Classical Receptions Journal Vol 6. Iss. 1 (2014) pp. 74–103
‘The Painful Memory of Woe’: Greek
tragedy and the Greek Civil War in
the work of George Seferis1
Vayos Liapis*
This article deals with some of the poems by George Seferis (1900–71) that deploy
the ethos and/or language of Greek (especially Aeschylean) tragedy to mythologize
the events of the Greek Civil War (1944–49). This mythologizing process both
triggers and conditions the reader’s reaction: s/he is invited to interpret
contemporary history through patterns of meaning that derive from the most
monumental classical myths and tragic texts. At the same time, by invoking Greek
antiquity, the poems zoom out to provide a wide view, thereby detaching current
events from their immediate context and re-inscribing them in the much larger
framework of human history, thought, and culture. The poems examined include
‘Blind’ (December 1945), ‘Oedipal, ‘48’ (October 1948), and ‘Thrush’ (October
1946). It is shown how contemporary history is invested, in these poems, with the
archetypal qualities of tragic myth. By the paradigmatic use of Greek (especially
Aeschylean) tragedy Seferis helps define the interpretive framework of his poetry by
providing insights into the worldview informing his stance towards the Greek Civil War
and towards Greek tradition in general.
Aeschylus and Seferis
Aeschylus holds a special place in the poetry of George Seferis (1900–71).2 An
edition of Aeschylus’ plays was one of the very few books Seferis had with him
when posted as a diplomat to Johannesburg (July 1941). Away from friends and
family, as he followed the exiled Greek government in its peregrinations during the
Second World War, he felt a sort of comfort at the idea that Aeschylus ‘can fill
several years of one’s life’.3 Aeschylus, Seferis noted in his personal diary, exudes a
*Correspondence: Graduate Programme in Theatre Studies, Open University of Cyprus,
P.O. Box 12794, CY-2252, Nicosia, Cyprus. [email protected]
1 This article is part of the research project ‘Our Heroic Debate with the Eumenides’: Greek
Tragedy and the Poetics and Politics of Identity in Modern Greek Poetry and Theatre, which
is generously funded by the Research Promotion Foundation of Cyprus. My warmest
thanks go to Professors Roderick Beaton and David Ricks (King’s College London), to
Dr Antonis Petrides (Open University of Cyprus), and to two Classical Receptions Journal
anonymous readers for constructive criticisms. Translations of Seferis’ poems and prose
are my own, unless otherwise indicated.
2 Cf. Mastrodimitris (1964: 574–7); Leontsini (2006: 235–7).
3 See Seferis (1977b: 120, 121).
ß The Author 2013. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
For Permissions, please email: [email protected]
doi:10.1093/crj/clt012
‘THE PAINFUL MEMORY OF WOE’
sense of serene rootedness, of belonging to an inalienable tradition: ‘Even if you feel
that you yourself are ephemeral, you know that this [i.e. Aeschylus’ Seven against
Thebes] is not ephemeral, you know that what part of yourself lies in there is not
ephemeral’.4 In particular, Seferis was fascinated by an idea that occupies a supreme
position in the Aeschylean universe, namely that of natural order, of security and
balance, of a justice prevailing like a law of nature, ‘without sentimentality, without
moralising, without psychology’.5
Already in late 1939, as premonitions of the Second World War loom large in the
horizon, Seferis becomes more and more preoccupied with the Aeschylean notion of
order emerging from chaos, of structure offsetting confusion. A profound belief in
these ideas was to sustain Seferis against the unimaginable turmoil that the war years
were to cause him.6 An Aeschylean line of cardinal importance in this respect is
Agamemnon 179–80:
st0z"i d’ 2nq’ 4pnou7 pr1 kard0 a”
mnhsip–mwn p0no”
There drips before the heart, instead of sleep,
the misery of pain recalled.
(Translation by Sommerstein 2008: 21)
The Aeschylean line is quoted by Seferis in his personal diary as an illustration of his
highly emotional state at the time, one ‘made of memories, of the most passionate
nostalgia, and of the injustices that well up and choke you’.8 It also makes an
appearance in Seferis’ service diary a few years later (25 April 1944) as a reaction
to news of three mutinied Greek war-ships in the port of Alexandria having been
stormed on 22 April by cadets loyal to the national government. At the ensuing
funeral, the coffins of the cadets who fell in action were adorned with wreaths and
flowers, whereas those of the mutinied sailors lay bare and unadorned as an eloquent
symbol of ‘implacable retribution’ as one newspaper put it at the time. Here is
Seferis’ disgusted commentary on the news: ‘A defamation of the dead. Worse: a
mistake. If only they had read Aeschylus: ‘‘mnhsip–mwn p0no”’’—Idiots.’9
Although later in his career Seferis’ attention shifted to Euripidean tragedy as a
source of mythic material, Aeschylus seems to have haunted him until the end of his
days. In his famous ‘Statement’ against the Greek Colonels’ junta (28 March 1969),
which was broadcast on the BBC Greek service and then on Radio Paris and on
Deutsche Welle, Seferis evokes the mechanics of self-spawning evil as laid out
4
5
6
7
Ibid., p. 33 (entry for 1 March 1941).
Seferis (1977a: 125–6). Cf. Beaton (2003: 172).
Cf. Beaton (2003: 173).
Emperius’ 2nq’ 4pnou is generally accepted by modern editors over the transmitted e!n q’
4pnN vel sim. The point is that the painful memory of woe keeps one awake at nights.
8 Seferis (1977a: 130) (entry for 22 September 1941).
9 Seferis (1979: 208). Cf. Beaton (2003: 234).
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VAYOS LIAPIS
originally in Aeschylus: ‘Everyone has now learned and knows that in dictatorships
the beginning may seem easy, but tragedy awaits, ineluctably, at the end. The drama
of this end tortures us, consciously or unconsciously, as in the age-old choruses of
Aeschylus. As long as the anomaly lasts, evil will advance further and further.’10
Seferis and the Greek Civil War
Before proceeding to explore Seferis’ dialogue with Greek tragedy, especially
Aeschylus, in poems written during, and providing a commentary on, the Greek
Civil War, it will be necessary to provide a brief overview of the main events surrounding that war, whose consequences were more devastating and long-lasting for
Greece than those of the Second World War that preceded it.11
During the last year of Second World War in Greece, violent conflicts erupted
between the two principal armed resistance organizations, left-wing (ELAS) and
right-wing (EDES), in what is commonly considered the ‘first round’ of the Greek
Civil War.12 In December 1944, shortly after its liberation from the Axis forces
(October 1944), Athens witnessed the so-called ‘December riots’, or Dekemvriana,
which signified the beginning of the ‘second round’ of the Greek Civil War.
Following the refusal of the Greek Communist Party (KKE) to surrender its militia
to the coalition government headed by Prime Minister George Papandreou and
enjoying British support, the communist ministers withdrew from Papandreou’s
cabinet on the 1st of December 1944. On the same day, the National Liberation
Front (EAM), the communist-backed guerrilla organization that had played a crucial role in the resistance against the German occupation forces, announced that a
large political rally was to be held in Syntagma Square, at the centre of Athens,
on the 3rd of December. During the rally, policemen opened fire against demonstrators, claiming several lives. Another communist-backed rally took place on the
following day, with more demonstrators being killed by government forces.
Negotiations ensued, to no avail, and on the 12th of February 1945 (under a new
Greek government headed by Prime Minister Nikolaos Plastiras) the Varkiza
Agreement was signed, whereby EAM partisans were obliged to surrender their
arms and to dissolve their ranks within two weeks. However, armed conflict between
Communists and government forces continued, and when elections were eventually
held on 31 March 1946 (under yet another Greek government headed since
10 For the Greek text of Seferis’ ‘Statement’ see Seferis (1981c: 261–2); on its dissemination
see Beaton (2003: 398). For its context and the reactions it generated see Keeley (1983:
107–10).
11 The following overview is based on Woodhouse (1976); Mazower (1993); Close (1993,
1995); and Kontis (2000a, b).
12 Cf. Beaton (2003: 251). On the politics of the Greek resistance movements, especially the
rivalry between ELAS and EDES, see Woodhouse (1976: 21–52); Mazower (1993: 138–
43). On the structure, function and ideology of ELAS, the largest Greek guerilla organization during the Occupation, see again Mazower (1993: 297–321).
76
‘THE PAINFUL MEMORY OF WOE’
November 1945 by Prime Minister Themistoklis Sofoulis), about 55.1% of the
votes went to the right-wing coalition ‘United Front of the National-Minded’.
The Communist Party had followed a policy of abstention, and an especially high
percentage (40%) of voters refused to vote.
With the new right-wing government now in office, communist guerrillas raided
targets mainly in Northern Greece, where sympathetic Slavic paramilitary groups
were particularly strong, apparently abetted and aided by Tito’s Yugoslavia. In
June 1946, the National Army was mobilized against the Communists, and at
about the same time extraordinary policies were introduced in order to overcome
communist activity, thereby leading to a number of Greek citizens being executed
or imprisoned or deported to concentration camps on remote islands. On the 1st
of September 1946, a rigged referendum decided in favour of the exiled
King George II being reinstated. In reaction to this, the Communist Party
announced the formation of a 10,000-strong ‘Greek Democratic Army’ (DSE)
but that move was in turn answered by the formation of government-controlled
Countryside Security Units, which often acted as little more than governmentsanctioned terrorist groups. Conflict escalated, a ‘liberated region’ under communist
control was self-declared in Macedonia and Thrace (later to evolve into a self-styled
Republic), thousands of Greek communists were arrested and displaced on charges
of attempted sedition, and eventually both the Greek Communist Party and the
communist-controlled National Liberation Front (EAM) were outlawed by the
Government, the relevant Act prescribing even the pain of death for any seditious
activity.
