuality in the Greek context, the research employs two Greek versions of the novel, by Eleni Athanasopoulou 1986 and by Anastasis Karakotsoglou 2015. The study analyzes various shifts in the target versions, and thoroughly discusses and assesses the different ways in which horror and queer implications are portrayed, separately and in combination.

2. Literature review

Since its early birth in the 1764s with Walpole’s ‘Castle of Otranto’, the gothic genre encompassed human anxieties about what lurks in the darkness of the outside and the inside, as well as people’s darkest thoughts and desires. Connected to the abject, the psychological repulsion and at the same time fascination with horror, as it bloomed from the gothic, turned into a genre that encompassed everything, from monsters to killers to ghosts to passion and emotions that subverted the norms.

Carmilla is a wonderful mixture of gothic horror and monster horror, specifically the vampire tales that started to emerge in the Victorian and pre-Victorian era, as they gave authors the chance to experiment with concepts that would have seemed inappropriate at the time, such as death and sexuality. As Castle (2006) suggests in the multi-authored analytical anthology of horror, ‘On Writing Horror’, vampiric tales often are metaphors for sexuality and sexual exploration, due to the erotic nature of the vampire’s powers, such as blood-sucking, warmth-stealing, mesmerism/seduction and the act of biting on its own. Furthermore, the vampire itself serves as a figure of not only eroticism, but also death, as it stands between the living and the dead with the grotesque life-energy that it steals from others. Very often, for this reason, vampires are ugly and horrid underneath their charm, and Carmilla is no exception to these rules.

Russet (2007) explained that Laura is both fascinated and scared of Carmilla, who has two faces, one passionate and one murderous. Jönsson (2006) furthers this claim and adds the way Victorians saw the female body in general, both with curiosity, attraction and revulsion. These allusions could go as far as saying that they saw the feminine body as vampiric; pale, delicate and associated with blood.

Another theme is the presence of queer sexuality in the Gothic and horror traditions (Jeffrey 2022). Queerness and the LGBTQ+ community were presented as villainous in horror stories for at least two centuries (from Carmilla and ‘Christabel’ to ‘Norman Bates’, ‘Buffalo Bill’ and various cartoon villains), horror was also a safe space for the queer community to explore what it meant to be trapped in a dangerous, unfriendly world, as well as a way for them to experiment with sexuality. Laura’s feelings of equal attraction and repulsion are more possible to arise from internalized homophobia and the fear of being a woman attracted to women in a society that puts women as second-class citizens and sees lesbian sexuality as a crime, rather than from an inner understanding of Carmilla’s demonic nature. After all, as Snodgrass (2005) writes in her ‘Encyclopedia of Gothic Fiction’, the vampiric legend created anxieties about fluid gender and transgressive sexuality, as in Le Fanu’s version, vampires are genderless. Moreover, Carmilla herself, along with Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’ (1797-1800) introduced to the public the subject of the “feminine demon” who prefers to have women as victims, rather than men.

While the queer sexuality in Carmilla was well-hidden, and while Le Fanu himself didn’t intend for the story to be seen as an example of early queer awakenings and mostly focused on the horror, the work displays intense platonic, romantic and sexual feelings on Laura’s part, as well as well-placed innuendos from Carmilla such as “you will die”, which is a pun on sexual climax as Snodgrass (ibid) mentions. Carmilla’s stalking of Laura intensifies both the horror and the queer, as it adds to the story elements of both threat and voyeurism.

The study examines how translators have handled implicatures of both horror and queer sexuality in the Greek versions. Implicatures highlight parts of speaker attitudes that are not explicitly stated (Brown and Levinson 1978). Carmilla as a work of horror and queer sexuality contains multiple implicatures, and more specifically threats and violent vocabulary to enhance the loss of safety, privacy invasion and intimacy markers to demonstrate the bond between Laura and Carmilla. While there have been recent studies studying its horror and queer elements, translations have not yet been examined as to how these themes and the power dynamics between the protagonists have been transferred.

