Hortus Semioticus 13 / 2026 — 3

Abstract: Abstract: This study explores the dynamics of intersemiotic translation as a process of cultural mediation, focusing on the role of nostalgic affect in the resemiotisation of literary texts within the contemporary digital environment. According to the Tartu– Moscow School of Semiotics, the text, in its broader semiotic dimension as a communicative and dialogic phenomenon, serves as a vehicle for the mediation of collective cultural memory. Within the framework of everyday cultural communication the past is reactivated through the renewal and reappearance of older cultural texts.

In this context, the article focuses on the adaptation of Days, the diary of Greek Nobel Laureate poet George Seferis, from printed textual form into podcast-based auditory narration. The analysis concentrates on the transfer of informational and affective load from the source text to the target text, with particular emphasis on the semiotic value of the adaptive strategies employed – such as the use of music, sound effects, dramatised readings by actors, extratextual excerpts, and archival materials. The intersemiotic transformation of the historical, temporal, and spatial conditions in the target text is grounded in the synergy of multiple semiotic resources, rendering the exploration of nostalgia as a rhetorical or affective strategy a particularly fertile field for inquiry.

Special emphasis is placed on the podcast as a medium that activates mechanisms of cultural memory and incorporates characteristics of analogue-era listening practices, thereby enhancing the nostalgic disposition of the listener. Finally, the study examines the extent to which the use of a thematically hybrid and digitally accessible medium constitutes an instance of cultural repurposing – functioning not only as a tool for the popularisation and archiving of cultural capital but also as a creative practice of intersemiotic translation within the post-analogue landscape of contemporary cultural production.  

Keywords: intersemiotic translation, nostalgia, George Seferis, podcast, adaptation, transmediality, repurposing

Intersemiootiline tõlge ja emotsionaalne: nostalgia George Seferise teose Days transmeediumilises adaptsioonis podcasti vormis

Abstrakt: Käesolev uurimus käsitleb intersemiootilise tõlke dünaamikat kui kultuurilise vahendamise protsessi, keskendudes nostalgilise tunde rollile kirjandustekstide ülesemiootiseerimisel kaasaegses digitaalkeskkonnas. Tartu–Moskva semiootikakoolkonna järgi on tekst kommunikatiivse ja dialoogilise nähtusena oma laiemas semiootilises mõõtmes kollektiivse kultuurimälu vahendajana. Igapäevase kultuurilise suhtluse raames on täheldatav mineviku taaselustamine, millega kaasneb vanemate kultuuritekstide uuenemine ja nostalgiline taasilmumine.

Käesolev artikkel uurib Kreeka Nobeli preemia laureaadi, luuletaja George Seferise päeviku Days adaptatsiooni trükitekstist taskuhäälingupõhiseks kuuldejutuks. Analüüs keskendub informatsiooni ja afekti ülekandmisele algtekstist sihtteksti, pöörates erilist tähelepanu kasutatud adapteerimise strateegiate semiootilisele väärtusele, näiteks muusika, heliefektide, näitlejate dramatiseeritud lugemise, tekstiväliste lisandite ja arhiivimaterjalide kasutamisele. Sihtteksti ajalooliste, ajaliste ja ruumiliste tingimuste intersemiootiline transformatsioon põhineb mitmete semiootiliste ressursside sünergial, muutes nostalgia uurimise retoorilise või afektiivse strateegiana eriti viljakaks uurimisvaldkonnaks.

Tähelepanu pööratakse ka taskuhäälingule kui meediumile, mis aktiveerib kultuurimälu mehhanisme ja rakendab analoogajastu kuulamispraktikaid, tugevdades seeläbi kuulaja nostalgilist hoiakut. Lõpetuseks vaatleb uurimus, mil määral kujutab temaatiliselt hübriidse ja digitaalselt kättesaadava meediumi kasutamine endast kultuurilise ümberkujundamise juhtumit, toimides mitte ainult kultuurikapitali populariseerimise ja arhiveerimise, vaid ka loomingulise praktika vahendina intersemiootilise tõlkena kaasaegse digitaalse kultuuriloome maastikul.