Despite these setbacks, the DSE appeared to achieve some progress on the
military front in early 1948, while the national army’s counter-offensives remained
largely ineffectual. The tide began really to turn with the arrival of General
James Van Fleet, Head of the Joint United States Military Advisory and Planning
Group (JUSMAPG), in Athens, on 24 February 1948. JUSMAPG was practically
in control of the Greek government’s military operations against the communists,
and General Van Fleet saw to it that some 260,000,000 US dollars worth of armament were made immediately available to the Greek armed forces. There followed
large-scale Army campaigns against the communist guerrillas in Roumeli and then
in Epirus and in the Peloponnese, culminating in the annihilation of DSE’s remaining forces in the last phase of the Civil War (3–30 August 1949), in which napalm
bombs were used extensively against the guerrillas. This was the end of the Greek
Civil War, a conflict that claimed some 100,000 lives, led to the displacement of
some 700,000 persons, and caused a deep political rift that continues to divide
Greeks even today.
In light of the preceding historical overview, it is now time to discuss Seferis’
responses to the events, insofar as they can be deduced from his service and personal
diaries. At the outset of the ‘December events’, or Dekemvriana — the bloody
confrontation in Athens between communist demonstrators and government
forces, which as we have seen soon expanded into a fully fledged civil war — the
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VAYOS LIAPIS
6th of December 1944 is marked as ‘a black day’ (ma0rh m:r# a) in Seferis’ personal
diary.13 Throughout December 1944, the poet’s diary records harrowing
descriptions of non-stop gun-fighting and bombing,14 of bloodshed, of food shortages, and of rotting bodies, including those of children, strewn in the streets of
Athens.15 As Seferis poignantly remarks, ‘I’m under the impression that I’m at the
bedside of a dying person, among hysterical madmen possessed by a furious wish to
finish him off as soon as possible’.16 He sees himself surrounded by ‘young men who
prefer machine guns to humanity; by old men, like so many senile moneychangers;
and in-between, a herd shaken by panic fear’17 — so much so that he proclaims the
last two months of 1944 as being second to none in their horror.18
By contrast to the outspokenness of his personal diary, Seferis’ poetry is typically more circumspect, often reflecting his reactions to contemporary events
through the (sometimes superimposed) filters of mythology, national history,
philosophy, and/or Greek tragedy. To the extent that it contributes to a
mythologization of current events, and of Greek Civil War in particular, this
filtering process both triggers and conditions the reader’s response to these
events: the reader is invited to interpret contemporary history through patterns
of meaning derived from classical myths and texts. The interpretive process is
sometimes aided by notes appended by the poet himself to the text, although as is
the case in modernist poetry in general there is much that is left to the ‘ideal’ or
‘competent’ or ‘implied’ reader to puzzle out by employing relevant background
information, strategies, patterns etc. targeted to the interpretation of the specific
text.19 At the same time, by invoking classical texts from Greek antiquity, the poems
zoom out to provide a wide view, thereby detaching current events from their
immediate context and re-inscribing them in the much larger framework of
human history, thought, and culture.
13
14
15
16
17
18
Seferis (1977b: 271).
See further Mazower (1993: 370).
Seferis (1977b: 371–82).
Ibid., p. 375 (entry for 10 December 1944).
Ibid., p. 376 (entry for 12 December 1944).
Seferis (1977c: 11) (1 January 1945): ‘I think there has been no year quite like the previous
year: nothing more horrible than the last two months.’
19 See Culler (1975: 123–4) for the ‘ideal reader’ as a theoretical construct — a fictional
reader who is master of the textual information, interpretive techniques, reading strategies, cognitive patterns, omissions etc required ‘to read and interpret works in ways
which we consider acceptable, according to the institution of literature’. For a history
of the concept in critical theory see DeMaria 1978. Seferis’ conception of the ‘competent
reader’ is derived principally from Montaigne (Essais I, xxiii): ‘Un suffisant lecteur
descouvre souvent ès escrits d’autruy, des perfections autres que celles que l’autheur
y a mises et apperceues, et y preste des sens et des visages plus riches’ (Montaigne 2007:
132). See further Seferis (1981a: 57, 149).
78
‘THE PAINFUL MEMORY OF WOE’
The Greek Civil War mythologized (I): ‘Blind’ and the Labdacids
In Blind, a poem written in mid-December 1945,20 allusions to the Labdacid myth
(and to (Neo)Platonic philosophy) are intertwined with transparent references to the
political situation in Greece at the time of the Civil War to convey a feeling of
personal and communal malaise:
BLIND
Sleep is heavy on December mornings
black like the waters of Acheron, without dreams,
without memory, without even a laurel sprig.
Awakenings rip gashes in forgetfulness as in flogged skin,
and the soul that has lost its way emerges holding
ruins of chthonic paintings: the soul, a dancing girl
with useless castanets, with tottering feet,
heels bruised from tramping heavily
at the gathering over there that foundered.
Sleep is heavy on December mornings.
And each December is worse than the one before.
One year, Parga; the next year, Syracuse;
dug-up bones of ancestors, quarries
full of exhausted people, invalids, without breath;
and the blood is bought, and the blood is sold
and the blood is divided like the children of Oedipus,
and the children of Oedipus are dead.
Empty streets, pockmarked faces of houses,
iconodules and iconoclasts slaughtering each other all night.
Shutters locked and bolted. In the room
the meagre light crept into the corners
like a blind dove.
And he
groped his way through
the deep meadow
seeing the darkness
behind the light.
December 1945
5
10
15
20
25
‘December’, the month when the internecine conflict had begun a year earlier,
dominates the poem: it is strategically placed at the beginning of the first and the
second strophe (l. 10), as well as in the second line of the second strophe and in the
20 See Seferis (1976: 12). A version of the poem (under a different title) is included in the
entry for ‘Saturday, [15] December [1944]’ in Seferis (1977c: 24), cf. 38.
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VAYOS LIAPIS
poem’s date at the end. The death-like sleep ‘on December mornings’ — a dreamless, memory-less state, ‘like the waters of Acheron’, the Underworld river of Greek
myth21 — evokes the image of a chthonic region, an icon of the Greek urban and
rural landscape that had been laid to waste since December 1944. The Civil War is
one from which the ‘laurel sprig’ — a transparent symbol of military distinction —
is by definition excluded.22 In a partial reversal of the Platonic concept of the
remembering soul, whereby the human ability to learn is attributed to the soul’s
recollection of ‘the original, prenatal, vision of the Forms’,23 the narrator’s soul ‘that
has lost its way’24 tries in vain to forget, but the harrowing experiences of its waking
hours will not allow it to do so. The image of the soul as a dancer may derive from
Plotinian Neoplatonism: Plotinus conceives of the universe as a mathematical structure, which consists of ‘number’ and melody; thus, music is for him the art that most
closely conveys the order and harmony of the cosmos. Indeed, Plotinus on a number
of occasions refers to the dance of the soul around the Intellect (Ennead I. 8. 2. 24–5)
or its dance at the moment when it is reunited with its intelligible source (VI. 9. 1).25
In its Seferian mutation, however, the soul becomes a meretricious dancing girl
(2rchstr0 ”),26 ineffectually performing her routines at meaningless, futile gatherings. The image of the ‘gathering . . . that foundered’ may evoke the countless official
‘gatherings’ — governmental meetings, committees, and councils — that (to judge
by his diaries) exasperated Seferis the diplomat to the extreme, since they hardly
ever came to any good.27
21 For Acheron as a river of Hades, into which flow two other Underworld streams
(Pyriphlegethon and Cocytus) see Odyssey 10. 512–14. For the nekyomanteion (an
oracle where dead spirits were called up for consultation) near the historical Acheron
in Thesprotia see Herodotus 5. 92h. 2. Cf. Oxford Classical Dictionary3 s.v. ‘Acheron’.
22 The origin of ‘without even a laurel sprig’ can be traced back to a meeting (1 October
1942, Greek military camp in Jerusalem) between Seferis and Brigadier Alcibiades
Bourdaras, commander of the Second Greek Brigade, whom the poet clearly admired.
When a passing fellow officer announced that his own First Brigade was being mobilized,
Bourdaras remarked: ‘What to do? You won’t leave even a single laurel sprig for the rest
of us.’ See Seferis (1977b: 240).
23 Quotation from Yunis (2011: 146). For the Platonic concept see Plato, Meno 81c-86a;
Phaedo 72e-77a; Phaedrus 248e-249d. See further Scott (1995: 15–85); Kahn (2006).
24 Or ‘the wayward soul’, which is another way of rendering 3 parastrathm:#nh yuc– of the
original.
25 For the dance of the soul in Plotinus see Slaveva-Griffin (2009: 118–19), whose phrasing
I have occasionally borrowed. For the cosmic dance in Greek religion and mythology see
also Zarifi (2007: 227–8); Ferrari (2008: 2–6, 17, 147).
26 The archaic word is highly untypical for Seferis, and may have been meant to evoke
Plato, Protagoras 347d, where it is claimed that flute-girls and dancing girls
(2rchstr0 da”) do not belong to dinner-parties thrown by people of taste.
27 For Seferis’ frustration at the inefficacy and pettiness of his superiors, especially during
the Second World War, see e.g. Seferis (1977b) 15 (27 January 1941), 44 (25 March
80
‘THE PAINFUL MEMORY OF WOE’
In the following stanza (ll. 10–17) the recent Dekemvriana events are mythologized — or rather ‘re-historicized’ — by being implicitly compared to two memorable tragic events in Greek history. The first is the selling of the Epirote town of
Parga by the British to the Ottoman Albanian ruler Ali Pasha of Yannina, a transaction that resulted to the enforced relocation of Parga’s Greek inhabitants (perhaps
some 5,000 people) to the Ionian Islands. The refugees dug up their ancestors’
bones, burned them in the town’s main square on 15 April 1819, and transferred
the remains to their new homes — hence Seferis’ ‘dug-up bones of ancestors’ in l.