The study analyses implicatures in two target versions and what effect they create with respect to the horror and queer sexuality themes.

3. Methodology

After the etic analysis, the study designed a questionnaire to select lay people’s views on what is implicated in the target versions (see Appendix). It asks respondents to say what implicatures they calculate to unveil nuances in power dynamics and themes crucial for understanding societal attitudes towards horror and queer sexuality.

The etic analysis (section 4) is divided in two parts, one of them related to the study of the horror elements in the two target versions and another one related to the study of queer sexuality, including multimodal data (images). Some of the examples analyzed in the etic analysis were also used in the questionnaire. It asked participants to anonymously assess passages from 1 to 5 (from least to most scary and least to most intimate). Then the questionnaire gave respondents the covers of the two publications and asked them to interpret the covers, in terms of the horror and lesbian love/queerness implications they conveyed and why.

Respondents were bilingual or trilingual and had a perfect knowledge of both the Greek and the English language. Their ages varied, but they were all translation postgraduate students of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. The study distributed the questionnaire online, through the Google Forms platform, and gathered the results to be analyzed in the next section. Information on how the participants would proceed appeared with the questionnaire, and respondents were vaguely familiarized with the theme, before they took the questionnaire. The questions were simple and presented in Greek.

Questionnaire results are presented in section 5, below.

4. Data analysis

The section presents an etic analysis of 1986 and 2015 fragment pairs (transl. Elena Athanasopoulou and Athanasios Karakotsoglou, respectively), along the corresponding source text fragment.

4.1 Horror and threat

Example 1

Laura is sitting with her two governesses outside, and the governess shares a ghost story in the light of the full moon. They observe the old schloss of the Karnstein family.

TTb item απόκοσμοι (uncanny) is more threatening and spectral, and involves subtextual horror, than νεραϊδένιοι (fairy), which is magical and inhuman, but not necessarily menacing. The author of the story is Irish, and in Celtic myths, fairies did play a more threatening and otherwordly role, which is probably what the 2015 translator was trying to compensate for.

In example 2, Laura explains how she feels about the house after the horrid experience of waking up in the night and seeing a mysterious feminine form gazing upon her.

TTb is more threatening, more adept to the notions of today’s horror. TTa ‘oπτασία’ (apparition), implies something imagined, a hallucination, while TTb ‘παρουσία’ (presence) assumes something that might not be clearly seen, but certainly exists and is more threatening. In particular, TTa ‘οπτασία’ (apparition) had more than half of the participants (52 percent) give it a ‘2’ on the scale of horror, which means that they didn’t find it particularly horrifying, while TTb item ‘παρουσία’ (presence) seems to carry stronger horror connotations, as readers split between a ‘3’ and a ‘4’.

In example 3, Laura wakes up abruptly in the middle of the night, encased in darkness, until a light appears and she notices something extremely disturbing.

Οnce more, TTb opts for a more threatening effect, one that alludes to horror imagery and evokes an implication of murder. TTa item ‘great stain of blood’ could possibly allude both to murder and to menstruation or something other than murder.

In example 4, Laura explains what the villagers saw Carmilla do, on the days when Laura and her father thought she had gone missing.

TTb item ‘καταληψία’ (catalepsy) is more scientific and possibly a heavier condition, while TTa ‘υπνωτισμένη’ (in a trance) keeps the fairytale approach to the story. TTb item ‘catalepsy’ realizes the ‘enduring evil’ (Lee 2006) which vampires are expected to bring with them.

In example 5, the General refers to Carmilla, whose vampire identity he figured out, as his daughter died because of her. He wants to murder her.

Likewise, TTb item ‘κόψω’ (cut off) is more violent and gory than TTa ‘πάρω’ (get) to appease today’s audience which loves blood more. Threat is clearer in TTb as ‘κοψω’ (cut) is more descriptive of the act.

In example 6, a woodcutter who worked in the village, where the Karnsteins (Carmilla’s family) were buried, claims that the village was abandoned because revenants ravaged it.