Märksõnad: intersemiootiline tõlge, nostalgia, George Seferis, taskuhääling, adaptatsioon, transmeedialisus, ümberkujundamine

Introduction

Humans continuously seek signs that the past persists within the present in a renewed form (Lowenthal 1985). The driving force behind this tendency is the bittersweet emotion of nostalgia, a term derived from the ancient Greek words nostos (return) and algos (pain). Semantically, it denotes an intense longing and yearning for a return to one’s homeland, often accompanied by feelings of sadness and melancholy. In general, it reflects a mental state triggered by recalling the past and reminiscing about beloved people or situations. This yearning – or desire to reconnect with the past – has become a central pursuit within the fluid postmodern condition. According to Niemeyer (2014), nostalgia is experienced by individuals or groups as a desire to return to or reconnect with a past time and place, or even an imagined future. From a fondness for vintage furniture, decorative objects, retro clothing, and music of past decades, to the revival of vinyl records, retro aesthetics in video games, reruns of old shows, and the creation of new media with nostalgic aesthetics – or even “before and after” trends on social media – the past seems to colonise the present, playing a central role in today’s cultural and commercial reality.

Unsurprisingly, this phenomenon has attracted the interest of scholars across the humanities. Semiotics plays a key role in decoding and analysing it, as, according to Lagopoulos and Boklund-Lagopoulou (2021), semiotic theory is inherently a tool for uncovering cultural structures, offering a valuable theoretical and methodological framework. Notably, the Tartu–Moscow School of Semiotics regards the text – in its broader semiotic dimension – as a communicative and dialogical phenomenon that mediates collective cultural memory, facilitating the interaction between cultural production and its audience (Torop 2004). Accordingly, by focusing on the preoccupation with the past, heritage, and memory, various cultural texts reveal how a “retrofutural” vision of the future is constructed – one that brings the past to life and defines the present (Erll 2011). This aligns with Lotman’s conception of culture as a supra-individual mechanism for preserving and regulating collective memory, and with his view of textual dialogism as a means of maintaining cultural continuity (Lotman 2019).

Podcasts have become an integral part of contemporary cultural communication. As a distinct medium, they deliver audio-based cultural texts via digital platforms and have gained remarkable popularity in the digital era. Podcasts often serve informative, educational, or entertainment purposes, appealing to the multifaceted postmodern subject. Yet beyond these roles, podcasts also function as vehicles of cultural memory. Their connection to the golden age of radio and the nostalgic evocation of a slower-paced, simpler era captivates modern listeners. Furthermore, many podcast creators intentionally amplify nostalgia – both through their content choices and their delivery methods. One strategic technique for achieving this is through intersemiotic translation: the transformation of informational content into a different semiotic system.

This study aims to examine to what extent the adaptation of the diary entries

Meres (Days) by Greek Nobel Laureate poet George Seferis into podcast form constitutes a new cultural product. Through the lens of intersemioticity and the affective force of nostalgia, this adaptation transfers the analogue reading experience into a contemporary auditory and digital environment.  

The central hypothesis of this research is that this adaptation does not function merely as a media transposition, but rather as a process of cultural re-signification – emotionally charged by nostalgia and shaped by the affordances of the digital auditory medium. It proposes that the podcast form enables a transformation of memory and emotion into a shared sensory and aesthetic experience, allowing the past to be re-encoded for contemporary audiences. This study addresses a gap in current research concerning how intersemiotic translation intersects with affective dynamics in digital media environments. While podcasting has been explored in terms of media convergence and oral storytelling, limited attention has been paid to its role as a platform for the emotional and aesthetic reactivation of archival literary material. By focusing on the affective reconstruction of memory through sound, this research contributes a new perspective to the fields of semiotics, cultural memory, and adaptation studies.

