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3) The Scotland I Never Knew: A Journey of Discovery (temporarily removed for editorial update)

6) "There is an island...Diplomacy and Poetry, Friendship and War" (On the 40th Anniversary of Seferis' Award of the Nobel Prize for Literature")

7) Contested Spaces/Competing Propagandas (Seferis, Durrell, Cardiff, Cyprus 1953-1956)

See also extract from "Czechoslovakia, Secret Journals of the Poets' Revolution" (Ars Interpres, September 2007)

Was it Ralph Vaughan Williams or The Yetties who first “turned me on” to the wonderful poetry of William Barnes ? It was certainly the words and the musical setting of his “Wiltshire” poem “Linden Lea” (“My Orcha’d in Linden Lea”) which sparked my interest.

I might have heeded the comments of his many admirers like Gerard Manley Hopkins , Thomas Hardy and Alfred Lord Tennyson.

I read English Literature at Wadham College Oxford, but in spite of the college’s West Country links, no professors or tutors lead me to the Dorset dialect poetry of Barnes, who for many years has been my favourite poet of all time. I was bound to discover him at some point, as I grew up hearing all around me the sound of Somerset, Dorset and Wiltshire accents. Barnes’ Dorset dialect poems present no problems to my eye or inner ear. I love his poetry so much that I have made it a tradition in the family to read his Christmas poems (“Christmas Invitation” and “Keepen Up O’ Chris’mas”) out loud every Christmas Eve, whether in Thessaloniki, Prague, Sydney or Stockholm.

If I had to choose one book to take with me to a desert island, it would be Barnes’ “Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect”.

As a member (albeit a long distance one) of the William Barnes Society, I was lucky enough in July 1992 to be able to visit , with other members of the society, the garden and grounds of Chantry House, Barnes’ former home and school in Mere, Wiltshire,- the very house which he later wrote about as “Linden Lea”.

Both Trevor Hearl (“William Barnes, The Schoolmaster”, Dorchester, 1966) and Alan Chedzoy (“William Barnes, A Life of the Dorset Poet”, Wimborne, 1985) write about the period he spent in Wiltshire, the most important and probably the happiest time of his long life (b. 1801- d. 1886), as it was there that he took his new bride, Julia. Their daughter, Lucy Baxter, in her biography “The Life of William Barnes, Poet and Philologist”, Macmillan, London, 1887, devotes a chapter to Chantry House.

William Barnes first moved to Mere in 1823, where he devoted himself to the study of Latin, Greek, French, Italian, German and Persian. He continued practising the arts of drawing and engraving, as well as music-making. But much of his spare time, Lucy Baxter writes, was “occupied in a sprightly correspondence with his future wife”.

For four years Barnes lived a lonely , solitary life in lodgings in Mere, “the school being held in a large public room” (the Old Cross Loft, in the Market House). Finally he decided to lease Chantry House (for 20 guineas per annum), which was situated near St Michael’s Church, and he asked her father for Julia’s hand in marriage. He wrote in his diary “In 1827 I took Chantry House at Mere, and on a happy day- happy as the first of a most happy wedded life- I brought into it my most loveworthy and ever-beloved-wife, Julia Miles, and then took boarders”.

“Chantry House was a roomy old Tudor building, with large oak wainscoted rooms, whose wide stone mullioned windows were entwined with greenery. It had a large garden and lawn, at the bottom of which ran a flowing stream, here widening into a pond overshadowed with trees. Here were trout and dace, and sometimes a flight of wild ducks or other water-birds would swim by. Near this pond was a favourite nook where William Barnes often came with his Petrarch in his pocket to pass a few happy leisure moments. The lawn was always mowed by his busy scythe, and he rose early in the spring and summer mornings to cultivate his garden……It was in the years 1833 and 1834 that William Barnes wrote his first poems in the Dorset dialect”.

