A Greek Miscellany.pdf

Introduction to Cavafy´s poems Ever since I was first introduced to his poetry by the late Professor R.M. Dawkins over thirty years ago, C.P. Cavafy has remained an influence on my own writing; that is to say, I can think of poems which, if Cavafy were unknown to me, I should have written quite differently or perhaps not written at all. Yet I do not know a word of Modern Greek, so that my only access to Cavafy’s poetry has been through English and French translations. This perplexes and a little disturbs me. Like everybody else, I think, who writes poetry, I have always believed the essential difference between prose and poetry to be that prose can be translated into another tongue but poetry cannot. But if it is possible to be poetically influenced by work which one can read only in translation, this belief must be qualified. There must be some elements in poetry which are separable from their original verbal expression and some which are inseparable. It is obvious, for example, that any association of ideas created by homophones is restricted to the language in which these homophones occur. Only in German does Welt rhyme with Geld , and only in English is Hilaire Belloc’s pun possible.

When I am dead, I hope it may be said:

‘His sins were scarlet, but his books were read’. When, as in pure lyric, a poet “sings” rather than “speaks”, he is rarely, if ever, translatable. The “meaning” of a song by Campion is inseparable from the sound and the rhythmical values of the actual words he employs. It is conceivable that a genuine bilingual poet might write what, to him, was the same lyric in two languages, but if someone else were then to make a literal translation of each version into the language of the other, no reader would be able to recognize their connection. On the other hand, the technical conventions and devices of verse can be grasped in abstraction from the verse itself. I do no have to know Welsh to become excited about the possibility of applying to English verse the internal rhymes and alliterations in which Welsh verse is so rich. I may very well find that they cannot be copied exactly in English, yet discover by modifying them new and interesting effects. Another element in poetry which often survives translation is the imagery of similes and metaphors, for these are derived, not from local verbal habits, but from sensory experiences common to all men. I do not have to read Pindar in Greek in order to appreciate the beauty and aptness with which he praises the island of Delos.

…motionless miracle of the

wide earth, which mortals call Delos, but the blessed on Olympus, the far-shining star of dark-blue earth.

When difficulties in translating images do arise, this is usually because the verbal resources of the new language cannot make the meaning clear without using so many words that the force of the original is lost. Thus Shakespeare’s line

The hearts that spanielled me at heels

cannot be translated into French without turning the metaphor into a less effective simile. None of the translatable elements in poetry which I have mentioned so far applies, however, to Cavafy. With the free relaxed iambic verse he generally uses, we are already familiar. The most original aspect of his style, the mixture, both in his vocabulary and his syntax, of demotic and purist Greek, is untranslatable. In English there is nothing comparable to the rivalry between demotic and purist, a rivalry that has excited high passions, both literary and political. We have only Standard English on the one side and regional dialects on the other, and it is impossible for a translator to reproduce this stylistic effect or for an English poet to profit from it. Nor can one speak of Cavafy´s imagery, for simile and metaphor are devices he never uses; whether he is speaking of a scene, an event, or an emotion, every line of his is plain factual description without any ornamentation whatsoever. What, then, is it in Cavafy’s poems that survives translation and excites? Something I can only call, most inadequately, a tone of voice, a personal speech. I have read translations of Cavafy made by many different hands, but every one of them was immediately recognizable as a poem by Cavafy; nobody else could possibly have written it. Reading any poem of his, I feel: “This reveals a person with a unique perspective on the world.” That the speech of self-disclosure should be translatable seems to me very odd, but I am convinced that it is. The conclusion I draw is that the only quality which all human beings without exception possess is uniqueness: any characteristic, on the other hand, which one individual can be recognized as having in common with another, like red hair or the English language, implies the existence of other individual qualities which this classification excludes. To the degree, therefore, that a poem is the product of a certain culture, it is difficult to translate it into the terms of another culture, but to the degree that it is the expression of a unique human being, it is as easy, or as difficult, for a person from an alien culture to appreciate as for one of the cultural group to which the poet happens to belong. But if the importance of Cavafy’s poetry is his unique tone of voice, there is nothing for a critic to say, for criticism can only make comparisons. A unique tone of voice cannot be described; it can only be imitated, that is to say, either parodied or quoted. W.H. Auden

More Cavafy BY A.E. STALLINGS

Rigoberto writes here of encountering Cavafy in his high school library, and the sense of discovery and liberation Cavafy’s frank evocation of homosexual eroticism gave him as a young poet. Reginald writes in the comment box that: All the translations I’ve read make Cavafy sound like prose broken into lines– well-written, sensitive, insightful prose, but prose nonetheless. Reading the introductions to the translations and other work about Cavafy, I understand that Cavafy was an obsessive poetic craftsman, obsessively revising and refining each line. . . . None of this comes across in any of the translations I have read. This absence, combined with the relative paucity of figurative language–as I recall, Cavafy has vivid imagery, but few metaphors and similes–contributes to the prosaic feel of his poetry in the translations I’ve read. Cavafy is without doubt the most translated and retranslated of modern Greek poets– perhaps among the most translated of foreign poets into English period. What are these translations not bringing to the table? What are we missing when we aren’t reading Cavafy in Greek?