The central hypothesis of this research is that this adaptation does not function merely as a media transposition, but rather as a process of cultural re-signification – emotionally charged by nostalgia and shaped by the affordances of the digital auditory medium. It proposes that the podcast form enables a transformation of memory and emotion into a shared sensory and aesthetic experience, allowing the past to be re-encoded for contemporary audiences. This study addresses a gap in current research concerning how intersemiotic translation intersects with affective dynamics in digital media environments. While podcasting has been explored in terms of media convergence and oral storytelling, limited attention has been paid to its role as a platform for the emotional and aesthetic reactivation of archival literary material. By focusing on the affective reconstruction of memory through sound, this research contributes a new perspective to the fields of semiotics, cultural memory, and adaptation studies.

1. Intersemiotic translation in contemporary cultural production

From an interdisciplinary perspective, translation is understood as a process of transfer and text production through the alteration of its semiotic condition. Roman Jakobson (1959), in his seminal essay “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation”, argues that translation is a process of re-encoding a message in which an equivalent to the original is produced using a different code. He defines intersemiotic translation – or transmutation – as the interpretation or translation of a linguistic sign through nonlinguistic signs.

By defining the translational process as interpretation, we recall the Peircean model, according to which semiosis – meaning-making – is itself a form of translation and thus a mode of semiotic mediation (Kourdis 2020). More broadly, based on the notions of negotiation and dialogism as developed by Eco (1976), earlier texts are seen to influence new ones, implying a continuous chain of cultural units that shape the production of subsequent units. Consequently, intersemioticity encompasses semiotic constructions in which meaning is generated either in the absence of verbal language or through the simultaneous operation of multiple semiotic systems.

During intersemiotic translation, the ontology of a text considered the prototext (source text) is transformed, leading to a metatext (target text). This transformation involves shifts and displacements at both the level of expression and content. Beyond the inherently dialogical nature of the text, the factor of intermediality often intervenes (Torop 2000). Thus, the two texts are not interchangeable but interdependent and autonomous, each possessing its own internal coherence and identity (Dusi 2015). Interpretation, therefore, inevitably leads to the addition or omission of elements – what Eco (1976) refers to as overcoding and undercoding.

Undoubtedly, intersemiotic translation and adaptation are both compelling areas of inquiry within the study of cultural communication. Recognising podcasts as a product of intersemiotic translation within the framework of popular culture carries significant scholarly interest. These texts circulate quickly and easily. They gain visibility not only within the private sphere of the listener but also within the public sphere, functioning as forms of cultural mediation. Consequently, they carry secondorder signifieds with specific cultural weight within collective memory, making them distinct, recognisable, and symbolically prestigious. This is the very nature of mass cultural texts: to be continuously transfigured into new forms.

2. Nostalgia, emotional impact, and podcasting

Intersemiotic translation is not a simple process of transposing a text into another semiotic system, but a cultural act with emotional and aesthetic dimensions that touch upon the realm of lived experience and the recipient’s emotional engagement. As Torop (2022) notes, in the digital era, translation increasingly acquires a transmedial dimension, where remediated forms not only convey meaning but actively reshape how emotions are experienced and signified. Within such adaptations – particularly the transmedia transformation of literary or autobiographical works into podcasts – the role of affect becomes central. Nostalgia, in this context, emerges as a dominant emotional mechanism and a key instrument for the cultural re-signification and reconstruction of memory.

Boym (2001) argues that this phenomenon lies at the intersection of individual memory and collective identity, distinguishing between restorative nostalgia, which seeks to reconstruct an idealised past rooted in absolute values and symbols, and reflective nostalgia, which perceives nostalgia as a contemplative process focused on absence in the context of an ambiguous modernity. The latter form is closely associated with hybrid narratives like podcasts, which incorporate temporality and activate memory through elements of sound, rhythm, and aesthetics that function as indicators.

Notably, nostalgia is not confined to the emotional domain but functions as a cultural practice, carrying ideological and symbolic weight. As van Dijck (2004) notes, memory in contemporary media is constantly preserved and reconstructed through technological filters and cultural practices of mediation. Assmann (2011) emphasises that through technological mediation, cultural forms of memory inevitably become tied to new representational possibilities of the past. Nostalgia in podcasts, therefore, is not only about content, but also about the form of the medium itself.