Amongst the Dorset dialect poems and eclogues that Barnes wrote in Mere were, according to his daughter, “The Common a took in”, “The Lotments”, “The House Ridding”, “Father came Home”, “The Best Man in the Vield”, “Two Farms in Woone” and “A Bit of Sly Courting”. For more detailed and accurate information about the social and literary significance of the eclogues written in Mere, see “Forewords” to “The Poems of William Barnes” , edited by Bernard Jones, Southern Illinois University Press, 1962.

Barnes lived in Mere from 1823 to 1835. As Alan Chedzoy writes, concerning Barnes’ marriage and move to Chantry House: “There began an idyllic domestic life, which he was to celebrate years later in the best-known of all his poems, My Orcha’d in Linden Lea”.

As Alan Chedzoy points out, Barnes came to love the garden as much as the house:

“There was a lawn which ran down to a lake with a small waterfall, fish, fowl, a yew tree and, if “Linden Lea” is to be believed, an apple tree leaning low.”

Trevor Hearl writes that “Happiness was to be the keynote of the next eight years at Mere…indeed they were probably the happiest of his life, for 60 years later, Laura told her sister, Lucy: ‘His happiest years were spent at Mere’, meaning Chantry House”.

“My Orcha’d in Linden Lea” , first published in 1856, is one of the most beautiful poems (and songs) in the English language.

It has meant a great deal to me in the course of my peripatetic career in The British Council, particularly the last verse:

For Barnes, going abroad did not mean traveling overseas, it probably meant no more than taking a stroll along a village lane or as far as the next town or hamlet, but I identify most deeply with the sentiments of this verse.

In 1984 I wrote a poem about William Barnes, which was published in the William Barnes Society Newsletter (No 19, August 1990):

Like most readers, I tend to associate Barnes with Dorset and Dorchester, but thinking again about the happy years he spent in Mere, especially the years at Chantry House with his wife Julia, in their “Linden Lea”garden, which I was privileged to visit ten years ago, in 1992, I realize that one of my own recurrent dreams is to live in a house in Wiltshire, or the West Country more generally, and to sit beneath an apple tree reading, not Petrarch, but the poems of William Barnes.

Readers of Wiltshire Life probably know much more of George Herbert’s poetry than they realize, if only because they have sung the words of his poems in school assemblies or in church, set to music as much-loved hymns:

My daughter once painted these words for me on a clear circle of glass, which could be hung by a little chain against a window, like a simple stained-glass panel.

But Herbert was not always pure sweetness and light. He struggled and wrestled with his Christian vocation, and rebelled from time to time against the discipline of servitude which he sometimes saw as a kind of bondage. It is not surprising that he is considered a great metaphysical as well as a devotional poet, like John Donne. Another favourite verse, from his poem “The Collar”, reveals something of his spiritual conflict; it begins abruptly and dramatically as follows:

How many of us have thumped the table or office desk and cried out “Enough! I’m going abroad!”

George Herbert, with his aristocratic background, might well have gone abroad. Instead he chose to go to Bemerton in Wiltshire, to become a country parson. If he sometimes felt like rebelling, he always came back to the Church, and found strength in his love of God.

He wrote a guide-book for country parsons while at Bemerton, “A Priest to the Temple: or, The Country Parson”.

Only a mile away from Salisbury Cathedral, St Andrew’s Church, Bemerton (or Bemerton St. Andrew) dates from the fourteenth century. George Herbert was Rector there from 1630-1633. Although the Church has been restored on several occasions, it is not hard to feel the presence of George Herbert there. If you visit it, remind yourself that “the (oak) door through which you entered is almost certainly that which George Herbert used “, as P.C.Magee’s information leaflet informs us. P.C.Magee was Rector from 1975-1984.

In another little (undated) booklet once obtainable from Bemerton Rectory, containing a selection from “The Temple”, Frances Forrest (who acknowledges the constant help and interest of Canon Lindsay Bartlett, another former Rector of Bemerton) writes in the introduction:

“Once described as a miserable village on Salisbury Plain with but a few inhabitants, George Herbert’s Bemerton today occupies a large part of the City of Salisbury. Yet, even now, Bemerton may be approached by field and riverside paths which bring one to Herbert’s church and Rectory, and very near to Herbert himself.”