I’m actually working on a review of some translations of the Nobel-prize winning poet George Seferis’ journals for a Certain Poetry Magazine as we speak. In it, Seferis himself wrestles with his mixed feelings about the greatest figure in modern Greek letters. In 1941, stationed in Cavafy’s home town of Alexandria in Egypt, Seferis has a sudden insight from the landscape: “I think of Cavafy, as I inspect this low-lying land. His poetry is like that too; as prosaic as the endless plain before us. It has no rise and fall; it goes at a walking pace. I understand Cavafy better now and I respect him for what he did.” (Seferis’ literary circle had been very dismissive of Cavafy.) What does he mean by prosaic, by a walking pace? (A pun in Greek, by the way, since prose and pedestrian are the same word.) There is a flatness–not in terms of music, in which Cavafy’s poetry is quite rich, but in terms of tone. His vehicle is often irony, which carries across into English remarkably well no matter how indifferent the translator is to the sounds and rhythms of the poetry itself. Rigoberto mentions “The City”, perhaps Cavafy’s most famous poem after “Ithaka” (you can hear “Ithaka” in Greek here). It is a powerful poem in Rae Dalven’s or Keeley and Sherrard’s or almost anyone’s translation. (I have mentioned earlier I think on how much I

love poems that end in negation, and this one is a whopper.) But how startled I was when I first tackled it in Greek. One of the things I had never been fully aware of before were its elegant parallelisms and chiasmus (land/shore; ship/road). I was surprised to find the poem rhymes, and not only does it rhyme, but it has a curious rhyme scheme (which I have since stolen for one of my own poems about leaving a city): A B B C C D D A Some of the rhymes are actually denser than full rhyme–they are rime riche, homophones–so that “tha menei” (“shall remain”) almost magically turns into “thameni” (“buried”); some are more like full consonantal rhymes-”tha gurnas” (“you will wander”) turns into “tha gernas” (“you will grow old”). The rhyme scheme that appears to go somewhere only to end up where it started is not decoration–it is central to the theme of the poem. Here is a version that carries off the effect of the rhyme scheme, by David Mason, from Arrivals: The City after the Greek of C.P. Cavafy You said: “I’ll go away to another shore, find another city better than this. In all I attempt, something remains amiss and my heart–like a dead thing–lies buried. How long will my mind stew in all its worry? Wherever I cast my eye, wherever I look, I see the ruins of my life turn black here where I wasted and wrecked many a year.” You won’t find a new land or another shore. This city will follow you, you’ll molder in these streets, in these neighborhoods grow older, and turn gray among familiar houses. You’ll always end here–don’t hope for other places– there is no ship, there is no road for you. Now that you have decided you are through with this place, you’ve wrecked your life everywhere.

One of the curiousities on my bookshelf is a volume of translations of Cavafy by his brother, J.C. Cavafy. Sometimes slightly Victorian in flavor, they are nonetheless fascinating–one wonders if Cavafy himself had any hand in them. And they always make an effort to get across the formal elements. Here is “Interruption”: We it is who interrupt the gods’ effectual power, we the hasty, the inexperienced, beings of the hour. At Eleusis and at Phthia, in the regal halls, when Demeter and when Thetis by their magic arts provoke and pursue works beneficial amid mighty flames and smoke: Metaneira, half distracted as it e’er befalls, rushes from the king’s apartment and cries out her fears, and there’s always Peleus who suspects and interferes. Rhymed poems represent only a significant minority of Cavafy’s work, however. Most poems are in unrhymed iambics–a sort of Greek blank verse. One of Cavafy’s central tenets is an almost Epicurean primacy of pleasure, in Greek, “hedone” (from which we get “hedonism”). It is one of the central words in his work. Yet somehow it is always difficult to translate. “Pleasure” in English is more fraught with guilt somehow, whereas “hedone” bypasses Christianity and comes straight from the ancient philosophers. Cavafy’s homosexual poems are always seen through the eyes of nostalgia. They are frank and confessional, but looking across the years lends them a distance and melancholy. Have I mentioned before how much I admire Don Paterson? (Um, yes, about a million times…) Here is his rendering of “One Night” from Landing Light: The room above the bar was the cheapest we could find. We could see the filthy alley from the window, hear the shouts of the workmen at their card-games. Yet there on that narrow bed I had love’s body, knew its red lips; those lips so full, so bloody with desire that now as I write, after so many years, in this lonely house . . . I’m drunk with them again. There’s much I like about this lean and clean version (not a translation). But one thing that to me is a disaster! In Greek, Love is a HE, not an IT. The word for sensual love, eros, is male in gender (Greek is a gendered language), but Eros is also the name of the Greek god of Love–identified with the Roman Cupid if you like, but he is no chubby little pink

Cherub. He is a beautiful young man–a “hottie” in Rigoberto’s phrase. The poem is at once ambiguous (the gender of the lover isn’t actually specified) and unequivocally clear. I had Love’s body, his body. The body of a god. Perhaps it is no coincidence that one of the finest translators of Cavafy to date is the sophisticated, dextrous and openly homosexual James Merrill. Alas, he only did a handful of poems. But he was alive to the wordplay, the repetition, the sounds, register shifts, and where he cannot get something across from the Greek, balances with an English equivalent. More on that perhaps later.

