George Seferis: Collected Poems

Foreword

George Seferis (born George Seferiadis) is the best representative of the 30s generation and one of the poets who influenced the newest poetic formats in Greece as well as in Europe. In 1963 he received the Nobel Prize for literature. 16 years later Odysseus Elytis was awarded the same Prize.

This translation of Seferis’ poetry is simple and to the point, and it offers a clear view of work considered by many readers and book critics difficult to understand. Yet Seferis’ poetry, which he started publishing in the early part of the twentieth century resonates with today’s reader as if it was written recently.

George Seferis lived through the destruction and misery of the 1922 war between the Greeks and the Turks and the mass migration of the Greek population from Asia Minor to the mainland Greece. He endured the suffering of the Second World War and the years of German occupation as well as the devastating civil war and the difficult years that followed when Greece tried to find its footing on the world stage. Seferis also lived during the strange years of military dictatorship which lasted from 1967 until 1974. He died in 1971 while his homeland was still under the heavy boot of the four colonels.

There is an acute similarity between Seferis’ life and that of this translator as they have both spent the greater part of their lives away from their homeland and they both felt their bond with the motherland in a lot stronger way than those who live there. Surely people who live away from their homeland experience the wrath of nostalgia, a word derived from two Greek words, nostos (νόστος) and algos (άλγος). Nostos underscores the longing one has for his homeland and, algos relates to the ache a person feels when the return is impossible. For every émigré, this severe homesickness becomes the catalyst for the manner in which they observe their place of birth and the way they lead their lives in their adopted homeland. George Seferis and this translator have lived a long part of their lives abroad, Seferis because of his diplomatic career and this translator by choosing to emigrate.

Living in a foreign country, one undoubtedly retains countless images from his homeland. Images that serve to guide him in the new land as well as provide him with resolve to face the reality of the new life, with hope to plan for his future away from his homeland, with patience to endure the everyday struggles one deals with when one faces the difficulty of communicating in the new language. At the same time they provide certain happiness one finds within oneself when one draws strength from his heritage, the myths and symbols of his motherland. Such a person undoubtedly develops certain reverence for the land he left behind. As a result, everything such person creates in reference to the old country is adorned with a celestial beauty emanating from his heart and the deep sense of belonging unparalleled to any other bond a man might develop in his life. This unique bond and deep sense of belonging is evident throughout Seferis’ work and it will be analyzed when the poem Return of the Émigré is discussed.

George Seferis lived much of his life away from his beloved Vourla, the small village near Smyrna, Asia Minor, where he was born. His career in the diplomatic corps took him to various countries around the globe. Like any other Greek who lives the bittersweet emotion of nostalgia he sees his motherland through a different lens than those who remained in Greece. Emigrés always retain an unquestionable glamour about their homeland, especially Greeks. Surely it is said that Greeks living away from home are far more Greek than those living in Greece.

That of course has a lot to do with the influence the foreign country has on the immigrant as he struggles to assimilate. While attempting to establish a firm footing and new identity in his adopted homeland, he gives up his original ways and customs, adopting new ones, while he always remembers the homeland to which he hopes one day to return. Sadly, it is a battle destined to defeat. Nevertheless the émigré never stops dreaming of the return trip. George Seferis rides his emotional roller coaster as he struggles to maintain the balance between past and present, a balance evident in his poem The King of Assini in which he finally admits that on his part every effort turns futile and the past can’t assimilate with the present since even the poet is, a void.

Introduction

George Seferis comes from a family of writers and artists. His father was an academic, his brother and sister poets, and they all influenced him positively, thus contributing to his tremendous creative achievements. Seferis was not a prolific poet like Yannis Ritsos, or Odysseus Elytis, however, Seferis’ poetry spanned from the early thirties when he first appeared in Greek letters until his death in 1971. Although he was considered a reserved poet, sophisticated, philosophical rather than a poet of instant excitement or even the playful poet composing his verse like a poet-river, endlessly rushing his verse deeply lyrical, thoughtful and sensual drew from his deep knowledge of the history of Greece, which he transformed into a revivalist poetry recognized both in the international stage and at home. Seferis changed the direction of Modern Greek literature by combining the traditional Greek formats with the world-wide ideological trends of his time.

George Seferis lived most of his life in a dichotomy, trying to balance between the poet George Seferis and the diplomat George Seferiadis. He lived permanently in his own dimension, between the diplomat and the poet who managed the impossible: to be honored with Nobel Literature in 1963, bringing to his homeland the first literary prize that awarded the spirit of Greece.