Below the Rectory window “a lawn slopes to the willowy edges of the Nadder.Beyond are water meadows, and in the distance the soft line of the Wiltshire hills. At a glance we are in Herbert’s world and Izaak Walton’s, beautiful, unchanged”.

Frances Forrest also writes that the Church was “by origin a wayside chapel (“a pitiful little chappell of ease to Foughelston” in Aubrey’s words)”.

Herbert was born on 3 April, 1593, in Montgomery, Wales. His aristocratic background and scholarly education did not suggest that he was destined to become a country parson in the parish of Fuggleston-cum-Bemerton. He was instituted in St Andrew’s Church by the Bishop of Salisbury on 26 April, 1630, according to P C Magee . Herbert was a deacon on his arrival at Bemerton and was ordained priest in the Cathedral on 19 September 1630.

He died of consumption on 1^st March, 1633, just before his 40th birthday. He is buried under the chancel floor His collection of poetry, “The Temple” was not published until after he died, in 1633. Herbert had dedicated or consecrated his poetic talent “to God’s glory”.

Reading “The Temple”, especially a lovely poem like “Vertue”, one cannot but think of Bemerton church, of Bemerton Rectory that George Herbert himself restored, and of the trees (perhaps the medlar tree near the river ?) and the flowers and herbs that he planted in the Rectory garden (Aubrey, quoted by Forrest, said that “Mr Herbert made a good garden and walkes” and was a “good botanic”). Here are two verses from “Vertue”:

George Herbert “chiefly lives” through the poems collected in “The Temple”, and, as Frances Forrest comments, “George Herbert lives still in ..our imaginations. The river Nadder remains and Salisbury spire remains, and ferns still grow in the ditches, and grasses and brambles narrow the path to Salisbury. Here, we may meet in fancy the Divine Poet.”

The Swedish Institute has just published a series of books about the relationships between Sweden and a number of other countries, including Greece and Cyprus. The book on Cyprus[1] mentions Viking inscriptions on runic stones which refer to expeditions to Byzantium and the Holy Land. In Sven Jansson’s book , “Runes in Sweden”[2], he writes:

“The foreign country whose name occurs most frequently is Greece, Grikkland, denoting the northeast Mediterranean lands of the eastern empire. It is clear that journeys there were especially common, and to judge by the inscriptions it was a destination found particularly enticing by men from the central Swedish provinces.”

Jansson says that most of the runic inscriptions were memorials to men who sailed away and never returned. “They met death among the Greeks”. Modern expeditions are more likely to be about recharging the life-force after a harsh Nordic winter !

The volume entitled “Sweden and Greece”[3], published in bilingual Swedish and Greek parallel-text format, contains an article by George Papandreou, “My Second Homeland”.

At the January 2001 Stockholm International Forum on Combating Intolerance, Greece’s Foreign Minister spoke of the welcome his family had received in Greece at the time of the Junta, but also referred to the fact that, even in Sweden, he had been the subject of racial discrimination, and was called a “svartskalle” or “black-skull”. Amongst his own best friends at school in Sweden were a Pakistani and an Iraqi boy, he writes.

In his article, he recalls his second homeland, the homeland of his exile, from the Autumn of 1968, when he started attending the English Department of the international school at Viggbyholm. He spent a year there before his family moved to Canada.

One of his fellow pupils was a girl called Margarita (now Ann-Margaret Mellberg, Greece’s Cultural Attache in Sweden and distinguished translator of Strindberg and Ibsen) and one of his teachers was Theodore Kallifatides, now one of Sweden’s best known writers. Kallifatides writes in Swedish, even though he did not emigrate to Sweden until the age of 25 /26, in 1964. He was born in 1938 in Molai, southern Peloponnese. His first book, a slim volume of poems called “Minret I exil”[4] (“Memory in Exile”) was published in 1969. His most accessible book for readers of English is “Peasants and Masters”[5], translated by Thomas Teal,1990. An article :”Theodor Kallifatides: An Introduction” , by Paul Norden, appeared in the Swedish Book Review[6] in 1989. His work is also discussed in the section “Immigrant Literature and the Jewish Voice” in “A History of Swedish Literature”[7], edited by Lars G. Warme, 1996 : “An aspiring writer in his homeland, he (Kallifatides) determined that his literary language would henceforth be Swedish and systematically set about mastering it. He has described the transition from one language to another as the longest journey anyone can undertake, a journey that inevitably ends in a sort of limbo.”