Podcasts, as a sound-based medium, revive oral and performative forms of literary experience, distinct from the solitary act of reading. They represent a particularly multisemiotic mode of storytelling, wherein linguistic information interacts with vocal delivery, theatricality, music, pauses, sound effects, and various extratextual documents. This synergy does not merely function as an aesthetic surplus but serves as an essential tool for meaning-making and emotional resonance (Spinelli, Dann 2019).

The activation of auditory memory and the retrieval of the past – as described by Berry (2015) – reconnect listeners with earlier forms of auditory cultural practice, especially radio. The revival of a collective acoustic time in a digital environment – where the content is not fully controlled by the user but instead delivered in a continuous auditory flow – heightens emotional involvement and amplifies the element of nostalgia.

The podcast, therefore, is not simply a new digital medium, but a site of cultural re-signification – a post-analogue space where the discourse of the past is conveyed in new terms yet through recognisable aesthetic codes. As Bolter and Grusin (1999) underline, the concept of remediation refers precisely to this process of integration and transformation of old media by the new. Thus, the podcast is not merely a means of reproduction, but a form of semiotic renegotiation of memory, experience, and emotion.

3. The Days podcast

George Seferis maintained a personal diary throughout his adult life. From his student years in Paris to his recognition as a diplomat and writer, the diary serves as a mirror of his inner life and spiritual quests. He perceived his work as a record of a journey, where nostalgia functioned not merely as a consequence but as a means of escape from social life into the private sphere, which, however, becomes aestheticised.

The diary entries were published in seven volumes under the title Days, between 1975 and 1990. Through these, a touchingly human, reflective, and confessional narrator is revealed, contrasting with the strict, hermetic, and allusive poet. The work transcends its documentary dimension, also functioning as an autonomous literary prose. Its utility as both an archival source and interpretive material is inexhaustible: from political history and social context to aesthetic considerations and the experiential dimension of creation. The intermedial adaptation into a podcast retains the fragmentary nature of the diary entries. However, as expected, from the approximately two thousand pages of the seven volumes, excerpts have been anthologised to form thirty-two episodes under the general title Days – George Seferis LIFO PODCASTS. Each episode bears a subtitle and a brief description. To explore the research hypothesis of this study, a qualitative analysis of excerpts from four episodes follows.

Shipwrecks and a rare recitation of Thrush by Seferis

The episode begins with a rare recording of Seferis reciting excerpts from the poem Thrush, recorded both for the Lyra company and for the album The Poetry of George Seferis by Caedmon, considered a precursor to audiobooks and, by extension, podcasts. In the recitation, the poet’s distinctive voice – the articulation reminiscent of a bygone era, and especially the sonic profile of an old vinyl record – surface noise, clicks, pops, needle hiss – creates a nostalgic soundscape that activates acoustic memory and emotionally engages the listener.

The recording serves as an introduction to the diary entries of August 15 and 16, 1946. In the background, soft music dominated by the piano is heard, while the narrator reads about the poet’s life in Poros, where he enjoys the Greek summer and outdoor life, charmed by the authenticity of the locals, who are far removed from the ministers, professors, or intellectuals of the city. Special mention is made of the encounter with the wreck of the Thrush, which captivates him visually and poetically. The narration culminates with the recitation of the eponymous poem by the poet himself. The images of nature and the shipwreck in the poem mirror those in the diary, and after a dramatic pause, the recitation continues with verses that critique city life, highlighting the aesthetic and conceptual connection between the diary and the poem. Thus, a transmutation of informational content is observed not only between the diary (prototext) and the podcast (metatext) but also between the diary and the poem, in a way transforming the listener into a participant in the poetic creation.