The myth of ‘revenants’ (animated corpses that have unfinished business in the living world and come back to haunt it) has had various renditions in Greek over the centuries, e.g., φάντασμα (ghost), αερικό (wraith) etc. TTb item βρικόλακες (vampires) connotes violence and blood, as vampires are associated with blood-drinking, and are thus more openly violent than φαντάσματα (ghosts) which only alludes to haunting.

Occasionally counterexamples do appear, as shown in example 7: Laura is sitting with her two governesses outside, and the governess shares this ghost story in the light of the full moon. Example 7 is a counter example, in that the horror gloss is stronger in TTa.

TTa gives the story a dark fairytale quality. The old woman alludes to tales people constructed to explain sleep paralysis, and the fairytale figure of the ‘hag’; sleep paralysis often manifests as hallucinations that take the form of shadows or old people with malicious intents. TTb gives the distorted characteri­stics to the old woman, not to the cousin. The majority of the participants considered TTa scarier because the dream interacts with the character’s reality. TTb is lighter and more psychological, as the character never forgets her chilling form, which only harmed him in his sleep but influenced his behaviour in real life.

Results show that TTb seems scarier and more psychological; because psychological horror flourished in the 21^st century, while the 20^th century rather focused on supernatural horror and the rise of monster horror. Participants agreed that TTb is scarier, except in example 7.

4.2 Intimacy and female sexuality

The section examines connotations arising from translator options, which paint the sexuality of Carmilla and Laura. Section 4.2.1 focuses on vampiric aspects of Carmilla’s behaviour, neutralizing Laura’s passion, section 4.2.2 rather highlights Laura’s erotic feelings and tones down Carmilla’s passion. As suggested the novella encompasses ‘erotic horror’ (Kilpatrick 2005).

4.2.1 Carmilla’s vampiric behaviour

In example 8, Carmilla says ‘good night’ to Laura before sleep on the first day she stays with Laura’s family.

TTa ‘αγάπη μου’ (my love) is again more charged with intimacy than TTb ‘καλή μου’ (darling) manifesting Carmilla’s intention to establish a closer relationship than TTb does, perhaps as a result of her vampirism, and not as a result of real feelings.

In example 9, Carmilla looks at Laura and talks about her emotions towards her, manifesting one of Carmilla’s occasional bursts of passion followed by periods of apathy, a symptom of her vampirism. TTb ‘με ζωηρότητα’ (with vigour) is less indicative of the special interest Carmilla has had in Laura.

TTb item ‘με ζωηρότητα’ (with vigour) is less charged with intimacy than the TTa item ‘με πάθος’ (full of passion), suggesting that Carmilla’s feelings are also blooming in the 1986 target version (TTa).

In example 10, Carmilla is experiencing one of her ‘fits of passion’, where Laura is scared of her own feelings for her.

TTa item ‘βίαιοι στεναγμοί’ (violent sighs) seems to anticipate Carmilla’s violent intentions towards Laura, while the TTb ‘αλλεπάλληλοι αναστεναγμοί’ (tumultuous sighs) may only allow erotic connotations.

In example 11, Laura describes Carmilla’s feelings.

TΤa item ‘λάγνα λατρεία’ (lustful adoration) assumes intimacy vs. TTb ‘αποχαύνωση’ (stupor) which does not and may signal unrequited sentiment on the part of Laura. The next section suggests that if TTa highlights the intimate feelings Carmilla has for Laura, TTb heightents awareness of lesbian attraction on the part of Laura.

4.2.2 Laura’s erotic feelings

In example 12, Laura describes Carmilla

The TTa item ‘χαριτωμένα’ (cute) alludes more to an attraction that is aesthetic in nature, meaning that Laura simply admires Carmilla’s beauty. The TTb item ‘γοητευτικά’ (mesmerisingly beautiful) is more often associated with romantic elements, and also creates an allusion to vampiric hypnotism, which is often translated as ‘γοητεία’ (mesmerism) in various texts of the fantasy genre. Τhe participants agreed that TTb ‘γοητευτικά όμορφα’ (mesmerisingly pretty) is more intimate, as the majority gave ‘3’ on the intimacy scale to the 1986 item (TTa) but ‘4’ to the 2015 one (TTb).