George Seferis George Seferis was born in Smyrna in 1900 and died in Athens in 1971. In 1931 he published, at this own expense, a collection of poetry with the ambiguous title Strophe (meaning both part of a poem and "turning-point"). The collection contained thirteen short poems, most of them in traditional metre and rhythm, and a more extensive poem, the cryptic "Erotikos Logos", in 96 rhymed 15-syllable verses, which vividly brings to mind Erotokritos, the celebrated Cretan 17th century poem. What became clear from the first appearance of this poet, who had already spent some years in Paris and in London studying law and English, was his desire to shed new light on the existing poetic landscape, overshadowed as it was both by the patriarchal figure of Palamas and by the ghost of Karyotakis. Many poems appear to follow the dictates of "pure" poetry, such as those found in the work of the French poets Mallarme and Valery. There are, however, also what were called "impure" poems, with "lower", more common speech forms, written in everyday language with corresponding subject matter. Today, seventy years later, most of the poems in Strophe (Turning-Point) retain their vigour. Some in fact are quite familiar to the public at large as they have been put to music, as have many of Seferis´later poems. One such poem is "Denial", which, thanks to the music of Mikis Theodorakis, has probably become the best known poem in all of Modern Greek poetry. The Cistern, Seferis´next work, is a lyrical poem of 125 verses. It was published in 1932, while the poet was working in the diplomatic corps in London. It appears, however, that The Cistern, no longer expressed Seferis´artistic needs, as the poet was now searching for new poetic directions. He had, during Christmas of 1931, been introduced to the poetry of T.S. Eliot, whom he was to meet in person twenty years later. There followed a long period of anguished experimentation - it was during this period that he translated The Waste Landinto Greek - until, in March of 1935, his Mythistorema appeared. Mythistorema(whose title from the Greek words for"myth" and for "history"´- is particularly significant) is a composite poem comprising 24 sections in free verse - a poem that contains the basic concepts and recurring themes of the poetry to follow: "common", almost unpoetic speech (Seferis was later to declare that what interested him primarily was to speak "plainly" and "without affectation"); a familiar, narrative but also dramatic voice; a continued intermingling of history and mythology (the poem resounds throughout with echoes of the Asia Minor Disaster of 1922) as everyday figures (those called "friends" and "comrades") parade through the poem in the company of mythical "personae" and symbolic figures. Everything takes place in "typical" Greek landscapes, sometimes recognisable, while the mythical subject matter (drawn chiefly from Homer and the tragic playwrights) appears fragmentarily, "peaks" of myths, as the poet himself would say, nevertheless capable of providing (in the manner of the "mythical method") stability and clarity to the emotion possessing the poet. This is Seferis´most definitive poem and the most truly representative text of Greek Modernism. It continues today to retain its effectiveness and to a certain extent its inherent cryptic nature. In the spring of 1940 two more collections came

out: Book of Exercises and Logbook I, containing poems written between 1928 and 1940. The five years between 1935 and 1940 were a critical period, both in terms of Seferis´ own life story and in the history of Greece. He served as Consul to Albania in the city of Korytsa for a brief period, where he felt extremely isolated, while in 1936 General Metaxas imposed a dictatorship in Greece along the ideological lines of Mussolini´s fascism and of Nazism. As a diplomat, Seferis felt himself trapped in the cogwheels of dictatorship, as seen in the confessional work Manuscript´41, but nevertheless he did not resign his post. Certain poems, particularly in the second collection, reveal this dilemma and also the oppressively stifling circumstances he was living under. There is no lack, however, of poems filled with poetry and existential angst, such as "Nijinsky", inspired by the vision of the great dancer, or the better-known "The King of Asine", in which the poet, while strolling through the ruins of the Homeric king´s castle, contemplates, among other things, the eventual disappearance of a work´s creator, the "void" that will unavoidably cover his actual person. The German invasion and occupation of Greece, his flight, along with the Greek government, to South Africa and to Egypt, the horrors of war, the political intrigues and clashes between Greeks - precursors of the impending Civil War - were the experiences that served as the subject matter for Logbook II, which came out, in a first version, in Alexandria in 1944. But now was also the time when he began to feel deeply the influence of the climate of cosmopolitanism and of greater Hellenism, as it was expressed in the poetry of the Alexandrian poet C.P. Cavafy, whom Seferis discovered during this period. The decade from 1947 to 1957 was a particularly successful one for Seferis. In 1947 he brought out his most mature work, The Thrush - taken from the name of a small boat that sunk in the waters off the island of Poros, a three-part "musical" composition, where personal and erotic memories are freely interwoven with the traumatic memories of WWII and the tragedy of the Civil War. In 1953 Seferis discovered Cyprus, a place "where the miracle still works", and in 1955 he brought out Logbook III,I containing poems inspired by the ancient and modern history of the island. Many of the poems, "Helen", "Salamis of Cyprus", "The Demon of Fornification", "Engomi", are considered classics. During this same decade he was placed in the highest diplomatic positions. He served first in Ankara in 1947, and had the opportunity to visit his birthplace, Smyrna, to which he had not returned since 1914. He later served in Beirut as acting ambassador to Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Iraq, and in 1957 he was appointed ambassador to London, where he was to finish his diplomatic career. In 1963 Seferis became the first Greek author to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. In his Three Secret Poems (1966) the poet, "the desolate mind [that] has been the end", sums up his work and his life, accepting the fact that "everything that has passed has fittingly passed". His views on poetry, the Greek language and literature and on popular cultural traditions, his critical studies of T.S Eliot, Dante, Cavafy and others, are included in the three volumes of his Essays- texts of unusual sensitivity and perspicacity, considered by some critics to be equal in merit to his poetry. Of particular interest are his journals (Days), his letters, and his early novel Six Nights on the Acropolis. On the subject of his being awarded the Nobel Prize, Seferis said that through its choice the Swedish Academy "wished to express its solidarity with Greece´s ever-vital intellect" and to honour a "language spoken for centuries but having at present a limited number of speakers". This viewpoint reflects Seferis´deep-seated belief in the current dynamic interrelationship between the ancient and modern Greek language and literature, between the diachronic power of Greek civilisation and its modern expression, and finally between tradition and innovation. It was, moreover, only through tradition that the demand for renewal of Greek poetry in the early 1930s was able to be realised, and Seferis´modernism and innovations were in large part characterised by the revitalisation and imaginative use of the Greek tradition. Seferis, the poet from Asia Minor, estranged from his homeland at a very early age, perpetually feeling like a refugee, died during the Colonels´ Dictatorship, a government that only months before he had denounced internationally as tyrannical and dangerous. His funeral turned into one of the largest mass demonstrations against the military junta.