Subsequently, the podcaster moves to October 17, 1946, where the poet meets the then-young painters John Craxton and Lucian Freud. The podcaster notes in a lyrical language that the two young men seek an Arcadian life experience in Greece, which is later translated through Seferis’s words in the entry. An adventure they all had is described when a storm broke out during one of their strolls. As the narrator refers to the weather phenomena, these are translated intersemiotically with sounds of rain and thunder. Then the sound of rain becomes more languid, mixed with guitar sounds; the narration reaches its end, and a mist covering the island verbally reintroduces the Arcadia motif. Consequently, through the intersemiotic translation of words with the soundscape, a metatext is formed that utilises emotion and nostalgia as a means of persuasion and emotional appeal.

The heart-wrenching return to Smyrna, the Skala neighbourhood, and our little family home

The episode opens with the reading of a handwritten note by Seferis, in which he movingly describes his childhood home in Smyrna and his departure at the age of 14 due to political frictions between Greece and Turkey. Oriental-sounding music follows, and the narrator refers to the poet’s entries from June 1950, during his travels in Asia Minor. There, Seferis encounters a street musician playing the saz. The podcast music grows louder. The poet is captivated by the beautiful metallic sound, and the listener notices that the saz dominates the orchestral music heard in the background. This scene is a characteristic example of how intersemiotic translation – through aesthetic orchestration and sonic narration – conveys the feeling of nostalgia from the written prototext into the auditory metatext, enhancing the listener’s emotional involvement and transforming a personal experience into a shared mnemonic and sensory event.

Seferis then arrives in Smyrna, in the Skala neighbourhood, and his memories begin to come alive, accompanied by gentle and tender music. The soundscape includes the noise of paper as the podcaster flips through the pages of the book – a coincidental moment that also serves the purpose of emotional immersion. The narration accelerates; the music reaches a dramatic climax when Seferis recognises the house where he was born. As the violin plays in spiccato, he describes the house’s decay – broken windows, rusted door, dirty walls – he takes a photograph, and children of the new tenants rush out. The music becomes pompous and highly emotional, reflecting his thoughts: the old tree is gone, he still keeps the key to the house in Athens, the initials he once carved into the wall have vanished, the church has turned into a school, and suddenly his young mother appears before him.

It is worth noting that this description – with its elements of house, key, tree, school, and mother – carries particular emotional weight for Greek listeners, as it evokes collective memory and the experience of displacement, while also interacting with a broader corpus of cultural texts on similar themes.

This is followed by an entry in which the poet visits the house one last time. Logic prevails as a poem is read about houses, their changing occupants, and their decay, which resembles that of human beings. The analogies between poem and diary are clear. The poet notes that the circle has closed, and the podcaster selects a postrock atmospheric track to underscore the nostalgic tone.

Inside the sea caves – Maro’s great love

The episode opens with the sounds of cicadas, the lapping of the sea, and the humming of a woman, reminiscent of a cinematic scene. The narrator reads a romantic journal entry recounting Seferis’s first encounter with Maro on Aegina and their embraces on the shore. A piano plays arpeggios as the couple climbs a hill. Animal sounds – cows mooing – serve as narrative indices, matching the moment when the couple encounters a herd. As night falls, the piano softens and the soundscape expands with birdsong and other nocturnal sounds, blending with the cicadas.

Following this romantic prologue and the transformation of informational content through sonic semiotic resources in the metatext, a characteristic romantic jazz song plays. The narrator then turns to extratextual material confirming that Seferis’s romantic summer on Aegina was a source of poetic inspiration. Accompanied by piano, Seferis recites a love poem. His tone is passionate yet sorrowful, marked by the grandeur of love. Bubbling water sounds transport the listener to sea caves. This time, a younger-voiced actor recites verses describing a couple’s secret erotic encounter within the caves. Again, the soundscape makes the metaphor vivid. A female actress then reads one of Maro’s handwritten letters, underscoring their shared passion.