In example 13, Laura and Carmilla are spending time together. Laura describes how she played with Carmilla’s hair.

TTb is more erotic with item ‘έχωνα’ (Ι was shoving my hands in her hair) than TTa ‘I put my hands under her hair’; it could very well be a product of the 21^st century, where openness to LGBTQ+ identities is much more common. The participants of the questionnaire agree that the 2015 TTb item is more intimate than the 1986 TTa one, as they gave ‘4’ to TTb and ‘3’ to TTa.

In example 14, Laura and Carmilla are spending time together.

The same goes for example 14, as the intimacy is stronger in TTb, with χαϊδεύω (stroke). The questionnaire participants gave a ‘3’ to TTa and a ‘5’ to TTb.

In example 15, Laura wakes up in the middle of the night, to see a female figure gazing at her.

Τhe TTa item ‘γυναικεία σιλουέτα’ (woman’s silhouette) assumes a solid shape, usually black, with its edges matching the outline of the subject. TTb item ‘θηλυκή μορφή’ (feminine figure) assumes a more profound awareness of a feminine presence, no matter its shape and what can be experienced visually, more explicitly implicating Laura’s potentially lesbian attraction to Carmilla. Once more, it seems that TTb enhances a lesbian love implication more clearly on Laura’s part, as the era assumes a more tolerating audience.

Evidently, a sexual attraction implication on Carmilla’s part does exist in TTa, as well, but it is heightened in TTb. By contrast, TTb keeps Carmilla’s feelings barely intimate, with occasional fits of passion in TTa stemming from her vampirism and her need for rejuvenation after drinking Laura’s blood, which keeps the story closer to a gothic fairytale and a tale of horror, enhancing the supernatural. TTb, by contrast, addresses people who are used to horror and are not prejudiced against queer sexuality; it builds a blooming relationship between Laura and Carmilla, while TTb Laura’s love is rather unrequited.

The covers of the two target versions seem particularly indicative of the intended narrative, prevailing in the two target publications. The TTa publication highlights the supernatural vs. the TTb cover which favours sexuality, although some questionnaire respondents commented that TTb evokes horror, too, due to the dripping red letters on the cover, as well as the queer due to the feminine cupid figure that possibly evoked the implication of female love in the story.

5. Questionnaire and results

The questionnaire implements the emic perspective (revealing lay people’s view on conveyed implications and as suggested, it was created on Google Forms and addressed 16 respondents. It selected examples from the analysis and asked respondents’ judgement questions to be answered on the basis of their intuition in Greek. The intention was to check the validity of the etic approach to the data, as presented in the analysis section. The intention was to selectively check six example pairs with lay person’s views; respondents were translation postgraduate students of the Department of English Language and Literature, who were not familiar with the research conducted. The final questions dealt with the book covers. It presented the book covers of the two publications and asked respondents to describe the implications following from the design and picture of each book cover, with respect to the themes discussed in this study.

To measure acknowledgement of the horror implication, the questionnaire asked which member of a pair of fragments was scarier and threatening to the reader, on a scale from 1 to 5, where 1 was the ‘least scary’ and 5 the ‘scariest’ of all. The examples were retrieved from the data analysis and appear in Greek, in the following figures. This was because respondents did not need a backtranslation.

The first question of the questionnaire dealt with question 2 of the analysis, which describes a feeling of terror in the context of the story described by the ST fragment, ‘It [terror] seemed to deepen by time, and communicated itself to the room and the very furniture that had encompassed the apparition’. The questionnaire asked respondents which rendition of ST item ‘apparition’ was scarier and threatening. Most respondents favoured TTb, which reveals that the ghastly form Laura saw was not a figment of her imagination causing an unsettling feeling, but some kind of a ‘horrifying presence’. In Figure 1, this is manifested by the higher columns on the right (version b).