Yoryis Yiatromanolakis

THE KING OF ASINE ILIAD* All morning long we looked around the citadel* starting from the shaded side, there where the sea, green and without luster—breast of a slain peacock— received us like time without an opening in it. Veins of rock dropped down from high above, twisted vines, naked, many-branched, coming alive at the water’s touch, while the eye following them struggled to escape the tiresome rocking, losing strength continually. On the sunny side a long empty beach and the light striking diamonds on the huge walls. No living thing, the wild doves gone and the king of Asine, whom we’ve been trying to find for two years now, unknown , forgotten by all, even by Homer, only one word in the Iliad and that uncertain, thrown here like the gold burial mask. You touched it, remember its sound? Hollow in the light like a dry jar in dug earth: the same sound that our oars make in the sea. The king of Asine a void under the mask everywhere with us everywhere with us, under a name: “Αsίνην te... Αsίνην te...” and his children statues and his desires the fluttering of birds, and the wind in the gaps between his thoughts, and his ships anchored in a vanished port: under the mask a void. Behind the large eyes the curved lips the curls carved in relief on the gold cover of our existence a dark spot that you see traveling like a fish in the dawn calm of the sea: a void everywhere with us. And the bird that flew away last winter with a broken wing: abode of life, and the young woman who left to play with the dogteeth of summer and the soul that sought the lower world squeaking and the country like a large plane-leaf swept along by the torrent of the sun with the ancient monuments and the contemporary sorrow. And the poet lingers, looking at the stones, and asks himself does there really exist among these ruined lines, edges, points, hollows, and curves does there really exist here where one meets the path of rain, wind, and ruin does there exist the movement of the face, shape of the tenderness

of those who’ve shrunk so strangely in our lives, those who remained the shadow of waves and thoughts with the sea’s boundlessness or perhaps no, nothing is left but the weight the nostalgia for the weight of a living existence there where we now remain unsubstantial, bending like the branches of a terrible willow-tree heaped in permanent despair while the yellow current slowly carries down rushes uprooted in the mud image of a form that the sentence to everlasting bitterness has turned to stone: the poet a void. Shieldbearer, the sun climbed warring, and from the depths of the cave a startled bat hit the light as an arrow hits a shield: “Αsίνην te...Αsίνην te...” Would that it were the king of Asine we’ve been searching for so carefully on this acropolis sometimes touching with our fingers his touch upon the stones. Asine, summer ´38—Athens. Jan. ´40

“THRUSH”* Ephemeral issue of a vicious daemon and a harsh fate, why do you force me to speak of things that it would be better for you not to know. SILENUS TO MIDAS* I The house near the sea* The houses I had they took away from me. The times happened to be unpropitious: war, destruction, exile; sometimes the hunter hits the migratory birds, sometimes he doesn’t hit them. Hunting was good in my time, many felt the pellet; the rest circle aimlessly or go mad in the shelters. Don’t talk to me about the nightingale or the lark or the little wagtail inscribing figures with his tail in the light; I don’t know much about houses I know they have their own nature, nothing else. New at first, like babies who play in gardens with the tassels of the sun. they embroider colored shutters and shining doors over the day. When the architect’s finished, they change,

they frown or smile or even grow stubborn with those who stayed behind, with those who went away with others who’d come back if they could or others who disappeared, now that the world’s become an endless hotel. I don’t know much about houses, I remember their joy and their sorrow sometimes, when I stop to think; again sometimes, near the sea, in naked rooms with a single iron bed and nothing of my own, watching the evening spider, I imagine that someone is getting ready to come, that they dress him up* in white and black robes, with many-colored jewels, and around him venerable ladies, gray hair and dark lace shawls, talk softly, that he is getting ready to come and say goodbye to me; or that a woman—eyelashes quivering, slim-waisted, returning from southern ports, Smyrna Phodes Syracuse Alexandria, from cities closed like hot shutters, with perfume of golden fruit and herbs— climbs the stairs without seeing those who’ve fallen asleep under the stairs. Houses, you know, grow stubborn easily when you strip them bare.

II Sensual Elpenor I saw him yesterday standing by the door below my window; it was about seven o’clock; there was a woman with him. He had the look of Elpenor just before he fell and smashed himself, yet he wasn’t drunk. He was speaking fast, and she was gazing absently toward the gramophones; now and then she cut him short to say a word and then would glance impatiently toward where they were frying fish: like a cat. He muttered with a cigarette butt between his lips: —“Listen. There’s this too. In the moonlight the status sometimes bend like reeds in the midst of ripe fruit—the statues; and the flame becomes a cool oleander, the flame that burns you, I mean.”

—“It's just the light… shadows of the night.” —“Maybe the night that split open, a blue pomegranate, a dark breast, and filled you with stars, cleaving time. And yet the statues bend sometimes, dividing desire in two, like a peach; and the flame becomes a kiss on the limbs, a sobbing, and then a cool leaf carried off by the wind; they bend; they become light with a human weight. You don’t forget it.”

—The statues are in the museum.” —No, they pursue you, why can’t you see it? I mean with their broken limbs, with their shape from another time, a shape you don’t recognize yet know. It’s as though in the last days of your youth you loved a woman who was still beautiful, and you were always afraid, as you held her naked at noon, of the memory aroused by your embrace; were afraid the kiss might betray you to other beds now of the past which nevertheless could haunt you so easily, so easily, and bring to life images in the mirror, bodies once alive: their sensuality. It’s as though returning home from some foreign country you happen to open an old trunk that’s been locked up a long time and find the tatters of clothes you used to wear on happy occasions, at festivals with many-colored lights, mirrored, now becoming dim, and all that remains is the perfume of the absence of a young form. Really, those statues are not the fragments. You yourself are the relic; they haunt you with a strange virginity at home, at the office, at receptions for the celebrated, in the unconfessed terror of sleep; they speak of things you wish didn’t exist or would happen years after your death, and that’s difficult because…”

—“The statues are in the museum. Good night.”

—“…because the statues are no longer

fragments. We are. The statues bend lightly… Good night.” At this point they separated. He took the road leading uphill toward the North and she moved on toward the light-flooded beach where the waves are drowned in the noise from the radio: The radio

—“Sails puffed out by the wind are all that stay in the mind. Perfume of silence and pine will soon be an anodyne now that the sailor’s set sail, flycatcher, catfish, and wagtail. O woman whose touch is dumb, hear the wind’s requiem.