However, upon their return to Athens, Seferis learns he’s being transferred to the Albanian embassy. Maro does not join him, as she remains trapped in her previous marriage. Their relationship survives through letters. The music shifts – darker, cinematic – echoing the poet’s emotional turmoil as he feels haunted by her absence. A temporal shift takes us to their final meeting in an Athenian suburb, reached by tram – its sounds audible. Rain begins to fall, its patter incorporated into the soundscape. The atmosphere grows heavy, and the poet paints the imagery: a drooping tree, another blooming amid overgrown weeds, a deserted chapel. This bittersweet, slowpaced narration gives way to a nostalgic bossa nova track that blends gradually with the sound of a train wagon. Seferis, as a diplomat, travels to Albania. The narration becomes an internal monologue; the train sound accelerates, and the Balkan landscape brings him sorrow. The episode concludes with a directorial touch: the train’s sound merges with the opening audio – cicadas and the woman’s humming.

Ultimately, through the dramaturgical orchestration of sonic cues, this metatext crafts an experiential landscape where nostalgia transforms romantic memory into sonic storytelling – uniting absence with presence and personal experience with collective emotion.

You Have Left Athens: The Germans Are Coming, Seferis Departs

The episode opens with a scene in which Seferis, invited for tea, disagrees with an English lord over poetry. The debate is tedious for Seferis. This is followed by an excerpt from Die Dreigroschenoper, in which the lyrics describe the boredom of a maid who fantasises about revenge. Beyond the redundancy of meaning, the song’s tone and the German language connote “Germanness” and foreshadow the impending German occupation. The music shifts into an elegiac tone, and the subsequent diary entries capture the tension, political upheaval, and Seferis’s psychological disorientation as he watches events unfold. The listener hears a deafening explosion: the Nazis have blown up a ship.

Seferis is dazed, and Maro, foreseeing the hardships ahead, suggests they marry. The wedding takes place without joy, a sentiment reflected in the ironic use of a slow Britpop song. The elegiac music returns, and the narration continues with an account of a plane crash that Seferis observes with childlike curiosity. The meticulous sound design of the metatext is remarkable – every word, every image from the diary is translated into sound: sirens, crowd voices, the drone of airplane engines, antiaircraft fire, and the passing of other planes. The sonic direction evokes a war film.

Next comes the poet’s attempt to flee with Maro to Crete, where the exiled Greek government has relocated. The excitement of departure is quickly replaced by air raid sirens and the search for shelter. On the way to the port, he wonders if he will ever see the Attic sky again. He meets a young man who cannot leave and declares his only weapon is a typewriter he’s hidden in the mountains. The sound of typing is heard – Seferis feels guilty. He boards the ship. Just as it begins to depart, the dive of a fighter plane and the roar of bombs interrupt the journey. They return to the port. A bus arrives, and they board. At midnight, they reach a British outpost where the drunken guard is portrayed by the narrator, who mimics slurred English. The episode ends abruptly, leaving the listener stunned.

In this metatext, through its layered sound design and emotionally charged narration, Seferis’s personal and historical testimony is transformed into an auditory monument of collective memory and existential anxiety. Poetry, love, and war are woven into a rhythm of constant farewell, resembling a film steeped in emotional and nostalgic depth. At the same time, the diary emerges as both a historical document and a living archive – revitalised and re-signified through its adaptation.

4. The podcasts as an example of archival repurposing

The adaptation of Seferis’s printed diaries into a digital audio product is more than a process of translation or transcription. Documents such as diary entries or correspondence have an organic relationship with the philosophy of archiving. However, in this case, podcasts as metatexts form a body that constitutes an act of cultural re-signification and repurposing of an archive in the contemporary digital environment. This process is embedded in a post-analogue condition of cultural production, where the past is not preserved intact but is curated, selected, and resignified under new terms of aesthetics and reception. As Hutcheon (2012) notes, every adaptation is an autonomous and distinct cultural event that, while dialoguing with the prototext, is self-contained, with its own semantic dynamics and aesthetic function. In this context, the Days podcasts function as new cultural products that utilise the literary and archival material of the diary to form a new semiotic entity suitable for the modern digital ecosystem.

Lev Manovich (2001) points out that new media do not simply replace the old but incorporate, reshape, and reposition them in the new technological environment. Thus, this specific form of reuse is not limited to the technical transfer of informational content but includes the transcription of diary discourse into a medium with new conventions. The audio text reassembles speech, senses, and memory through the use of various sonic resources: narrative delivery, musical accompaniments, archival interjections, dramatised excerpts, environmental sounds, and semiotic cues.