Figure 1. Example 2 results

Question 2 of the questionnaire dealt with example 3 of the analysis, where Laura wakes up abruptly in the middle of the night and sees Carmilla in blood. The question asked which version presented a scarier description of Carmilla. Results show that the scarier description seems to appear in version (b).

Figure 2. Example 3 results

As suggested in the analysis of example 3, the second version was scarier. The figure shows that more respondents considered the second version (TTb) scarier, as displayed by the right-hand columns of the second fragment pair.

Example 7 of the analysis was a counter example: the horrifying member was the first fragment. The distribution of the 16 votes is different in the first fragment, in that more respondents considered the fragment scarier. The measurement shows that respondents’ criterion is accurate enough in distinguishing offensiveness levels.

Figure 3. Example 7 results

Question 4 of the questionnaire examined whether potential readers can sense the sexier connotations following from Laura’s shoving Carmilla’s hair in TTb, as described in example 13 of the analysis. Questionnaire results show that the second fragment pair displays higher right-hand columns, in agreement with the analysis.

Figure 4. Example 13 results

Question 5 of the questionnaire deals with the fragment where Laura caresses Carmilla’s hair, in example 14 of the analysis; the second member of the pair was thought to be creating higher intimacy between them, as displayed by the higher right-hand columns of the second member of the fragment pair in Figure 5, in agreement with the analysis.

Figure 5. Example 14 results

The last question of the questionnaire (on verbal material) dealt with the vampiric connotations prevailing in the Greek TTa version of the novel (as suggested in the analysis of example 10) and asked respondents to assess versions as to the highest erotic connotations they allow. Figure 6 shows that more respondents chose the second (TTb) version, which is manifested by the higher right-hand columns, in agreement with the analysis.

Figure 6. Example 10 results

In part 3 of the questionnaire, the assessment of the multilingual material (the book covers) showed that respondents overwhelmingly acknowledged the sexual connotations of the TTb cover¹.

6. Discussion and significance of research

Findings show that the second target version of the novel (TTb, 2015) is indeed more focused on the themes of horror and queerness. TTb sets a more standard view of horror that is more threatening, to meet the needs of a modern audience. Expressions like ‘cut her head off’, ‘bathed in blood’ ‘state of catalepsy’, ‘uncanny guests’ are much more pronounced than in the earlier version. That improved the make-up of the story, as Carmilla expressed anxieties about the female body and female sexuality, at an early stage (Smith 2007).

The way her vampirism is presented is less mythical and more realistic in the latest version than in the earlier one. The vampire isn’t presented as a dead fantasy creature that is cursed, but as a creature that drinks blood, a demon even, as religious allusions enhance the Gothic feeling of the text. The supernatural doesn’t prevail like in the original and the earlier version, but invades it, furthering the threats. The preference of the participants for the way horror is depicted in the 2015 (TTb) version suggests that the latest version addresses a modern audience, which is more comfortable with horror, blood, gore and butchering.

On the narrative of queerness and queer love, the latest translation again is more descriptive and open to physical and emotional aspects of Laura’s awakening sexuality and makes frequent use of items connoting mesmerising and seduction in order to enhance the representation of both Laura’s feelings for Carmilla but also the idea that Carmilla might be using some form of dark hypnosis on her (Signorotti 1996). The second target version has multiple instances where Laura seems more intimate with Carmilla. While the first target version tries to make Carmilla seem interested in Laura as well, as it is closer to the original, the overall impression is of a much friendlier, deep platonic connection, rather than a romantic and sexual one. The second target version also created more implicatures of queer feelings and LGBTQ+ sexuality and more intimacy markers, and also makes Carmilla’s gender slightly more fluid, exactly because the notions of gender not being binary adhere more to what Le Fanu was trying to suggest by presenting genderless vampires.