13.28 The circumstances surrounding the event were bruited far and wide, and are
commemorated in a number of Greek folk songs dating from that era, as well as in
Andreas Kalvos’ ode ‘To Parga’.29 The second event alluded to in ll. 12–14 is the
Athenian defeat at Syracuse in 413 BC, at the end of an ill-conceived expedition,
which resulted in a number of Athenian prisoners being held in dire conditions at
stone quarries near Syracuse (see especially Thucydides 7. 87).30 Specifically, ‘quarries j full of exhausted people, invalids, without breath’ condenses Thucydides’
harrowing description of the situation of Athenian prisoners at Syracuse (7. 87.
1–2):
‘A large number of people were crammed into a small and hollow place, and as a result they
were distressed by the sun and the stifling heat [. . .] and as they did everything [i.e. they
relieved themselves] in the same place, due to lack of space, and as the dead were piled up one
on top of another [. . .] there was an insupportable stench, and they were also oppressed by
hunger and thirst . . .’
The stanza culminates in an explicit allusion to the myth of Eteocles and Polynices,
especially to its Aeschylean version in Seven against Thebes, which emphasizes the
bitter division of the brothers’ inheritance: in Aeschylus, it is ‘Iron, a harsh distributor of property’ that allots the brothers ‘only the piece of land in which they will
be buried (727-33, 816-19, 906-14, 941-50)’;31 hence the ‘divided blood’ of Oedipus’
dead children in ll. 16–17 of Seferis’ poem. The imagery of division is further
developed and rounded off in l. 19 by the reference to the nocturnal scuffles between
‘iconodules and iconoclasts’: the transparent parallelism between the Greek Civil
28
29
30
31
1941), 54 (15 April 1941), 75–6 (6 May 1941), 102 (17 June 1941); Seferis (1977c) 14
(23 April 1945), 16 (8 May 1945) ‘I’m wasting my time in empty discussions’ at the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs, etc. Further on Seferis’ disgust at the idle talk and meanspiritedness of his fellow exiles (especially politicians and officials) see Krikou-Davis
(1989: 143–8, 151, 154, 155, 156–8).
On the selling of Parga to Ali Pasha by the British see Vakalopoulos (1975: 402).
See e.g. Passow (1860: 163–5) (nos. CCXXII–CCXXIV).
The Thucydides passage is explicitly mentioned by Seferis in a note to his poem ‘The
Last Day’ from Logbook I (Athens, 1940): see Seferis (1972a: 172, 327); cf. Kokolis (1993:
39), Maronitis (2008: 133–5) and esp. Tambakaki (2008).
Quotation from Torrance (2007: 36).
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VAYOS LIAPIS
War and the notorious iconoclastic schism that divided Byzantium in the eighth and
ninth centuries32 is thus combined with the earlier references to Labdacid myth, to
the fate of Athenian prisoners in Syracuse and to the selling of Parga. The resulting
amalgamation of contemporary Greek events with earlier mythic and historical
landmarks is typical of Seferis’ concept of Hellenicity as an essentially unitary
wholeness, where patterns of action, structures of thought, mentalities and behaviours rest on homogeneous underlying structures that feed into and elucidate each
other, regardless of their individual time frame (see the ensuing Section).
The Greek Civil War mythologized (II): ‘Oedipal, ‘48’ and the Labdacids
The Greek Civil War provides the implicit backdrop to yet another Seferic poem of
tragic ancestry, one in which the tragic subtext is announced already in the title
(‘O2dip0d"io, ’48’):33
OEDIPAL, ’48
Sherlock Holmes has branch offices everywhere
all over the earth, all around the world;
Oedipus interrogates the shepherd everywhere
without knowing what’s in store for him.
At the crossroads, dead Laius lies in wait
5
and in the orchards you hear the stutter: ‘Blind in your ears . . .’
time runs, nervous, its brakes failing —
Hey, Mister! Eyes and lights are extinguished here!
Ankara, 8. 10. 1948
A sardonic comment on the politics of universal suspicion at the height of the Greek
Civil War, this short poem contains transparent references to Sophocles’ Oedipus
Tyrannus (‘Oedipus interrogates the shepherd’, ‘dead Laius lies in wait’), the most
obvious of which is a quotation, in l. 6, of Sophocles’ original Greek from OT 371:
«tufl1” t1 t’ P* ta . . . ». The mythologization of current events here acquires a further dimension, as it is fused for ironic effect with elements from popular literature
(‘Sherlock Holmes’ with his ‘branch offices . . . all over the earth’). Thereby, the
sublimation of contemporary history into consecrated myth is counterbalanced by
the bathos of intentional triviality.
32 The most thorough and up-to-date study of the iconoclast era is Brubaker and Haldon
(2011). For nocturnal fights during the Greek Civil War cf. Seferis (1977b: 333) (28 May
1944): ‘Meanwhile, little kids, adolescents, in Greece go about at night fighting each
other with pistols.’
33 See Seferis (1976: 21). The poem first appears in Seferis’ personal diary, in the entry for 8
October 1948 (Seferis 1977c: 125).
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‘THE PAINFUL MEMORY OF WOE’
A tragic vision of the Greek Civil War: ‘Thrush’ and Greek tragedy
In ‘Thrush’, we find ourselves immersed in a universe shaped by and relying on
background references to classical texts, including Homer and Greek tragedy. The
poem, dated 31 October 1946, consists of three parts, the first of which, entitled
‘The House by the Sea’, is populated by haunting images of uprooting and loss.34
Especially prominent is a sense of dispossession, rendered visible in the image of the
lost house: ‘The houses I had were taken from me. The times j happened to be harsh;
wars disasters migrations’ (ll. 1–2).35 Typically for Seferis, collective and personal
experiences intermingle here. In March 1922, some five months before the fall of
Smyrna to the Turks, Seferis’ father, Stelios Seferiadis, wrote to his son asking his
permission for the sale of a family house at Skala tou Vourlà (Turk. Urla İskelesi),
the site of ancient Clazomenae, in the Gulf of Smyrna, a house left to the poet by his
grandmother in her will.36 The house at Skala held an extraordinary appeal for
Seferis — it was ‘like entering a garden from the Arabian Nights, where all was
enchantment’ — 37 and its loss dealt him a heavy emotional blow. At the same time,
the loss of the house at Skala nearly coincided with the fall of Smyrna to the Turks in
August 1922, in what is commonly known in Greece as ‘The Asia Minor Disaster’. It
is easy to see how the fall from the Paradise of Skala has come to encapsulate, in
Seferis’ poetic mythology, the traumatic loss of one of the most vibrant, cosmopolitan, and cultured Hellenic communities — an event that haunted the poet throughout his life. Further, as Beaton (2003) 273 perceptively remarks, the house in Part I
of ‘Thrush’ is also ‘reminiscent of the half-furnished homes and offices in which
[Seferis] had lived and worked throughout the war years’. How painful this was for
Seferis is apparent from his notes in his personal diary (10 January 1942), where he
complains about the number of temporary quarters he and his wife have had to
‘ ‘‘put on’’ like so many borrowed clothes’ — ‘so many borrowed clothes that I can’t
help thinking that we have nothing but our naked bodies in this roofless land or in
the land further on’ (Seferis 1977b: 175–6).
34 On ‘Thrush’ see Vayenas (1979: 259–97).
35 Seferis (1972a: 219). On echoes of T. S. Eliot’s Dry Salvages in these lines see Keeley
(1956: 222–3) — although Keeley is careful to point out the substantial differences
between the two poets. On the image of the house in Seferis’ poetry see Vitti (1978:
194–5); Vayenas (1979: 268); Argyriou (1986: 53–5); especially in ‘Thrush’: Padel (1985:
107–9).
36 See Beaton (2003: 48).
37 See Seferis (1972b: 8). Further on Seferis’ emotional attachment to the ‘little house’ at
Skala see Beaton (2003: 15–18).
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VAYOS LIAPIS
The second part of ‘Thrush’, entitled ‘Elpenor the Hedonist’ (‘ &O 3donik0”
*Elp–nwr’),38 consists largely of a dialogue between ‘Elpenor’ and ‘Circe’ in the
latter’s house, as Seferis himself indicates in his essay ‘A Mise-en-Scène for
‘‘Thrush’’ ’.39 The dialogue is reported by the unnamed narrator, tentatively identified by Seferis as ‘a certain Odysseus’, who stands for ‘the people of unsettledness, of
wanderings, and of wars’.40 ‘The house of Circe’, Seferis continues, ‘is the first home
Odysseus sees after many tribulations, many murders and follies (the bag of winds)
that cost him dearly’; predictably, ‘Odysseys’ fully enjoys the sensual pleasures
afforded by this house.41 ‘Elpenor the Hedonist’ is clearly a complement to the
first part of ‘Thrush’: after all, ‘The House by the Sea’ ends on a sensual note, the
image of a ‘deep-girded’ (baq0zwnh) woman ‘with curling eyelashes’, and of the
indulgence associated with ‘southern ports’ and ‘the smell of golden fruit and
herbs’.42 That woman, however, turns out to be Circe, ‘the reverse side of decay’
and of death.43 As the title implies, and as Seferis makes clear in his ‘Mise-enScène’, Elpenor is victim to his own immoderation, unable to control his physical
desires, and living only for the flesh: ‘his own homeward voyage [nostos] is to the
pigsty’.44
‘Elpenor the Hedonist’ ends in a seemingly light-hearted mode with a section
subtitled ‘The Radio’, which echoes the themes of ‘the passage of time, the tyranny
of memory and decay’,45 albeit disguised as a series of easy-listening chansons à la
38 Seferis (1972a: 221–5). Further on Elpenor in ‘Thrush’ see Keeley (1966: 384–
90) = (1983: 60–7); Argyriou (1986: 66–8); on Elpenor in Seferis see Tambakaki
(2013); on Elpenor in Modern Greek poetry see Savidis (1990); on Elpenor in
European literature see Vayenas (1979: 271–4).