One thinks of Conrad , Nabokov, Brodsky, Broumas and Tsaloumas, who made similar journeys with even greater international success, no doubt because their adopted language happened to be English. Prime Minister Göran Persson recently gave Theodor Kallifatides a great honour by asking him to speak at the launch of Sweden’s European Union Presidency (January-June 2001). In a book on racism in Europe, “Even in Sweden” (2000), Professor Allan Pred quotes Kallifatides, in translation, from an article in a Swedish daily newspaper[8] from September 1989:

“As a migrant you never get any real peace of mind anywhere. To be a migrant is to be split, and this state of being split is the modern immigrant’s problem in particular. Owing to rapid communications, emigration never becomes definitive. One can, on the contrary, continue to commute between one’s origin in and one’s new environment throughout life, constantly returning to childhood and memories and never taking root in the new country. It’s possible to decide in the morning and be in Athens in the same evening.”

Perhaps that is truer for Greek migrants in Europe than it is for those who emigrated to Australia or the USA, but even Dimitris Tsaloumas from Melbourne returns to Leros for a part of every year.

George Papandreou returned to Sweden as a student in 1971, not only because he wanted to study here, but also to have closer contact with the Social Democratic Party. His academic diploma was on the topic of Greek Immigrants to Stockholm.. He learnt Swedish and made many Swedish friends. Sweden won a special place in his heart, not least because of his respect for Olof Palme, but also because of the summers he spent on the islands of Stockholm’s archipelago, and riding his bicycle in the snow. The cold never bothered him.

The award of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Seferis and Elytis also helped to cement the bonds between the two countries. The Swedish writer Sun Axelsson has always had close connections with Greece and the island of Leros. In the Swedish Institute publication “Sweden and Greece”[9], Ann-Margaret Mellberg and Jan Henrik Swahn claim that Greece is perhaps the only country in the world with which Sweden has had such close cultural relations. I was recently delighted to buy a book in a Stockholm antiquarian bookshop devoted to the subject of the influence of Greece on Swedish literature and art. Selected by Karl Asplund and published by Bonniers in 1941- and beautifully illustrated on a quality of paper that would have been unthinkable in wartime Britain, it is called “Hellas i svensk litteratur och konst[10].”

The new Swedish Institute book on Sweden and Greece presents a comprehensive account of the links and exchanges that have taken place in recent years. Among many others , Mellberg and Svann mention writers like Kostis Papakongos (born 1936, in Pindos, Greece, he came to Sweden as a political refugee in 1967 and who wrote a series of poems and novels about the Greek Civil War) and Pericles Korovessis, whose account of torture in the hands of the junta (“The Method”[11]) was published in England and Sweden in 1970. Korovessis also lived in Stockholm and was married to a Swede. He still maintains an apartment in Stockholm and visits every year. Other Greek writers listed on the Swedish Immigant-Institute web-site [12]include Jannis Ambatsis, Vasilios Gakis, Ioannis Greveniotis, Andreas Hadjoudes, Kostas Koukoulis and Leo Malaxos.

Mikis Theodorakis has always been hugely popular in Sweden. A few weeks ago I attended a concert of his songs by the Swedish-Greek group “Taximi”. It was almost as if I was reliving a concert from 1970, the songs and melodies still carried the same emotional force. The dancing that followed was a little less authentic, if a lot of fun for those who joined in. The Swedes have enormous enthusiasm for Greek dancing, even if the hassapiko and zeibekiko are occasionally confused and even if the kalamatianos circle-dance is the universal solution to any almost regional folk-song or tune.