The book-cover pictures can illustrate notions of Gothic horror and Gothic romance. The Cupid figure on the earlier version’s book-cover and the bleeding letters betray an attempt of the illustrator to combine blood and love in a way fitting the 1980s but certainly not for today’s audience, which is used to wildly different aesthetics. Instead, the 2015 (TTb) cover shows a beautiful woman in a dark strapless dress in a posture that creates erotic connotations. The background is slightly foggy, uncanny in that it depicts woods growing upside-down. Respondents preferred the modern version, probably because our notion of horror, romance, queerness and Gothic has changed a lot over the forty years, between the publications.

Highlighting the ‘lesbian love’ reading in TTb seems to be an attempt to appeal to modern audiences and perhaps create a similar effect in the present days. Borges de Araújo (2011) analyses a Spanish version of Carmilla and suggests that the lesbian reading is less challenging nowadays: “The lesbian overtones in the story, which were so shockingly perverse and violently opposed to the moral of nineteenth-century society, do not cause the same effect in contemporary times, but rather seem to attract sympathisers” (2011: 198). This is true and perhaps this is why TTb favours Laura’s lesbian love to preserve some of the shock effect of the ST. Laura’s resistance to her father’s ideas “is the threat lesbianism poses to heteronormativity” (Tyler 2017: 11) and TTb seems to enforce the threat to heteronormativity by elaborating on Laura’s lesbian identity. If “vampires in Gothic fiction can be read as marginalized, the ‘Other’, the untouchable, the unwanted, the deviant and the abject in a society” (Uygur 2013: 50), TTb chooses to reshape the assumingly heteronormative (Laura) to heighten awareness of ‘Otherness’ and deviance.

Reception of fiction has changed significantly over the years, in the Greek context. Offensiveness and aggression have heightened in latest versions of fictional texts (Dimitrakakis 2022, Kyriakou 2022, Zacharia 2022) and social values point to diversified societal set-ups which may favour different values both cross-culturally (Vasileiadis 2022) and intra-culturally (Koutsoumpogera 2022). Likewise, in this study, representation of values (e.g., queerness) are represented differently in the latest version and in agreement with contemporary understanding of what may be appealing.

A limitation of the study may be the small number of questionnaire respondents and that only a specific demographic was recorded, although they had a similar profile, that of translation postgraduate students.

The significance of the research lies both in the subject matter and the approach. Greek versions of Carmilla have not been thoroughly examined and the field remains to be broadened and further explored. Furthermore, Carmilla as a story is still quite overlooked, as it is usually overshadowed by Dracula, even as a vampire tale of great importance that very much contributed to the genre. Studies of horror and queer sexuality are very much under-researched, as subjects that are still developing through the recent years and still have lots of unexplored ground where scientists can base future studies.

Studies of horror seem to be a limited field in Greece, which can inform change awareness, in the reception of the genre over the years, now that audiences are more comfortable with violence, gore and monsters. The 2015 (TTb) version utilizes psychological terms, manifesting a rather psychological turn in horror studies. In terms of queer studies, queer linguistics and LGBTQ+ awareness, the Greek society is running behind in comparison to other countries but is more receptive than it was in the past, and leaves the door open for more research of the kind, which will help raise awareness, as well as offer answers to questions in the field.

Open research problems may be the translation of fantastic elements in Greek versions of gothic literature. It seems that both the horror and the queer are two subjects that will continue to draw attention and fascinate scientists. Lindop (2015) for instance analysed “the lesbian/bisexual coupling in noir by exploring how it is depicted in more recent postmillennial texts” (2015: 59), suggesting that Carmilla was a forerunner of the trend whose relationship with the follow-up genres needs to be explored (Nagle 2021).

About the author(s)

Maria Episkopou has a BA in ‘English Language and Literature’ and a MA in ‘English Language, Linguistics and Translation’, Specialization ‘Translation Studies and Interpreting’ from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece. Maria specialises mostly in historical and queer linguistics as well as the translation of folklore, legends, horror and fantasy, and the intersection of culture, society and history in language and translation. This current work is a passion project, since ‘Carmilla’ is considered one of the first gothic vampire novels which opened a tradition of queer representation in horror. Her interest in Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu was motivated by her Erasmus exchange project at Dublin City University in Ireland.

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