39 Seferis (1981b: 30–56). Interestingly, Tambakaki (2011: 228–9) argues that the dialogue
between Elpenor and Circe should be seen as a kind of cinematic ‘flashback’, an analeptic
technique allowing a person’s voice from the past to be heard in the narrative present.
40 Quotations from Seferis (1981b: 31–2). On the figure of Odysseus in Seferis and in
European literature see Nikolaou (1992), esp. 13–99. For echoes of Ezra Pound’s
poetry in Seferis’ use of myth in ‘Thrush’ see Thaniel (1974).
41 Quotation from Seferis (1981b: 33–4); cf. Argyriou (1986: 62–3).
42 See Seferis (1972a: 220) (ll. 33–7). On the ‘verbal sensualism’ of this part see Mackridge
(2008: 314–16).
43 See Seferis (1981b: 37), whence the quotation.
44 Quotation from Seferis (1981b: 37): « &O dik0” tou n0sto” "9 nai gi1 t1 gourounost0si.»
Further on Elpenor’s character see again Seferis (1981b: 38–41). Elpenor makes a fleeting
appearance also in ‘Mr. Stratis Thalassinos amongst the Agapanthuses’ from Logbook II
(Seferis (1972a: 197), ll. 44–5): ‘And the comrades remain in the palaces of Circe; j my
dear Elpenor! My stupid, poor Elpenor!’
45 Seferis (1981b: 46).
84
‘THE PAINFUL MEMORY OF WOE’
mode. As an imaginary hand keeps changing radio stations,46 we finally come across
an oddly rhyming news bulletin:
‘Athens. News of rapidly developing
events were received with dread
by the public. The Minister
stated, There is no time left . . .’
[. . .]
‘. . . is overwhelmingly superior.
‘The war . . .’
SOULMONGER.
85
91
‘Soulmonger’ is Keeley and Sherrard’s (1995) 166 felicitous rendering of Seferis’
coinage Yucamoib0”, lit. ‘money-changer of souls’.47 As Seferis himself notes,48 the
word alludes to 3 crusamoib1” d’ Arh”
!
swm0twn (‘Ares, the moneychanger of
bodies’)49 in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon 438. In his imaginary mise-en-scène of the
poem, Seferis notes that ‘Soulmonger’ may be uttered ‘either by the poet or by
the chorus’,50 thereby accentuating even further the word’s tragic descent. In the
Aeschylus passage, Ares is envisaged as exchanging the bodies of dead warriors with
their ashes: he ‘sends back from Ilium to their dear ones j heavy dust that has been
through the fire, j to be sadly wept over, j filling easily-stowed urns j with ash given
in exchange for men’ (Ag. 440–4).51 Just as a gold-changer uses money as a universal
measure for the trade of goods, so Death, the great leveller, reduces the individuality
of young soldiers to the universal and ‘impersonal homogeneity of ash’.52 Seferis
goes Aeschylus one better: war is a ‘money-changer of souls’ not only because it
returns dead bodies in exchange for living souls but also because it changes, it
transfigures and degrades souls.53
The third and last part of ‘Thrush’, entitled ‘The Shipwreck of ‘‘Thrush’’ ’, is
introduced by a few lines addressed by ‘Elpenor’, now dead, to ‘Odysseus’ in Hades.
His voice, ‘sensual and bitter’, is now meant to sound ‘braver and plainer’, since
‘death simplifies all things and turns them into marble’.54 The words of Elpenor’s
46 On the interplay of different narrative voices in the poem, including the radio, see
Tambakaki (2011: 229–30).
47 Rex Warner’s translation had opted for the more cumbersome ‘ARES DEALER IN
SOULS’ (Warner 1960: 98).
48 Seferis (1972a: 334).
49 Translation by Sommerstein (2008: 52).
50 Seferis (1981b: 47–8) (italics mine).
51 Translation by Sommerstein (2008: 52).
52 See further Seaford (2004: 157), whence the quotation.
53 See further Seferis (1981b: 48); Mastrodimitris (1964: 575) n. 4; Vitti (1978: 213);
Argyriou (1986: 74–5).
54 Quotations from Seferis (1981b: 46). However, Vitti (1978: 216–17) disputes the identification of the voice at the outset of Part III with that of Elpenor; he thinks rather that
85
VAYOS LIAPIS
ghost here serve as a link between the preceding sections and the ensuing ‘descent to
Hades’ that dominates a large portion of the last part of ‘Thrush’. Elpenor’s words are
again filled with sensuous images (a piece of wood from a lemon-tree, which cooled
his brow ‘the hours when noonday made the veins fiery’), but are now infused with a
newly found generosity: the lemon-tree branch is simply offered to ‘Odysseus’ in the
hope that it may ‘bloom in another’s hands’.55 The narrative focus then abruptly
shifts to the small vessel ‘Thrush’ (Kikhlē in Greek), which had been deliberately
sunk during the war so that the occupying German forces could not take hold of it —
though, once sunk, it was ravaged by black marketeers. The actual shipwreck was
visited by Seferis on the last-but-one day of his week-long stay on the island of Poros
(from 9 to 17 August 1946).
The shipwreck of ‘Thrush’ encapsulates a poignant duality between selfless heroism and self-serving greed: the sinking of a ship that might otherwise have been a
source of income is juxtaposed to its exploitation by black marketeers.56 This duality
between heroism and mean-spiritedness, elation and despair, light and darkness
dominates the entire third part of ‘Thrush’; indeed, it seems to have been prevalent
in Seferis’ mind that summer, as becomes evident from his personal diary:57
A distension of the soul within this other world. A terrifying abyss in front of you up to the
shrinking of the soul that you felt when you, too, were stained by the fratricidal war. How to
cross this abyss?
Unbearable, painful silence.
Dizziness. In this abyss, the abdomen of a woman that becomes, more and more, the abdomen
of an unknown female, the abdomen of earth.
The black and angelic Attic day.
The image of the sunken ‘Thrush’ that reappears in the poem —‘its masts, j broken,
swayed at an angle deep underwater, like tentacles j or the memory of
the voice belongs to ‘a beloved person’, and that any attempt to identify it more specifically would be ‘otiose, to say the least’.
55 Seferis (1972a: 226). This passage may conceal memories of the famous ‘golden bough’
(aureus . . . ramus) that Aeneas is asked to cut off in order to secure entry into the
Underworld in Vergil, Aeneid 6. 137–41 (cf. 187–9, 194–7). Rather inappositely,
Argyriou (1986: 76) with n. 17 hesitantly detects here echoes from the biblical ‘tree of
knowledge’ (Gen. 2:17, 3:9), while Capri-Karka (1982: 311) equally improbably sees the
image of the branch blooming ‘in another’s hands’ as implying ‘sterile love’. More to
the point, Padel (1985: 118) detects in this symbol a manifestation of ‘erotic revelation’ as
the hero’s (Odysseus’) ‘self-revelation and re-emergence into every close relationship’.
56 Capri-Karka (1982: 299) finds further resonances in the fact that ‘a thrush is also a small,
humble bird. [. . .] This small bird is usually the victim of hunters, and it is not accidental
that the first image of the poem [not quoted in the present paper] is one of hunting, used
as a metaphor for war’.
57 Seferis (1977c: 38) (entry for 2 June 1946).
86
‘THE PAINFUL MEMORY OF WOE’
dreams . . .’—58 is immediately followed by ‘Odysseus’’ descent into the
Underworld.59 After a throng of anonymous souls, or rather disembodied ‘voices’
or ‘whispers’, make themselves heard, albeit indistinctly, the calm voice of an ‘old
man’ is quoted directly (Seferis 1972a: 226–7):
And if you condemn me to drink poison, I thank you;
your justice will be my justice; there is no point in my leaving
to wander in foreign places, a round stone.
I prefer death;
which of us goes to a better lot only God knows.
20
As should be clear by now, the ‘old man’ speaking these lines is not Tiresias, whom
readers of the Odyssey might expect here, but Socrates. Indeed, as Seferis himself
points out,60 the last line is a near-quotation from Plato’s Apology of Socrates 42a:
3p0t"roi de; 3m8n e! rcontai e’p1 4m"inon prRgma, 4dhlon pant1 pl1n 5 tM q"M.61 The
reason why he chose Socrates rather than Tiresias as the poem’s authority figure (to
be contrasted with Elpenor, the bumbling hedonist) is, as Seferis (1981b: 52) explains, because he needed ‘a person who I feel is more human; the righteous man’.
Further on, Seferis comments on the enormous influence Plato’s Apology exerted on
him ‘maybe because my generation grew up and lived in an era of injustice’.62
The notion of self-sacrifice is thus embodied both in the inanimate wreck of
‘Thrush’ and in the living example of Socrates: the relinquishment of a piece of
property as an act of patriotism is set, morally, on a par with the acceptance of death
as an act of devotion to righteousness. Coming after Part I, with its pervasive imagery of abandonment and loss, and Part II, with its frustrated eroticism, Part III
seems at first sight to promote a return to a simple but robust moral code of honesty,
decency, and self-negation — a stance that deliberately shakes off both the infirm
passivity of resignation and the moral laxity of self-gratification. However, as intimated above, Part III is dominated by a conflict between dualities: moral courage
and pettiness, delight and despondency, gratification and detestation. Images of
light and darkness alternate continuously: ‘the Doric cloak [. . .] is a piece of
marble in the light, but its head is in the darkness’;63 ‘naked bodies sinking in the
black light j with a coin between their teeth, still swimming [. . .]; even now, white
58 Seferis (1972a: 226).
59 For a sensitive exploration of the intertextual links between ‘Thrush’ and the Odyssey see
Padel (1985: 107–20).
