Greek tragedy
Peter Levi
Collected Poems George Seferis (Anvil Press 0.95) Thirty years ago, big publishers were grumbling that there was no money in Poetry, and less than that in translated Poetry. Now they are saying the same about novels. Yet we have had more and better translations of foreign poetry into English since about 1960 than at any time since the Elizabethans. It is a sign of the times that today the stream is diminishing, and that Modern foreign poetry, even if it is well known and much admired, has to be issued by one of the bigger small presses. There is no longer enough money in it for those fat- ter publishers who used to be interested in its prestige.
George Seferis first appeared in English soon after the war, in a selection that has never been bettered; it was partly the work of Bernard Spencer and Laurence Durrell. The book has been out of print for a very long time. The reputation of George Seferis in England was distinguished but not widespread until his Nobel Prize in 1963. His now famous Collected Poems, translated by Keeley and Sherrard were pro- duced by Princeton University Press in 1967 and a little later in this country by Cape. It has recently been out of print, and we owe the third edition, which adds a number of Poems and makes some revisions, to the Anvil Press.
During all this time, the size of his achievement has continuously grown. At first it depended largely on 'Mythistorema', the powerful and mysterious sequence of Poems in which he found his compelling voice as a young man, and on the title of the 1948 selection, 'The King of Asine', which is a fine poem and a marvellous piece of sustained rhetoric and sensuous explora- tion, but not the best of Seferis. `Mythistorerna' is still printed first in the Collected Poems, and it is still the best Place to start. It has a purity and strength that are essential qualities of Seferis as a Poet. The nearest analogy in English is the dispersed and heavenly music that haunts the milder shades of Pound's 'Cantos'. ‘Mythistorema' has a confidence and a reticence that make it classical.
There are other sides of Seferis. First of all, the bulk of his poetry consists of a long series of personal meditations and dramatic fragments which are peculiarly sane. His songs of experience are, at the same time, innocent. His eye does not roll in a fine frenzy. This poetry is for grown ups, it is perfectly serious. It is full of memorable detail, in Greek of phrases, in English of images and the suggestion of rhythms those who disappear, the sailor smoking on the garden steps, babies who play in gardens with the tassels of the sun, the lead melted for divination, the brilliance of the summer sea. In how many ways can poetry be nourishing? This poetry is nourishing in many, perhaps in all of them.
It has become more obvious with the publication of his diaries, volume by volume, that Seferis was, among other things, a great political poet. His public career ought to have made us at least ask the question long ago. But Greek history in this century has been a river much tortured by rocky outcrops and ravines, and the received truths of British journalism have not always permitted the attitudes of a Seferis to be understood. He wrote, in an essay in 1967, that he had given himself wholeheartedly to only two national crises, the war against Hitler and the struggle for Cyprus. It is in those two periods, and in the final period of the Colonels, in which he gave himself again, that his poems have the deepest political resonance. These poems are among few modern examples of what responsible political poetry would be like. It is tragic, of course. But the paradox of this and so much of his poetry is how it can be so perfectly serious, so profoundly tragic, and so inspiriting, so undepressing. In a re-reading today .after years of re- readings, the poems are stronger and more innocent-eyed, bleaker-eyed and more universal than before. The Delphic rumbl- ing is still audible, but the poems look clearer than they used to look. Seferis is unusual among the poets of the modern movement — those who, as young men, read Laforgue with delight — in not being a writer for intellectuals, just for human beings who think.
Translations make him a little duller, a little slower. They are the steady rattle of a lawnmower instead of the whisper of a scythe in the grass. Seferis was a brilliant linguist, and I know that he was hungry to be better translated than he has been. All the same, I doubt if we shall ever see translations as wonderfully full of Seferis as these, which can so decently face the originals on opposite pages; or if one day for a few poems, then never for the whole works.
A great deal used to be said about his likeness to Eliot, his friend whom he loved. As time goes by it seems less substantial. The few mannerisms they had in common for a time do not lead anywhere important and their discoveries of Laforgue and of other French writers were made in- dependently. For what it is worth, I discovered with pleasure that Seferis was also fond of Francis Jammes (`whom my friend Tom Eliot was calling Francis Jam, my dear'). But as it often emerges with time in the case of great and original poets, late Seferis now seems more and more to be bas- ed chiefly on middle and early Seferis. He invented his opportunities, he fought for his voice. 'I often think, my dear, that I owe my career in poetry to the fact that I do not play Bridge'.
If one was lucky enough to know him, it is terribly hard to think away his seductive charm and his admirable principles, and to consider his poems as a text. Even his recorded voice is hard to forget, and does more for certain poems than the voices of Eliot or Yeats or Pound do for their own work; it does as much as Bunting's voice. I cannot remember that he read Briggflats but as poetry it comes close to him. The poetry of Seferis, all the same, goes far beyond his personality.
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