“Drained is the golden keg the sun’s become a rag round a middle-aged woman’s neck— who coughs and coughs without break; for the summer that’s gone she sighs, for the gold on her shoulders, her thighs. O woman, O sightless thing, Hear the blindman sing.

“Close the shutters: the day recedes; make flutes from yesteryear’s reeds and don’t open, knock how they may: they shout but have nothing to say. Take cyclamen, pine-needles, the lily, anemones out of the sea; O woman whose wits are lost, Listen, the water’s ghost…

—“Athens. The public has heard the news with alarm; it is feared a crisis is near. The prime minister declared: ‘There is no more time…’ Take cyclamen… needles of pine… the lily… needles of pine… O woman… —… is overwhelmingly stronger The war…” SOULMONGER*

III

The wreck “Thrush”

“This wood that cooled my forehead at times when noon burned my veins will flower in other hands. Take it, I’m giving it to you; look, it’s wood from a lemon-tree…” I heard the voice as I was gazing at the sea trying to make out a ship they’d sunk there years ago; it was called “Thrush,” a small wreck; the masts, broken, swayed at odd angles deep underwater, like tentacles, or the memory of dreams, marking the hull: vague mouth of some huge dead sea-monster extinguished in the water. Calm spread all around. And gradually, in turn, other voices followed,* whispers thin and thirsty emerging from the other side of the sun, the dark side; you might say they longed for a drop of blood to drink;* familiar voices, but I couldn’t distinguish one from the other. And then the voice of the old man reached me; I felt it quietly falling into the heart of day, as though motionless: “And if you condemn me to drink poison, I thank you. Your law will be my law; how can I go wandering from one foreign country to another, a rolling stone. I prefer death. Who’ll come out best only God knows.” Countries of the sun yet you can’t face the sun. Countries of men yet you can’t face man. The light As the year go by the judges who condemn you grow in number; as the years go by and you converse with fewer voices, you see the sun with different eyes: you know that those who stayed behind were deceiving you the delirium of flesh, the lovely dance that ends in nakedness. It’s as though, turning at night into an empty highway, you suddenly see the eyes of an animal shine, eyes already gone; so you feel your own eyes: you gaze at the sun, then you’re lost in darkness. The doric chiton that swayed like the mountains when your fingers touched it is a marble figure in the light, but its head is in darkness. And those who abandoned the stadium to take up arms

struck the obstinate marathon runner and he saw the track sail in blood, the world empty like the moon, the gardens of victory wither: you see them in the sun, behind the sun. And the boys who dived from the bow-sprits go like spindles twisting still, naked bodies plunging into black light with a coin between the teeth, swimming still, while the sun with golden needles sews sails and wet wood and colors of the sea; even now they’re going down obliquely, the white lekythoi, toward the pebbles on the sea floor. Light, angelic and black, laughter of waves on the sea’s highways tear-stained laughter, the old suppliant sees you as he moves to cross the invisible fields—* light mirrored in his blood, the blood that gave birth to Eteocles and Polynices. Day, angelic and black; the brackish taste of woman that poisons the prisoner emerges from the wave a cool branch adorned with drops. Sing little Antigone, sing, O sing… I’m not speaking to you about things past, I’m speaking about love; decorate your hair with the sun’s thorns, dark girl; the heart of the Scorpion has set,* the tyrant in man has fled, and all the daughters of the sea, Nereids, Graeae,* hurry toward the shimmering of the rising goddess: whoever has never loved will love,* in the light: and you find yourself in a large house with many windows open running from room to room, not knowing from where to look out first,* because the pine-trees will vanish, and the mirrored mountains, and the chirping of birds the sea will drain dry, shattered glass, from north and south your eyes will empty of daylight the way the cicadas suddenly, all together, fall silent. Poros, “Galini,” 31 October 1946 At the end of 1949 my friend George Katsimbalis asked me to write him a letter that might help the well-intentioned reader to read my poem “The Thrush” more easily. * The fact was that at that time this poem appeared to be utterly incomprehensible. I sat down, and in the lighthearted way which one has when writing to a friend, I wrote out for him a kind of scenario. “So,” I wrote,

“it may well be that some day “The Thrush” will be shown as a film.” A few people understood what I was driving at; others turned my words against me or hastened to ascribe to me inconceivable intentions; they thought I was trying to give a definitive interpretation of a poem or, more precisely, to complete a poem of mine with a piece of prose. I have now reread this letter and I think that both the first and the second class of readers have already derived whatever good or bad they could from it. Here I am reprinting only the concluding passages, since they contain a few of those more general thoughts that, I think, have their place in this book.

Letter on The Thrush SEFERIS´ LETTER TO KATSIBALIS

MY DEAR GEORGE… Any explanation of a poem is, I think absurd. Everyone who has the slightest idea of how an artist works knows this. He may have lived long, he may have acquired much learning, he may have been trained as an acrobat. When, however, the time comes for him to create, the mariner’s compass that directs him is the sure instinct that knows, above all, how to bring to light or to sink in the twilight of his consciousness the things (or, as I should prefer to say, the tones) that are necessary, that are unnecessary or that are just sufficient for the creation of this something: the poem. He does not think of these materials; he fingers them, he weighs them, he feels their pulse. When this instinct is not mature enough to show the way, the most fiery sentiment may become disastrous and useless, like frozen ratiocination; it will be able to do nothing but stammer. Poetry, from a technical point of view, may be defined as “the harmonic word”—with the greatest possible emphasis on the term “harmonic,” in the sense of a conjunction, cohesion, correlation, opposition of one idea to another, of one emotion to another. Once I spoke of a “poetic ear”; I meant the ear that can discern such things as these. I think that this kind of hearing, as I define it, is less common in Greece now than it was among the Ionians in the time of Solomos; less common also than is usual in present-day Europe. Perhaps this is due to lack of care, perhaps to our linguistic anarchy, perhaps to the fact that here the evolution of our poetry has been too rapid and nobody has really been able to keep up with it. Generally speaking, in Greece there is less response than one might expect from the trained listeners to poetry. To this, I think, must be attributed the fact that we observe so many and such gross mistakes in our poetical judgments. However it may be, one needs an ear to hear poetry; the rest is just chatting round the fire at Christmas, as I am doing now. I think of this as I try to understand how it came about that in “The Thrush” I had to substitute Socrates for Tiresias. My first answer is that I saw elsewhere the tones that were necessary for the ensemble that I was attempting to complete; the idea of the Theban never even occurred to me. Then—autobiographically—because the Apology is one of the books that has most influenced me in my life; perhaps because my generation has grown up and lived in this age of injustice. Thirdly, because I have a very organic feeling that identifies humaneness with the Greek landscape. I must say that this feeling of mine, which is shared, I think, by many others, is often rather painful. It is the opposite of that state of ceasing to exist, of the abolition of the ego, which one