60 Seferis (1972a: 334), (1981b: 52).
61 Moreover, Seferis’ ‘I prefer death’ (l. 23) condenses Pl. Ap. 28d–29b and 38e–39b, where
Socrates repeatedly declares his wish to die rather than go on living in violation of his
principles. Cf. Mastrodimitris (1964: 574).
62 Seferis (1981b: 54). On the idea of justice in Seferis see further Argyriou (1986: 78–9).
63 Seferis (1972a: 227) (l. 40).
87
VAYOS LIAPIS
lekythoi go down at an angle j towards the pebbles at the bottom of the sea’.64 This
conflicting duality is nowhere more apparent than in the following lines (56–81),
which incorporate, among other things, copious allusions to Greek tragic myth:
Daylight, angelic and black,
smile of the waves on the ocean’s highroads,
tearful smile,
the aged suppliant sees you,
as he goes to stride across the invisible flatlands;
a light reflected in the mirror of his blood
that gave birth to Eteocles and to Polynices.
Day, angelic and black;
the brackish taste of woman that embitters the prisoner,
a cool sprig, adorned with water drops, comes out of the waves.
Sing, little Antigone, sing, sing . . .
I’m not talking to you about the past, I’m talking about love;
crown your hair with the sun’s thorns,
dark girl;
the heart of the Scorpio has set,
the tyrant inside man has fled,
and all the daughters of the ocean, Nereids, Graiae,
hasten to the shimmering of the Rising Venus;
those who have never loved will love,
in the light;
and you are
in a large house with many open windows
hurrying from one room to another, not knowing
from which part to look out first,
because the pine-trees will go away, and so will the mirrored mountains
and the chirping of the birds,
the sea will empty, like shattered glass, from north and south
your eyes will empty of the light of day
the way all the cicadas abruptly stop at once.
60
65
70
75
80
The above extract is shot through with references to Greek classical texts, especially
tragic ones. Thus, the ‘smile of the waves on the ocean’s highroads’ (l. 57)65 is sewn
together from Aeschylus’ ‘uncountable smiles of sea-waves’ (pont0 wn t" kum0twn j
2n–riqmon g:l# asma, Prometheus 89–90) and the Homeric metaphor for the sea,
‘moist routes’ or ‘fish-filled routes’ (3gr1 k:l# "uqa, 2cqu0"nta k:l# "uqa, cf. Odyssey
64 Seferis (1972a: 228) (ll. 49–50, 53–5). On the sinking of bodies and of (funeral) lekythoi as
an intimation of a katabasis into Hades see Vitti (1978: 227–8).
65 The line appears already in the ‘Notes’ Seferis kept for ‘Thrush’ in his diary (entry for 7
October 1946, though the notes are dated ‘May-June’, presumably of the year 1946): see
Seferis (1977c: 56).
88
‘THE PAINFUL MEMORY OF WOE’
3. 71, 177).66 Yet another Homeric echo is the ‘tearful smile’ of l. 58, an allusion
to Iliad 6. 484 dakru0"n g"l0sasa, ‘smiling through her tears’ (said of Andromache
in the context of her last meeting with Hector).67 The highest concentration of tragic
references is to be found in ll. 59 ff., which explicitly evoke the story of Oedipus’ last
moments on earth as related in Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus. The ‘aged suppliant’
of l. 59 is of course Oedipus, the old, blind man who arrives at the grove of the
Eumenides in Athens and performs an act of supplication there. The ‘invisible
flatlands’ (20rat"” pl0k"”) that Oedipus prepares ‘to stride across’ (l. 60) contain
a verbal allusion to, again, Oedipus at Colonus 1679–82:68
. . . m–t’ Arh”
!
m–t" p0nto” 2nt:#kurs"n,
4skopoi de; pl0k"” e!maryan
e’ n 2fan"8 tini m0rN f"r0m"non.
1680
. . . neither Ares nor the ocean hit upon him; rather, the invisible flatlands took hold of him, as
he was carried away by some obscure fate.
The lines quoted come from Antigone’s and Ismene’s lament over the passing away
of their father and dwell on the mysterious nature of his end: he did not meet with
any of the usual causes of death (e.g. war, shipwreck) but disappeared into the
‘invisible plains’ of Hades, his end thus being 2fan–”, i.e. ‘secret’, ‘concealed’,
‘lying beyond the evidence of the senses’.69 In light of the preceding remarks on
this poem’s essential duality, the image of Oedipus going to his unfathomable end
should by no means be read as a sort of crypto-Christian vision of impending
transfiguration. On the contrary, the imagery is consistently ambiguous. Daylight
is both ‘angelic’ and ‘black’ (ll. 56, 63).70 Oedipus’ blood is illuminated by the light
mirrored in it, but it is still the polluted blood that produced, through an incestuous
union, two fratricidal sons (ll. 61–2). ‘Little Antigone’ is repeatedly encouraged to
‘sing . . . sing, sing’, and is invited to hear the narrator talk ‘about love’, but she is still
envisaged as a ‘dark girl’ about to crown her ‘hair with the sun’s thorns’ (ll. 66–9) —
an archetypical Christian image of self-sacrifice that brings us back full circle to
66 Cf. Seferis (1972a: 334); Mastrodimitris (1964: 576).
67 Translation by Murray and Wyatt (1999: 309). The Homeric allusion is pointed out by
Seferis himself (1972a: 334).
68 The allusion is pointed out by Seferis himself (1972a: 334). The ‘flatlands’ are ‘invisible’
because ‘we cannot see them before the hour of our death’ (Vitti 1978: 229).
69 The collocation ‘flatlands of the dead’ (n"kr8n pl0k"”) also occurs in S. OC 1563 and
1577, where the Chorus pray to the Underworld gods for Oedipus to reach Hades
painlessly.
70 See also Keeley (1996: 85–6) on both ‘light’ and ‘darkness’ in this section being twodimensional qua composed of dualities: light is both of this world and beyond it; darkness
belongs both to life in this world and to the world of the dead.
89
VAYOS LIAPIS
Socrates’ willing acceptance of death towards the beginning of Part III. In ll. 72–5,
the evocative image of sea-nymphs encircling a Rising Venus, bolstered by a
near-quotation of the repetitive refrain from Peruigilium Veneris in l. 74 (cf. Cras
amet qui numquam amavit quique amavit cras amet, ‘Let him love tomorrow, who has
never loved; and let him who has loved love [again] tomorrow’), is counterbalanced
in the immediately ensuing ll. 75–81, which revert to the imagery of empty
houses and desolate landscapes. The anticipation of being able to ‘love, in the
light’ (ll. 74–5) and the seemingly cheerful image of a well-lit house ‘with many
open windows’ (l. 76) eventually gives way to images of darkness and void: ‘the sea
will empty’, ‘your eyes will empty of the light of day’.
Equally ambivalent is the tear-stained ‘smile of the waves on the ocean’s highroads’ (l. 57). As noted above (n. 65), the line appears in Seferis’ ‘ ‘‘Notes’’ for a
Poem’ kept in his diary in May–June 1946, though it is clear that it preoccupied
Seferis since at least August 1941: in a diary entry dating back to that time, he notes
how he read to his wife lines 88–92 from Prometheus Bound, ‘barely holding back
[his] sobs’:71
O you, divine heaven and swift-flying breezes,
O streams of rivers and you, uncountable smiles
of sea-waves, O Earth, common mother,
and you, all-seeing disc of the Sun,
I call upon you to witness . . .
90
The Prometheus passage is, I think, central to Seferis’ vision of Greek tragedy. By
calling upon the surrounding landscape to witness his suffering, Prometheus humanizes it; and yet, the natural world remains fundamentally beyond human grasp.
The enchanting natural imagery of breezes, rivers, and sea-waves is in stark and dark
contrast to the fundamental despair voiced by Prometheus, from which there can be
no easy way out.
The cardinal place of ambiguous duality in Part III of ‘Thrush’ can be further
illuminated by the following entry in Seferis’ personal diary (17 June 1946):
There is a drama of blood that is being played out, between the light and the sea, around us,
though only a few people are aware of it. It has nothing to do with sensuality; it is something
much deeper than the vulgar desire or even the very persistent scent of woman that prisoners
yearn for. There is a drama of blood that goes much deeper, that is much more integral (body
and soul); maybe one can begin to discern it as soon as one realizes that behind the grey and
golden weft of Attic summer there is a terrifying blackness; that we all are the playthings of this
blackness. The stories we read about the Atreid or the Labdacid families indicate in some
71 The entry is inscribed only ‘Sunday’; this must be one of the Sundays between 3rd and
24th August 1941. Cf. also Seferis (1977c: 91) (12 or 19 February 1947): ‘Prometheus’
cry: O you, divine heaven . . . , as I read it one cold evening in Johannesburg and broke into
sobs like a man rejected.’
90
‘THE PAINFUL MEMORY OF WOE’
way this feeling of mine. Attic tragedy is the loftiest poetic image of this enclosed world that
incessantly struggles to live and to breath within the narrow gilded zone, though without any
hope of being preserved against the flood. This is what makes for its humanism.
Askopoi
!
de; pl0k"” e!maryan
e’ n 2fan"8 tini m0rN f"r0m"non.