Seferis won the highest literary recognition at a time critical to Hellenism and the Greek language: his prize was at the same time a tribute to Greece and its contribution to European culture: ... for his wonderful lyrical style, inspired by a deep feeling for the Greek cultural ideal, as was the rationale of the Swedish Academy.

There have been several lengthy periods during which Seferis appeared to have written very little if anything. Following his award of a Nobel Prize in 1963, he wrote just one book, Three Secret Poems, then during the dictatorship, he managed his last two poems, The Cats of St. Nikolas and On Aspalathi.

In 1918 Seferis finished school and moved to Paris to study law at the Sorbonne, where he obtained his PhD in 1924. There he lived the 1922 Asia Minor catastrophe, a trauma that will remain deep in his heart and unhealed throughout his life. In Paris he also came in contact with the modernism in writing that the French avant-garde introduced to the world. The years he stayed in the French capital were decisive for shaping his poetic physiognomy. It was the time when the modernist movement was at its peak.

As with any other Greek poet, Seferis’ poetry is enriched with known Greek motifs such as the azure sea, the small islands, secluded coves, golden sand and above all these, the ancient beauty and the glorious past represented by the images of the voyage, rocks, marbles, statues, temples, and the sea. His adoration for everything Greek shines throughout: the landscape, harsh and punitive, the naked, frugal beauty, the sea’s whoosh on the shores. Images from his childhood, the tall granite mountains, traditions and customs, the daily struggle of ordinary folk and the continuation of the Greek language through the eons appear in his verse again and again. This adoration of everything Greek is what Yannis Ritsos called Romiosini that characteristic Greekness of the people that all contemporary poets including Cavafy, Elytis, Ritsos, Seferis, Kazantzakis, Palamas, Sikelianos, and others presented in their works; the Greekness which is not just the contemporary Greece but the diachronic Greece from her very beginning as a concept nation, to the day of Seferis and all the other great Greek poets.

Some analysts find similarities between Seferis’ works and Eliot’s. Seferis was introduced to Eliot’s poetry in 1931 while Seferis was with the diplomatic corps in London. The two poets met in person twenty years later and they influenced each other although there were fundamental differences between the two. Seferis gifted the Greek literature with the first ever translation of Eliot’s Wasteland and there are places where Seferis’ work exhumes the pessimistic aura of mid nineteenth century Europe, although his images emanate from his contemporary Greece where, he says, bodies no longer know how to love.

Seferis suffered from unrelenting nostalgia and the long-traveled poet returned to Greece only through literature and this became the pattern of his writing which reflected his endless longing for his motherland. Crafting his poems he used a strange interrelation between the art of poetry and the artistic technique as the two appear to coexist, meddle and interrelate in his verse thus serving and complimenting each other. As the poems search and self-reveal, as they try to surface and struggle to develop, so does the technique used. Indeed both struggle to come to the light and in their fight to appear they create co-centric circles such as when one tosses a pebble into a body of water. In these circles the basic characteristics of Seferis’ art become evident: dualities, pairs of images, such as nostos-thanatos in Thrush, myth-history, evident in Mythistorema and in his three Log Books but most importantly from our perspective, the duality nostos-algos, in his famous poem The Return of the Émigré in which nostos results in traumatic reality when the old émigré returns to his homeland and searches for childhood images that no longer exist in a place where everything has become small and insignificant. This recognition, this undoubted reality of contemporary Greece causes to him stronger pain than the nostos he felt while living abroad.

Images such as the voyage, rocks, marbles, statues, the sea, temples, rocks, abound in Seferis’ poetry and serve to connect modern Greece with her glorious past in a special way since these references represent the famous history, though static, glorious and admirable, yet dead and immobile which the poet struggles to connect with the present – an effort not totally unsuccessful. These images refer to the mythological and historical weight of Greece carried on the shoulders of modern Greeks, which Seferis finds almost insufferable,

he sinks the one who carries

the heavy rocks

he says as he accepts and understands that the ancient glory is no longer present. Indeed in the King of Assini he realizes that the ancient glory is completely dead where even, the poet is a void an empty medium, unable to bridge the chasm between the two worlds. The absence of that bridge is evident in images such as,

and the bird, a wind broken

that flew away last winter

as well as

with the ancient moments and the

contemporary sorrow

images that transpose the contemporary to the ancient and as a result they create the unavoidable comparison that finds contemporary Greeks to be of lesser importance. Consequently the images of the voyage the rocks, statues, marbles, temples underscore the reasons why today’s Greeks consider themselves as failing to measure up to their glorious antiquity. Images of rocks, static and immovable, associate with death as well as the images used in reference to water being static in cisterns, as opposed to the flowing water of springs and rivers,

We have no rivers, we have no wells,

no springs only a few cisterns—and these