Sotiris CHalikias

Sotiris Chalikias was born in 1947 in Lefkada, where he completed high school. He then studied Architecture in Athens and Urban Planning in Paris. For twenty-five years, he worked as a translator at the Economic and Social Committee (ESC), one of the institutions of the European Union. He currently resides in Brussels, having traveled and lived in various other countries in the meantime. He completed the language course cycle at the School of the Belgium-China Friendship Association, which began in 1989, and is one of the few Greeks who know ancient Chinese. The primary aim of his translation work has been to render certain fundamental texts of the Chinese intellectual tradition, or Chinese literature, into Greek. This endeavor has so far included the books (with the necessary introduction and interpretative comments): "The Analects" of Confucius (2001), "The Book of Mencius" (Meng Zi, 2006), "The Great Learning" of Confucius (2010), "The Doctrine of the Mean" of Confucius (2010), "The True Text of the Perfect Emptiness" (Lie Zi, 2016). In a parallel effort to understand both the historical trajectory and the social reality of contemporary China, he also translated two collections of short stories by modern Chinese authors, "Call to Arms" by Lu Xun (2003) and "The Sun Shines Over the Sanggan River" by Chi Li (2015). As an author, he published the essay "Tradition and Modernity in China" (2013), the novel "Before and After the Walls" (2008), two collections of short prose ("Neither Greek Nor Foreigner," 2006, "Memoranda," 2012), a collection of short stories ("Returns," 1998), a travelogue ("On the Silk Road," 2004), and, more recently, the essay "The Debacle of Politics" (2017). All his books have been published and are available from Indiktos Publications. In 2008, he was a member of the Greek delegation at the Beijing International Book Fair, with Greece as the honored country. His speech, as part of the related events, focused on the correlation between the paths followed by the Greek and Chinese languages. In 2011, he was a member of the group of Greek authors invited by the Chinese Writers Association in Beijing, where he presented a paper on "The Specific Translation Challenges of Rendering Chinese Texts into Greek." His articles have been published in newspapers and magazines.