(Oedipus at Colonus, 1681)
In the Oresteia, the same drama of blood ends gR” 3p1 k"Nqo” [‘in the recesses of the
earth’].72 And in the undying land of folktale, people do not die; rather, they disappear. This
ending is not a sense of death but an awareness of the abyss.73
One notes immediately how elements from this entry reappear in Part III of
‘Thrush’. The ‘very persistent scent of woman that prisoners yearn for’ reappears
as ‘the brackish taste of woman that embitters the prisoner’ (l. 64): the imagery
suggests a deep, embedded desire that remains perpetually unfulfilled; a desire
generated by the tormenting interplay of light and darkness that pervades the
Greek landscape. Even death is not envisaged as a finality; rather, it represents a
state of unresolved ambiguity. Oedipus does not die; he disappears into the unknown: the ‘invisible flatlands’ he is about to cross on his journey to an inscrutable
Beyond (l. 60) suggest, as is clear from Seferis’ diary, ‘not a sense of death but an
awareness of the abyss’. The ‘drama of blood’ played out in the dazzling Greek
landscape — a drama expressed in the ‘stories we read about the Atreid or the
Labdacid families’ — remains unresolved even in death. It is precisely this tragic
dichotomy between the blazing sunlight of Greece and the ‘terrifying blackness’
lurking behind it that is expressed by the emblematic lines ‘Daylight / Day, angelic
and black’.74 To quote Beaton (2003) 274, ‘The ending of ‘‘Thrush’’ is finely ambivalent. Like everything else that [Seferis] wrote, it is deeply embedded in private
experience, but it transcends that experience to become a richly evocative
72 Cf. A. Eum. 1036 gR” 3p1 k"0q"sin.
73 Seferis (1977c: 42); italics in the original. Cf. Jouanny (1980: 718).
74 Cf. also Seferis (1977c: 92) (13 or 20 February 1947); the antithesis between the ‘absolute
light’ of the Greek landscape and the darkness of contemporary Greek history is also
emphasized in a letter by Seferis to his translator Robert Levesque, quoted in Greek
translation by Karantonis (2000: 151). On the poem’s dualities see also Karantonis (2000:
167); Argyriou (1986: 85–8); Zachareas (1968: 197). Vayenas (1979: 263–4) comments on
the antithesis between the tragedy of civil war and the ‘brilliant calmness of the Greek
landscape’, although his reading of the poem is an ultimately optimistic one, since he sees
it culminating in harmony and serenity, and even detects in it traces of Seferis’ interest in
Zen philosophy (cf. esp. 275–83). Cf. Padel (1985: 110), for whom ‘Thrush’ ‘has accepted
wreckage and has found a harmony beyond ruin, a harmony created by the endurance of
these voices or fragments or statues in Greek texts’. For a positive, ‘eudaemonistic’
reading of the final part of the play see Vitti (1978: 231–9), who nonetheless rejects
Vayenas’ ‘Zen’ interpretation (Vitti 1978: 235–6, n. 45).
91
VAYOS LIAPIS
commentary, at once on a specific historical moment in the life of his country, and of
the historical process, as [Seferis] perceived it at work in human life.’
Epilogue: reactivating ancient myth
In modern receptions of classical myth (and of its configurations in fifth-century
tragedy), the normative qualities of the classic, while implicitly ever-present, are
typically subsumed to what is perhaps the defining feature of myth, namely its
malleability. As a traditional tale, myth is not only authoritative but also (and
mainly) susceptible of being constantly remodelled and reformulated through successive retellings and through subsequent readings and interpretations (including
literary and philosophical ones). As Moddelmog (1993) observes, building on insights by Eric Gould, the essential quality of myth is that it initiates interpretive acts
by its recipients, involving them in a quest for an essential meaning that is absent
(i.e. unrealized) until the interpreting subject recognizes it as an object of enquiry.
There is thus an ‘ontological gap’ between the mythic tale and the meaning(s)
assigned to it by its recipients — a gap that can never be closed, insofar as ‘myth
is discourse that generates discourse and thereby brings with it an elaborate literary
and interpretive history’.75 Thus, acts of ‘interpretation, including the interpretation of retelling and translation’76 are perpetually generated by myth, in a constant
flux of semiotic mobility, whereby the semantic constituents of myth are selectively
privileged, questioned, challenged and/or renegotiated, in a continuous interplay of
different versions and reinterpretations.77 By resisting the notion of an originary
meaning, through its being subject to potentially never-ending re-signification,
myth — especially classical myth — performs ‘the contradiction between the two
mutually oppositional sides of the classic, the timeless and the contingent’,78 by
simultaneously asserting the death of classical authority and promoting its transhistorical, perpetually re-definable identity.
Especially thanks to its reconfigurations through Greek tragedy, one of the classic
genres par excellence, classical myth has become a culturally privileged mode of
discourse, a sort of common cultural currency invested with significations that are
perceived as familiar qua constituents of a specific (Western) identity. By playing on
their audiences’ presumed familiarity with the classic, modern rewritings of classical
myth — and particularly of classical tragic myth — may set themselves up as rival
readings of the source texts and their associated values, or as re-readings that configure afresh the source text’s established meaning(s), or as points of view that
75 Moddelmog (1993: 3–4) (quotations from p. 4), with important insights from E. Gould,
Mythical Intentions in Modern Literature (Princeton 1981), esp. 6, 183, 186–7 (quod
non vidi).
76 Moddelmog (1993: 4).
77 Cf. Moddelmog (1993: 5).
78 Quotation from Lianeri and Zajko (2008: 4). For a history of theoretical perspectives
(especially Gadamer’s) on what constitutes a classic see Forsyth (2002: 1–43).
92
‘THE PAINFUL MEMORY OF WOE’
privilege ambiguity, problematize the source text’s current valuations, and question
the dominant discourse about what constitutes the classic both in literary and in
cultural terms. Paradoxically, modern re-workings of classical myth presuppose and
build on the notion of authoritativeness in order to negotiate or even negate the very
idea of a monumentalized manifestation of the classic and the concomitant notions of
semantic fixity and originary meaning. ‘A myth’s true meaning is the paradox that it
is meaning-full and meaningless at the same time.’79
Seferis exploits this paradox by turning it to an advantage. He enlists the authority
of ancient myth in order to bolster the validity of his own poetic utterance and even
to legitimate his own (implicit) claims to canonicity.80 By investing his poetry with
recognizable mythological components, Seferis seeks to predetermine the actualization of his work, at the point of reception, as a structure based on a specific ordering
principle — namely, that of a dynamic relationship with tragic myth, whereby the
reader is invited to pursue the interpretive potentialities of the dialogue between the
modern text and its mythic antecedent.81 This is achieved by means of a two-way
transference of significant features, including linguistic and ideological baggage,
from ancient myth to modern text and vice versa. In Seferis’ case, as in many
others, this involves a partial ‘updating’ of tragic myth to re-contextualize it into
modern concerns and sensibilities; thus, readers are encouraged partly to detach
myth from its perceived ‘original’ context (in this case, Greek tragedy) and to invest
it with qualities associated with subsequent temporal and cultural contexts. At the
same time, by grafting his poems on the template of ancient (tragic) myth, Seferis
invites his readers to disassociate his work from its contemporary time-frame and to
imbue it with a temporal depth it might otherwise have lacked. He thus encourages
an interpretive interplay between modern text and mythic subtext, whereby the
modern poem is illuminated by ancient myth but also causes us to reinterpret the
myth it appropriates.82
Time present and time past are thus intertwined: they interpenetrate and contain
each other. The preceding allusion to the opening lines of T. S. Eliot’s ‘Burnt
Norton’ is deliberate: Seferis himself brought them to bear on his discussion of
the use of the past in the poetry of Cavafy and Eliot.83 As is well known, Eliot
himself, in his essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, which is justly regarded
as an early manifestation of the notion of literary reception, asserted that for an
author to attain ‘the historical sense’ it is necessary to acquire
79 Moddelmog (1993: 6).
80 See on this point Dimiroulis (1997: 245–6), with regard to Seferis’ use of myth as a means
of appropriating its universal symbolic validity.
81 Further on this type of dialogue see Moddelmog (1993: 16–17).
82 Cf. Moddelmog (1993: 8): ‘if it is true that the myth tells us something about the modern
story, it is equally true that the narrative’s appropriation of the myth causes us to reinterpret the myth’.
83 Seferis (1981a: 335).
93
VAYOS LIAPIS
a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense
compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling
that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the
literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous
order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of
the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the
same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his own
contemporaneity.84
The ‘historical sense’ advocated by Eliot is, of course, a salient feature of his own
poetry, one seized upon by Seferis in his ‘Introduction to T. S. Eliot’, where he
quotes parts of the passage given above and insists that for Eliot, ‘history is not what
is dead but what is still alive. Alive, present, contemporary’ — thus allowing Parker
the telephone operator to appear next to the Volscians in ‘Coriolan II: Difficulties of
a Statesman’, or Mrs Porter and Mr Eugenides next to Tiresias or Phlebas the
Phoenician in The Waste Land.85 As a universally accessible medium, myth can
relatively easily be utilized as a tool for the interpretation of history and of individual
or collective reactions to it; it can impose shape on the chaos of developing events
and it can offer the comfort of an underlying structure behind what appears as
disorder and unpredictability. At an era of fragmentation and incommunicability,
myth provides a common denominator, a commonly appreciable paradigm that can
help create and convey meaning. The following extract from Seferis’ ‘Introduction
to T. S. Eliot’ is particularly illuminating:
When myth used to be a common feeling, the poet had at his disposal a living agent, an
emotional atmosphere that was ready, where he could move freely in order to approach
people around him; where he could express himself. A single word, regardless of the artist’s
skillfulness, could awaken in people’s souls an entire world of fear or hope. In modern
languages there is nothing that can equal the weight or the universality or the emotional
richness of the simple word Semnai of Aeschylus’ time, or of the two words eterno dolore of
Dante’s time.86
84 Eliot (1934: 14). For the importance of this essay in the context of contemporary thought
on literary tradition, but also as a prefiguration of reception studies, see Martindale in
Martindale and Thomas (2006: 8) n. 31; Budelmann and Haubold in Hardwick and Stray
(2008: 13).