feels in face of the grandeur of certain foreign landscapes. I should never use such adjectives as “grand” or “stately” for any of the Greek landscapes I have in mind. It is a whole world: lines that come and go; bodies and features, the tragic silence of a “face.” Such things are difficult to express, and I can see the boys getting ready to take up the mocking chorus: “the graverobber of Yannopoulos.” However it may be, it is my belief that in the Greek light there is a kind of process of humanization; I think of Aeschylus not as the Titan or the Cyclops that people sometimes want us to see him as, but as a man feeling and expressing himself close beside us, accepting or reacting to the natural elements just as we all do. I think of the mechanism of justice which he sets before us, this alternation of Hubris and Ate, which one will not find to be simply a moral law unless it is also a law of nature. A hundred years before him Anaximander of Miletus believed that “things” pay by deterioration for the “injustice” they have committed by going beyond the order of time. And later Heraclitus will declare: “The sun will not overstep his measures; if he does, the Erinyes, the handmaids of Justice, will find him out.” The Erinyes will hunt down the sun, just as they hunted down Orestes; just think of these cords which unite man with the elements of nature, this tragedy that is in nature and in man at the same time, this intimacy. Suppose the light were suddenly to become Orestes? It is so easy, just think: if the light of the day and the blood of man were one and the same thing? How far can one stretch this feeling? “Just anthropomorphism,” people say, and they pass on. I do not think it is as simple as that. If anthropomorphism created the Odyssey, how far can one look into the Odyssey? We could go very far; but I shall stop here. We arrived at the light. And the light cannot be explained; it can only be seen. The rest of this scenario may be filled in by the reader—after all, he has to do something too; but let me first recall the last words of Anticleia to her son: The soul, like a dream, flutters away and is gone. But quickly turn your desire to the light And keep all this in your mind. [Odyssey XI, 222-224] Something like this was told to me by that small ship, sunk in the harbor at Poros, that in the happy days used to sail on errands to supply the naval establishment. I hope that all this has shown you that I am a monotonous and obstinate sort of man who, for the last twenty years, has gone on saying the same things over and over again—things that are not even his own… And now, since we have forgotten about it entirely, do me the favor to read, as though it were a Christmas carol, the poem called “The Thrush.” Happy New Year, G.S. Ankara 27 December 1949

A Levant Journal, by George Seferis. Tr. by Roderick Beaton. Ibis Editions. $16.95. To Greek readers, George Seferis and Odysseus Elytis are the two modern poets. According to a poet friend, Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke, Constantine P. Cavafy — her own favorite — is a much less discussed third. While Seferis clearly has his American fans — I was surprised to discover that Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot has some epigraphs from his work — my sense is that in the us he is not nearly as widely read as Cavafy. Certainly in my own case, having

moved to Greece in 1999, I had read quite a bit of Cavafy, who no doubt appealed to my Classicist roots, but had only a peripheral impression of Seferis — the well-chosen handful of pieces from Keeley and Sherrard’sVoices of Modern Greece. Even so, they were harder for me to get any purchase on — I would often slip off their elusive modern surface. This has slowly changed. I kept going back to the poems, now wrestling with them in Greek, staking out more and more “discoveries” in what was still a difficult landscape. Perhaps if I had had a guide to his work in the context of his life and times, as offered by Roderick Beaton in A Levant  Journal, I might have come round sooner. Poetry is that which is lost in translation, as Frost’s truism goes, but there is a corollary to be deduced from this — what comes across in translation is then the prose of the poem, the argument, the plot, the syntax perhaps, the thought if the thought is separate in some way from the sound. The prose of an ambitious poem is not negligible. The diction, the wordplay, the “best words” are lost, but they are still in the “best order.” This is why Cavafy does so well in translation — the parallelisms, juxtapositions, repetitions, irony, situations, characters, and “historical sense” do travel. Cavafy’s artistry may be in the verse of his poems, but his original genius is in the prose of his poems, and that translates very well indeed. The prose of Seferis’s poems is more problematic. Stripped of the music of Greek, the context of its Greekness, and its strata of registers, what remains in translation canseem a hermetic Modernism redolent of Eliot. (Lawrence Durrell writing to Seferis remarked, “We are having a hard time not making you sound like Eliot.”) I have a hunch he fares better in French. It is perfectly possible, for instance, in Greek, to quote a phrase directly from Aeschylus (take “Last Stop,” with its “mnesipemon ponos,” beautifully rendered by Beaton as “the pain-perpetuating memory of pain”) in the ancient Greek without having to change font or language and have it be understandable on some level by the average reader. The language is archaic, but it is clearly the same language — words 2,500 years apart can be placed side by side to set off harmonic vibrations across the millennia. Greek myth will also have a different function for a Greek, an overlap and continuity, not symbol but reality. Odysseus, resembling the Skala fisherman of Seferis’s youth, speaks to Seferis in his own tongue. One of Seferis’s major early works goes by the title of Mythistorima — the regular term in Greek for novel, but, as one can hear, a combination of myth and history. Its twenty-four sections, “numbered” by the twenty-four letters of the Greek alphabet, evoke the twenty-four books of the Iliadand the Odyssey. Seferis’s historical sense also differs from Cavafy’s. (I am thinking of Eliot’s use of the term, though it is best distilled by Faulkner: “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.”) It is as though the character in any Cavafy poem could get up and walk into any other Cavafy poem — shabby, beautiful young men of modern Alexandria fraternizing with Hellenistic grammarians. But Seferis’s historical sense is shaped by a much more direct experience of — indeed sometimes direct involvement in — history’s violent vicissitudes. When Seferis says in an epitaph on Euripides the Athenian, “He grew old between the fires of Troy/and     the quarries of Sicily,” he could almost be talking about himself, his life caught between the Smyrna of his birth in 1900 — in the twilight of the Ottoman Empire — and his death in Athens in 1971 under the oppressive rule of  the Colonels. That Smyrna would be razed and burnt to the ground in what is known by Greeks as the Asia Minor catastrophe of 1922 — the same year as the publication of Eliot’s The Waste Land, a poem Seferis would later famously translate into Greek. Mr. Eugenides the Smyrna merchant would be stuck that year in London, it seems, with his pocketful of currents and