Furthermore, as Jenkins (2006) observes, the logic of convergence culture and participatory culture favors forms of intertextual, intermedia, and multimodal reuse of cultural assets. Ultimately, repurposing is a way in which the audience interacts with cultural documents: through the podcast, Seferis’s “rewritten” literary and historical material is popularised, becoming accessible to a broader audience, and is also archived, as it is stored in digital repositories. The podcast, as a medium, acts as a hub of this convergence, offering narrative flow, sensory engagement, and institutional accessibility to the audience. In this case, Seferis’s example fully aligns with this model of cultural reuse. The preservation of the diary form, combined with the audio accompaniment and the selection of thematic excerpts, shapes an audio corpus that functions not only archivally or commemoratively but aesthetically and interpretatively. Cultural reuse here does not signify the loss of authenticity but the renewal of meaning, the entry of the archive into new life cycles, and the deepening of the audience’s relationship with the past through emotion, memory, and listening.

5. Conclusions

This study has highlighted how the intermedia adaptation of George Seferis’s Days diaries into the form of a digital audio product constitutes a characteristic example of intersemiotic translation and repurposing. The audio podcast, as an autonomous cultural genre, does not limit itself to the realistic rendering of the prototext’s content but functions as a new carrier of meaning, reconnecting the archive with the emotional, aesthetic, and technological demands of the contemporary cultural sphere. Through the strategic use of reflective nostalgia and the continuous activation of auditory memory, the podcasts reconstruct not only the poet’s past but also the cultural and historical context in which it is inscribed. The transition from the printed form to a multisemiotic auditory field allows for the transmutation of experience, memory, and emotion into a new sonic narrative with strong emotional dynamics.

The Days podcasts reproduce the diary archive, curate, reassemble, and transfer it into a new cultural environment, transforming it into a lived experience for the listener. The function of the soundscape, the sonic choices, the narrative voices, and the extratextual documents do not serve as illustrations but as carriers of new meaning and interpretation. This process, integrated into the logic of cultural convergence and the re-signification of the past, constitutes an act of participatory and emotional archaeology. Thus, podcasts function simultaneously as forms of archiving, popularisation, and emotional activation.

Ultimately, the example of the Days – George Seferis LIFO PODCASTS confirms that a literary diary, transformed into an auditory narrative, can maintain its complexity, sensitivity, and reflectiveness, while simultaneously immersing the listener in a sonic spacetime of memory and contemplation. This transformation highlights the deeper value of intersemiotic translation: the transmission of content and the creation of a new semiotic space where memory, emotion, and aesthetic experience intertwine.

These findings open new avenues for further research into the emotional and semiotic mechanisms of intersemiotic translation in digital culture. Future studies could explore how different literary or archival texts are adapted into podcast form across cultural contexts, how platform-specific aesthetics and sound design influence emotional engagement, or how audiences actually receive such adaptations. Comparative, reception-based, or cross-media approaches – examining, for example, how the same material is adapted into podcasts, documentaries, or social media – may further illuminate the complex dynamics between memory, affect, and media form. Ultimately, integrating perspectives from semiotic theory, sound studies, and affect theory can enrich our understanding of how cultural memory is emotionally and aesthetically remediated in the digital era.

Epilogue

The need to reconnect with the past through contemporary technological forms underscores the deep human desire to process memory not as a closed archive but as a living and constantly evolving field. The intermedial adaptation of Seferis’s diary discourse, in the form of a podcast, serves as an eloquent example of how cultural memory, aesthetic reception, and emotion converge in new semiotic environments. Through this process, the listener is no longer a mere recipient but becomes a participant in an emotional narrative that links the discourse of the past with the sound of the present. In an era where emotion becomes a mode of knowledge and nostalgia a means of connection, literary and archival podcasts function as contemporary carriers of memory and reflection, offering an alternative, affectively charged experience of engaging with literature and history – a sensory experience that we hear, feel, and remember.

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