85 Seferis (1981a: 42–3, 40). On the (substantial) points of contact between Seferis’ and
Eliot’s conception of tradition see Drakopoulos (2002: 76–8); on Eliot’s influence on
Seferis as perceived by contemporary Greek critics, and the contribution of E. Keeley
(see esp. Keeley 1956 and 1969) to the appreciation of Seferis’ originality with regard to
Eliot, see again Drakopoulos (2002: 193–202, 218–21).
86 Seferis (1981a: 43–4). Cf. Leontsini (2006: 241).
94
‘THE PAINFUL MEMORY OF WOE’
By appealing to Greek tragic myth, especially after the publication of his
Mythistorema in 1935,87 Seferis attempts to revivify, however partially, this
‘common feeling’ that was once assured by the shared medium of myth. He also
attempts to activate a broader and solider awareness of current events, an awareness
informed by a fresh application of schemes and patterns consolidated in Greek
tragedy. By mythologizing contemporary history through paradigms derived from
Greek tragedy, Seferis inscribes it within a context that is both timeless and timely;
he encourages his readers to approach developing events through insights that lay
bare the mechanisms of history in a more penetrating fashion precisely because they
rely on configurations of thought deeply rooted in a comprehensive perception of
human behaviours and actions.88
As we have seen, in Seferis’ poems that were written on the eve of or during the
Greek Civil War, contemporary history is renegotiated by being mythologized, i.e.
by being invested with the archetypal qualities of tragic myth. The tragedian of
choice for this mythologizing process is Aeschylus, whose work focuses prominently
on the mechanics of evil, transgression, and retribution. In Aeschylus, evil is selfperpetuating and self-renewing;89 its patterns are reproduced by, and its repercussions may extend into, a multitude of generations; and (most importantly) its destructive force is eventually counterbalanced by the universal mechanisms of
retribution. Insofar as the Aeschylean intertexts are shared by the reader (and
Seferis assumed that they should),90 their incorporation in Seferis’ poetry functions
as an interpretive lens that helps bring out crucial aspects of the text, elucidate its
semantics, and partly lay bare its code. Unsurprisingly, the aspects of the
Aeschylean Weltanschauung that Seferis chooses to highlight are those that may
be seen to elucidate the notion of sinful transgression and wrongdoing as offences
against universal equilibrium. Evil has a continuing painful presence in the human
heart (mnhsip–mwn p0no”), and will continue to generate more evil, like the ‘inexhaustible purple’ of the Oresteia. It constitutes a kind of inherited miasma, or pollution, like the polluted blood of Oedipus’ children. It irrevocably debases human
souls as a ‘soulmonger’, much as Aeschylus’ War God is a ‘money-changer of souls’.
And it will eventually demand payment like an old debt, or will blossom into a fleur
87 On Seferis’ Mythistorema as a turning point in the poet’s appropriation of ancient myth as
an anchoring device and a marker of identity see Drakopoulos (2002: 74–6).
88 Cf. Vitti (1978: 230). A somewhat different approach is that of Jouanny (1980), who sees
the poetry of Seferis as transcending the pseudo-dilemma between uncritical adulation of
and overconfident distancing from the ancients to achieve a humanizing and harmonizing
familiarity with them.
89 Note how Seferis (1977c: 154) (entry for 27 March 1950) foregrounds Aeschylus Seven
682 (‘this pollution cannot grow old’ (o2k e!sti g8ra” toNd" toN mi0smato”)) as a rather
cryptic comment on the events of the previous years — Second World War and the
Greek Civil War.
90 As noted by Seferis (1981b: 48), Aeschylus can reasonably be considered ‘common
property’ (koin1 kt8ma); ‘if he is not, so much the worse for us’.
95
VAYOS LIAPIS
du mal that will have to be harvested. It is such paradigmatic aspects of Aeschylean
tragedy that help frame Seferis’ poetic responses to the Greek Civil War — a war he
visualizes as a widespread disease, a monster feeding on its own polluted blood, and
an evil that has the potential of endless self-perpetuation.
Seferis’ Aeschylean intertexts are not to be seen merely as an antiquarian exercise,
or even as a means of activating cultural memory. They are deeply rooted in the lived
history of the Greek people, in the palpable distress of everyday life, and in the
dynamics inherent in personal and collective attitudes. Of cardinal importance here
is Seferis’ conception of Hellenicity91 as an essentially uninterrupted tradition that
runs through the whole of Greek history and manifests itself not only in the creations of the classical era but also in the kinds of popular modern Greek art and
literature that are all too often dismissed as ‘lowbrow’ by the literati. An emblematic
case here is General Yiannis Makriyiannis, a semi-literate chieftain active during the
Greek War of Independence (1821–32), whose keen sense of collective solidarity
Seferis regards as being on a par with Aeschylus’ castigation of hubris and his
preoccupation with justice as universal equilibrium. Indeed, Makriyiannis is pronounced by Seferis ‘a secure harbinger of our long and uninterrupted popular
tradition, which he holds deeply rooted inside him and thus comes to tell us in
the voice of many people, not of one only, what we are and how we are ourselves’.92
Another emblematic figure in this respect is the folk painter Theophilos
Hatzimikhaı̈l (1870?–1934), admired by Seferis for ‘finding [his] way fumblingly,
all alone, along the dark paths of a highly cultivated, as I believe, collective soul, such
as the soul of our people’.93 For Seferis, Theophilos — a naı̈ve character as well as a
naı̈f painter, often dismissed by his contemporaries as being away with the fairies —
represents a cardinal if hitherto unacknowledged manifestation of the ‘Hellenic
cultural heritage’ at large, a heritage handed down and shaped now through towering figures such as Homer and Aeschylus, now through the anonymous people.94
The search for forerunners in the Greek tradition — often overlooked figures
such as Makriyiannis and Theophilos — is a fundamental aspect of the cultural
physiognomy of the so-called ‘Thirties’ Generation’, of which Seferis incontestably
was the leading figure.95 Most of the authors of the ‘Thirties’ Generation’ had
lived abroad (especially in France and Britain) and had been exposed to many of
91 On the history and uses of the term, which is my attempt to anglicize e‘llhnik0th” / -thta
(a nineteenth-century neologism), see further Tziovas (2011: 286–320).
92 See Seferis (1981a: 261), in the context of a lecture characteristically entitled ‘A Greek —
Makriyiannis’.
93 Quotation from Seferis (1981a: 461–2).
94 Seferis (1981a: 462–3). On Makriyiannis and Theophilos as emblematic figures of the
new Hellenicity advocated by the ‘Thirties’ Generation’ (principally by Seferis) see Vitti
(2006: 197–201).
95 On the differences and multifariousness, as well than the similarities and relative homogeneity, of ‘Thirties’ Generation’ authors see now Tziovas (2011) passim, esp. 18, 39,
157–68.
96
‘THE PAINFUL MEMORY OF WOE’
the then-current European cultural trends.96 In reacting to the perceived dogmatism
of the Greek cultural establishment, which was seen as foregrounding an excessively
rigid concept of what constitutes a ‘genuinely Hellenic’ outlook (mainly traditional
Greek folksongs, the poetry of Solomos, and the prose of Papadiamantis), the
‘Thirties’ Generation’ sought to formulate a more inclusive paradigm by integrating
further major figures (such as Coraës, Kalvos, Makriyiannis, Psycharis, Palamas,
Cavafy, Sikelianos, Seferis, Elytis etc.) into the cultural canon they wished to promote.97 In ‘Free Spirit’ (’El"0q"ro Pn"Nma), a 1929 essay that came to be regarded as
the manifesto of the ‘Thirties’ Generation’, the novelist Yiorgos Theotokas even
attempted to develop a vision in which sanctioned landmarks like the Parthenon
could coexist with the technical advances hymned by Futurism, such as the airplane
or (in the case of Athens) the newly constructed Syngrou Avenue, regarded by many
(in a manner that now seems quaint) as a symbol of the new modernist spirit about to
invade Greece.98 In his public exchange of essays on poetry with his brother-in-law,
philosopher, and academic Konstantinos Tsatsos, which has come to be known as
‘A Dialogue on Poetry’, Seferis himself advocated a new form of Hellenicity,
one that would no longer be a synonym either for cultural isolationism or for the
idolization of a fossilized concept of classical antiquity such as the one promoted
by archaist scholars. More importantly, Seferis’ Hellenicity would not consist in a
mechanical transplantation of alien (=Western) perceptions of Greekness: it would
be a ‘Hellenic Hellenicity’, one that would derive naturally from the as-yetunformed ‘spiritual physiognomy’ of modern Greece; that would rely on a genuinely
Hellenic creativity and self-reliance rather than on the aping of foreign models, all
the while remaining open to new developments in foreign countries; that would
define properly its own place with regard to the classical tradition rather than
allowing it to be mediated through Western filters; and that would actively embrace
the more recent achievements of the Greek spirit (Theotokopoulos, Calvos,
Solomos, Palamas, Cavafy) as well as the remote classical past.99
The version of Hellenicity promoted by Seferis, as well as by many of his contemporary ‘Thirties’ Generation’ authors, was neither geopolitically nor culturally
determined; rather, it was a new cultural narrative that selectively reactivated
96 See further Vitti (2006: 29–32, 189–96).
97 See further Vitti (2006: 32–40), esp. 33.
98 Cf. Vitti (2006: 46–9). Seferis monumentalized the (then) new Syngrou Avenue in his
poem ‘Syngrou Avenue, 1930’, dedicated ‘To Yiorgos Theotokas, who discovered it’
(Seferis 1972a: 85–6). On the introduction of European poetic modernism into Greece
(Valéry, Claudel, Éluard, Aragon, Eliot, Ungaretti, Lorca), by means of translations
published mainly during the 1930s, see Vitti (2006: 82–5).