his demotic French. (You can’t go back to Smyrna — it is now modern Izmir.) After his family moved to Athens, Seferis studied law in Paris and embarked on a life as a diplomat for Greece, serving successive governments through world war and civil war, from dictatorship to government-in-exile during German occupation to socialist rule to military junta, and would be stationed in Albania, Turkey, Lebanon, South Africa, Jerusalem, and Egypt, eventually serving as ambassador in London during the Cyprus crisis. He was a civil servant firmly in the establishment who nevertheless became the popular voice of protest. His funeral was held in the Church of the Transformation in Plaka, the old neighborhood of Athens, after which crowds spilled into the thoroughfare, spontaneously breaking into Theodorakis’s setting of his poem “Denial.” With its last line, “And so we changed our life,” it became an anthem of protest. Without this context, Seferis’s work can be difficult to approach. A Levant Journalshould provide a welcoming entrance. Roderick Beaton, who translated, edited, introduced, and annotated this little jewel of a book, which has the look and feel of an actual journal you might tuck into a capacious overcoat pocket, selected excerpts from Seferis’s diaries written during his postings and travels in the Levantine region. Seferis was not just a poet, but a man of letters — a novelist, brilliant critic (see his essay on Cavafy and Eliot), translator, assiduous letter-writer, and diarist. These different modes of writing all illuminate one another. Beaton highlights this by including five poems, which in and of themselves make an excellent introduction. The poems come either from the nautically-titled Logbook II or Logbook III, while the journal entries themselves are sometimes written aboard ship (or in hotels or on trains), with the leitmotif of removals, upheavals, and evacuations. As Beaton points out, though Seferis is steeped in travel writing, this is its opposite — not the willing adventures of the traveler, but the peripeteias of the exile, the displaced person tossed on waves of war, like the anonymous and reluctant companions of Odysseus whose day of return has, in the words of Homer, been “blotted out.” The Companions, characters who appear in one way or another throughout his opus, are clearly still with us. Stratis Thalassianos (Beaton reminds us his name means something like, “Wayfarer the Seafarer”) is arguably one of them. An alter ego of Seferis, he is sometimes depicted as a companion of Odysseus (“I sailed for a year with Captain Odysseus”), sometimes Odysseus himself, though adrift off the coast of South Africa (“Stratis Thalassianos Among the Agapanthi”), sometimes just a Greek sailor far from home. This is from “Stratis Thalassianos at the Dead Sea,” one of the poems in A Levant Journal: the dark train full of  fugitives, where infants are fed on filth, and the sins of their parents and the middle-aged can sense the chasm opening out between the body that remains behind like a wounded camel and the soul whose courage knows no bounds, or so they say. It is also the ships that take them on voyages, standing-room only like stuffed prelates packed into the hold, to come to rest one evening in the seaweed of  the deep, so very gently.

Compare the Jerusalem entry of  July 5, 1942: The “evacuation” train was due to leave at 21:00. We were there by 19:45. There was a set of empty third-class carriages and a motley throng of people waiting for the signal to start pushing and shoving through the turnstiles. The signal duly came, and all the wave of humanity, dragging along suitcases, paper bags, infants, sprang up and started pouring into the carriages, like water into a sinking ship. So we found ourselves on wooden seats in the midst of a crowd speaking German and Italian (the “free” subjects of the enemy), all getting on each other’s nerves, quarrelling and shouting.

The two modes of writing are utterly different in the way they process the raw materials — but the poem is grounded by the reality, and the reality expanded by the metaphorical dimension of the poem. We see just how literal many symbols are, and how the straw of experience is spun into gold. In Egypt in 1943 he writes: On this I insist: why does a certain impression function poetically, more than a thousand other daily impressions?   ...   The last time it happened, I was coming down the stairs from the office: I saw a group of carpenters in a room knocking down a stage-set, which had been left over by the previous tenants. I had a feeling like when the camera lens clicks: the impression functioned: why that one and not another?

From this, “Mountebanks, Middle East” emerges, a poem both surreal and (depressingly) topical, charged with poetic and historical moment. It begins: We set up theaters and knock them down every time we come to town — we set up theaters and stage-sets, but stronger still are our fates that sweep away both them and us mountebanks and impresarios both the prompter and the band to every corner of  the land.

And concludes: look into our hearts: a sponge to hang about bazaars and plunge down into the blood and grief of  the tetrarch and the common thief.