99 See Seferis (1981a) 94–104, esp. 97 (remaining open to foreign developments), 101
(‘Hellenic Hellenicity’), 102 (‘spiritual physiognomy of modern Greece’), 103 (modern
Greece ‘defining properly its own place with regard to its classical tradition’). See further
Karantonis (2000: 170); Vitti (2006: 189–96); Dimiroulis (1997: 31–43, 51–65, 79–80,
405–15); Drakopoulos (2002: 86–9, 182–3); Tziovas (2011: 20, 45–6, 47–8, 294).
97
VAYOS LIAPIS
elements from the classical past and integrated them into a larger scheme that also
drew on the Byzantine and Modern Greek tradition. Most importantly, this new
Hellenicity deliberately distanced itself from the earlier Greek anxiety to reproduce
Western conceptions of classical Hellenism and militated against the widespread
inferiority complex that sought either to imitate the West uncritically or to banish all
Western cultural influences. Major figures of the ‘Thirties’ Generation’ explicitly
advocated the need for Greece to rise to cultural parity with Europe by neither
abolishing its tradition (classical or later) nor avoiding healthy cross-fertilization
with Western influences. Their ambition was for contemporary Greece to enter as a
legitimate player into the European cultural landscape, to establish itself as a distinct
cultural presence, independent from stereotyped European constructions of
Hellenicity, and to contribute by virtue of its own individual physiognomy to the
synthesis of a new European cultural paradigm.100
In this quest for a new Hellenic self-definition, classical myth is of paramount
importance, insofar as it encapsulates those archetypal qualities that, far from being
monumentalized in a remote and inaccessible past, continue to inhabit present
sensibilities. Thus, myth provides a signally apt means through which to aestheticize
the past, turning it from a seemingly fossilized and unalterable construction into
something malleable and changeable, which may be re-energized, revised, and
reshaped.101 As pointed out above, myth (thanks to its universality) is inherently
susceptible to new readings and reworkings; its timelessness contains the possibility
of perpetual renewal. By making ancient myth new — in accordance with Ezra
Pound’s famous injunction ‘Make It New’102 — modernist writing does not seek
to repudiate or destroy the past; on the contrary, in the words of T. S. Eliot, it
enlarges ‘our conception of the past’ and in so doing it allows us ‘in the light of what
is new [to] see the past in a new pattern’.103 This kind of modernist aestheticization
of myth reflects Henri Bergson’s conception of time as an ineffable durée, an allencompassing flux experienced intuitively by the subjective consciousness, ‘a continuum in which past and present interpenetrate or melt into each other’.104 As is
well known, the interpenetrability of past and present is predicated of the
100 The above remarks draw on Tziovas (2011: 147–57, 225–7, 232, 234–85; esp. 235, 248,
250–2, 255, 257, 258–60, 265, 270–1). Cf. also Drakopoulos (2002: 78–80, 96–7).
101 See esp. Tziovas (2011: 295–6, 298–314). On Seferis’ view of modern poetry as reactivating the past — in the sense not of a mechanical revival but of a creative reordering
and a projection of new aspects and relations — see Tziovas (2005), esp. 225–6.
102 This is the title of a collection of essays by Pound, published by Yale University Press
in 1935.
103 Quotations from Eliot (1965: 57).
104 See Parsons (2007: 110–11; quotation from p. 111). On the importance of Bergson’s
concept of time in modernist writing see also Tziovas (2011: 300–1). One inevitably
recalls, once again, the opening of T. S. Eliot’s ‘Burnt Norton’: ‘Time present and time
past j Are both perhaps present in time future, j And time future contained in time
past.’
98
‘THE PAINFUL MEMORY OF WOE’
hermeneutical phenomenon by Gadamer, for whom the understanding of the works
of the past cannot exhaust itself in a simple translocation into the historical horizon
of the time in which the work in question was produced; it necessarily involves a
fusion of the historical horizon of the past and the horizon of the present, the latter
being ‘continually in the process of being formed’ insofar as it continually tests its
prejudices against an attempt to understand the horizon of the past.105 Notoriously,
Gadamer exempted the classical from this perpetual tension between historical and
present horizons of understanding, claiming that ‘What we call ‘‘classical’’ does not
first require the overcoming of historical distance, for in its own constant mediation
it overcomes this distance by itself’.106 However, subsequent critics have argued
that, although classical works of art have, historically, ‘been pressed into the service
of meaning-formation’, thus ‘inaugurating a tradition’,107 it would be misguided to
assume that the traditionary function (and consequent formative authority) of such
works somehow bridges the distance between past and present horizons through its
constant mediation. For one thing, as Jauss remarks, what is now considered classic
is so only in retrospect, that is, after the new interpretive possibilities it prefigured or
paved the way for have become familiar and almost self-evident.108 For another, the
classic is never only a mediator, since it is itself mediated by subsequent readings
(interpretations, adaptations, rewritings), which necessarily condition our reception
of the classic. Of this Seferis was perfectly aware:
. . . each new work that comes to add itself to the series [of canonical works] both affirms and
alters the canon and the meaning of the earlier works. For instance, Dante does not have the
same meaning before and after Baudelaire, nor Racine before and after Valéry, nor England’s
Elizabethan poets before and after Eliot. Likewise, we can correlate Homer with Virgil,
Homer with Aeschylus, and Aeschylus with Euripides — or, in our recent history, Calvos
with Cavafy. And this is a living tradition, and it is thus that works of art live — not as
something solidified and unchanging.109
As well as uncannily prefiguring Jauss’s thesis about newer literary forms creating
horizons of expectation that help reveal the unrealized semantic or aesthetic potential of earlier works,110 this passage sheds valuable light on Seferis’ conception of
literary canons as something fluid, malleable, and subject to continual change. Like
the Parthenon, that supreme manifestation of the classical architectural canon, classical myth can evoke a set of more or less predictable responses, based on
105 Gadamer (1989: 303, 305). Further on prejudice and the interpretive responsibility in
Gadamer see Forsyth (2002: 48–53).
106 Gadamer (1989: 290).
107 Quotations from Haynes in Martindale and Thomas (2006: 51).
108 Jauss (1982: 31).
109 Seferis (1981a: 90). Cf. Tziovas (2011: 304).
110 See Jauss (1982: 35).
99
VAYOS LIAPIS
accumulated historical information, scholarship, earlier critical views, etc. But it can
also evoke an ‘aesthetic’ (Seferis’ word) response, imposed on the modern observer
by ‘a sudden presence, intense and exclusive’, which generates an overwhelming
desire to ‘speak in a voice [the modern author] does not understand’, in an effort to
comprehend that voice.111 As Padel (1985) 106 perceptively remarks, Homer (and
the ancient world as a whole, we may add) is for Seferis ‘a world whose past, whose
inherited landscape, has imposed a terrible burden on its heirs’.
This, of course, involves neither mere imitation nor (what is worse) the regurgitation of rhetorical topoi lionizing the glory that was Greece. In his essays, Seferis
owes to a sentiment of intense disgust at the ‘vilification of every worthy and honest
thing [including the Parthenon] by our wretched speechifying’.112 To ‘speak in the
voice of’ canonical works, including classical myth, is to attempt to integrate them
into the inextricable nexus of Hellenic tradition — a ‘whole and indivisible’ tradition, not one made up of a few prominent landmarks (‘certain luminous promontories, certain brilliant pieces, certain big names’) but one that includes everything
from the Ionian philosophers, Aeschylus and the Greek Anthology down to the
mosaics of a small Byzantine church, the popular songs of the Comnenian era,
Solomos, Cavafy, and Palamas.113 This integrative tendency becomes more pronounced, in the authors of the ‘Thirties’ Generation’, after the Second World War,
when their earlier focus on antiquity shifts to include Byzantium, Makriyiannis,
Theophilos, and even Greek Orthodox piety.114 This all-encompassing vision of the
Greek tradition, of which classical antiquity is but one constitutive element, is part
of a collective desire to scrape off the age-old accretions accumulated on the phantasm of Hellenicity ‘by Europe’s own self-serving and autoscopic investement’,
which resulted in the story of Greece becoming a cultural colony of the Western
imaginaire.115
All in all, in foregrounding tragic myth, Seferis’ poetry activates a device aimed at
bringing out both the essential oneness and the individual physiognomy of what
constitutes the essence of Hellenism. At the same time, the mythologization of
current events does not only help visualize contemporary history sub specie aeternitatis, through the universally accessible point of reference that is tragic myth: it also
generates a two-way dialogue between the source texts and their modern receptions.
As a result of this dialogue and of the concomitant reactivation and aesthetization of
tragic myth, a mutual pollination of past and present occurs, in which archetypal
frames of reference interact and interpenetrate with their modern avatars.
111 Quotations from Seferis (1981a: 127).
112 Seferis (1981b: 297).
113 See Seferis (1981a: 362–3), whence the quotations. See further Drakopoulos (2002:
127–47).
114 See Tziovas (2011: 310).
115 See Gourgouris (1996: 6), whence the quotation; cf. further Tziovas (2011: 310–11,
313–14).
100
‘THE PAINFUL MEMORY OF WOE’
By encouraging a potentially perpetual process of re-signification, renegotiation, and
redefinition, the reactivation of tragic myth engenders multiple and multi-lateral
shifts of perspective, thereby fusing the horizons of past and present into a synthesis
that transcends the categories of archetypal and contemporary and (pro)claims the
essential unity of classical and later Hellenism, not only as a fundamental (and
celebrated) component of national identity but also as a warning that the mechanisms of self-propagating evil, cosmic and moral imbalance, and eventual retribution
and restoration of justice may be as active in contemporary history as they are in
tragic myth.
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