(Note the sensitive rendering by Beaton of the rhyme and meter — one hopes he will try his hand at more verse translation.) In Greek, the title is “Theatrinoi” — “actors,” but “insincere people.” “Mountebanks” gets this across neatly, though it is perhaps more highly colored than the Greek. (There is also something to be said for the simplicity of Keeley and Sherrard’s “Actors, Middle East,” which also vibrates with political overtones. My own stray thoughts went to “Players” or even “Hypocrites,” though the latter is probably too arcane a pun.) A tetrarchy was a quarter of a region and the tetrarch its ruler — it specifically applied to areas such as Palestine — while the Tetrarch that springs to mind is Herod. The journal entries also illuminate Seferis’s thinking on poetry and poets, and how that thinking is caught up in experience and landscape. In Egypt, Seferis tries to come to terms with the influence of Cavafy: I think of Cavafy, as I inspect this low-lying land. His poetry is like that too; as prosaic as the endless plain before us. It has no rise and fall; it goes at a walking pace. I understand Cavafy better now and I respect him for what he did.

(Seferis’s literary circle had at one point been dismissive of Cavafy.) Presumably there is a pun here in the Greek, since the word for prose is the word for pedestrian. Seferis has a diarist’s perfect pitch for dialogue and anecdote, which range from the humorous to the tragic. From a Greek writer living in Alexandria who nonetheless does not bother releasing his books in Greece, we hear: “Do you send those [privately-printed books] to Greece?” I [G.S.] asked him. “No. I allow nothing to distract me from the task at hand. Not even the pleasure of giving them to my friends. For me the work of art is like fucking. If it happens to result in children, that’s purely by the way.”

“Wherever I travel Greece wounds me,” Seferis says in perhaps his most famous line, and in the journals we see how true this is. For throughout the Levant — Egypt, Jerusalem, Iran, Cyprus, Lebanon, even Iraq — it is not only the pain of Greek exiles, or the sickening incompetence of local and colonial Greek politicians, but the decaying monuments of a once-extensive Greek-speaking empire — ancient theatres hollow as sea shells — since fallen into dust, that prick the heart. Having been born into one toppling empire, witnessing all that it takes down with it, he was forever wary of other empires in their decline, such as the British on Cyprus. But again for Seferis, this is overlaid by the historical sense — the palimpsests of ancient, Hellenistic, Byzantine, Ottoman, and modern empires. It is a region where generations utter solemnly to one another across the millennia, even as the giant us Embassy compound is doing in Iraq today: “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair” amidst the leveling sands of time. The haunting question for Seferis is always, what shall we replace this with? But above all, what comes across in these excerpts is that Seferis’s own brand of Modernism, deeply influenced as it was by Eliot, cannot be divided from current events, history, or politics. In 1944 he writes: Timos wants me to return to literature and write a prologue and a study of the poet for a book that’s been commissioned by an Alexandrian publisher, with the title The Age of Eliot. My response, which is to send them to the devil is strong: The Age of Eliot, after everything that’s been done before our eyes these last few months? Poetry is not an ornament of life, nor an escape from it, but deep engagement with it, integrated expression of  it. It is the high seriousness of Seferis (not to be confused with humorlessness, for humor too can play for mortal stakes) that feels so refreshing in this day and age, like a glass of water after elaborate cocktails. He writes in “An Old Man on the Riverbank,” (“Gerontas,” “old man” in Greek, cannot help here but evoke Eliot’s “Gerontion”): I ask nothing else but to speak simply, to be granted this grace. Because our song has become overloaded with so many kinds of music that slowly it is sinking and our art has been overlaid so heavily that the gold has eaten away its face and it is time we spoke the few words we have because tomorrow our souls set sail.

The overlay of gold on the image simultaneously brings to mind the gold death masks of pharaohs and Mycenean kings, and Byzantine icons with their precious metal revetments — revetments that often survive the painted wooden images themselves. When one looks at such an artifact, it is exactly as though the face has been “eaten away.” The image is pure Seferis — stubbornly local, mysterious, universal. Take away the layers of gilt, he seems to say. Let us look on the face, flawed, individual, human. -Alicia Stallings

Odysseus Elytis

The Mad Pomegranate Tree In these all-white courtyards where the south wind blows Whistling through vaulted arcades, tell me, is it the mad pomegranate tree That leaps in the light, scattering its fruitful laughter With windy wilfulness and whispering, tell me, is it the mad pomegranate tree That quivers with foliage newly born at dawn Raising high its colours in a shiver of triumph? On plains where the naked girls awake, When they harvest clover with their light brown arms Roaming round the borders of their dreams–tell me, is it the mad pomegranate tree, Unsuspecting, that puts the lights in their verdant baskets That floods their names with the singing of birds–tell me Is it the mad pomegranate tree that combats the cloudy skies of the world? On the day that it adorns itself in jealousy with seven kinds of feathers, Girding the eternal sun with a thousand blinding prisms Tell me, is it the mad pomegranate tree That seizes on the run a horse's mane of a hundred lashes, Never sad and never grumbling–tell me, is it the mad pomegranate tree That cries out the new hope now dawning? Tell me, is that the mad pomegranate tree waving in the distance, Fluttering a handkerchief of leaves of cool flame, A sea near birth with a thousand ships and more, With waves that a thousand times and more set out and go To unscented shores–tell me, is it the mad pomegranate tree That creaks the rigging aloft in the lucid air? High as can be, with the blue bunch of grapes that flares and celebrates Arrogant, full of danger–tell me, is it the mad pomegranate tree That shatters with light the demon's tempests in the middle of the world That spreads far as can be the saffron ruffle of the day

Richly embroidered with scattered songs–tell me, is it the mad pomegranate tree That hastily unfastens the silk apparel of day? In petticoats of April first and cicadas of the feast of mid-August Tell me, that which plays, that which rages, that which can entice Shaking out of threats their evil black darkness Spilling the sun's embrace intoxicating birds Tell me, that which opens its wings on the breast of things On the breast of our deepest dreams, is that the mad pomegranate tree? Greek; trans. Edmund Keeley & Philip Sherrard