This unbridled enthusiasm for Greek culture and for Greece itself can be seen in a different light, or as a mixed blessing, as it was by Nikolas Kokkalis, in a poem called “The Tourist”[13], translated by Martin Allwood:

Nikos Kokkalis was born in 1918, in Crete, and came to Sweden in 1952. He died in Stockholm in 1997. The translator, Martin Allwood, a bilingual British poet living in the USA, also wrote poetry in Swedish. He edited the volume “Modern Scandinavian Poetry”,1982, from which this translation is taken.

By now, of course, Greek houses , Greek food, music and literature have become more familiar to foreign tourists than ever before, be they Swedish, British or American.

But it is thanks to people like Margarita Mellberg, the Greek Cultural Attache in Stockholm, that deeper understanding is achieved between nations. Her wide knowledge of both Swedish and Greek literary history and recent developments, her exceptional bilingual skills and her stimulating lectures on topics such as Strindberg’s influence on Greek letters has made her a role model for many of us engaged in cultural relations work in Sweden and elsewhere.

[1] Sverige och Cypern, The Swedish Institute, Stockholm, 2001

[2] Runes in Sweden,Sven B.F.Jansson,tr. Peter Foote,Gidlunds,1997

[3] Sverige och Grekland, The Swedish Institute,Stockholm,2001

[4] Minnet I exil, Dikter av Theodor Kallifatides, Bonniers, Stockholm, 1969

[5] Peasants & Masters, Theodor Kallifatides, translated by Thomas Teal,Fjord Press, Seattle, 1990

[6] SBR 2 , Lampeter, Wales, 1989, pp 20-24

[7] Ed. Lars G. Warme, University of Nebraska Press, 1996. Pp 451-452

[8] Dagens Nyheter, September 3, 1989, quoted in “Even in Sweden”, Allan Pred,Univesrity of California Press,2000.

[9] Ibid, pp 29-40

[10] Hellas i svensk litteratur och konst, Bonniers, Stockholm, 1941

[11] The Method: A personal account of the tortures in Greece, Pericles Korovessis, translated by Les Nightingale and Catherine Patrakis, Allison & Busby, London, 1970.First Greek language edition in series Tema, Raben & Sjogren, Lund, Sweden,1970.

[12] www.immi.se/kultur/authors/balkan

[13] Modern Scandinavian Poetry, ed. Martin Allwood, The Anglo-American Center, Mullsjö, Sweden, 1982

“Swedish Reflections, Beowulf to Bergman”

Introduction by Jim Potts

The British Council opened in Sweden on 17 December 1941, although British Council programmes had been organised in the country as early as 1939 (essay competitions in schools, with the prize being a visit to the UK, following a visit by the Secretary of the Council´s Students`Committee in January-February 1939), there had also been influential English Language Teaching Summer Schools held in Sigtuna. During the War the British Council organised a lecture tour by T.S Eliot (in 1942) which was judged a great success. He gave talks on “Poetry, Speech and Music” and on “Poetry in the Theatre”, which received exceptional publicity and detailed coverage in the Swedish Press.

This anthology marks the 60^th Anniversary of T.S.Eliot’s British Council tour of Sweden, and was conceived to celebrate the 60^th Anniversary of British Council projects and full operational activity in Sweden.

In September 1941 the Chairman of the Council’s Executive Committee reported in the minutes that “H.M. Legation at Stockholm had urged the Council to appoint a representative in Sweden to organise Council activities there. The Foreign Office were strongly in favour of expanding the Council’s work in Sweden”. Modest expenditure was approved by the Treasury which would “allow it to be taken from savings in the Balkans and Finland” (following the dramatic changes in Eastern Europe after 1989/1990, funding priorities in the region shifted in favour of the Baltic States, Central and Eastern Europe and beyond.)

An influential exhibition of Modern British Watercolours (“Nutida Engelsk Akvarellkunst”) at the Swedish National Museum in 1943 and other centres like Gothenburg (total attendance was 12,600) was probably as close as the Council ever came to “cultural propaganda” . The opening at Stockholm was attended by T.R.H the Crown Prince and Crown Princess of Sweden and Prince Eugen.

Political propaganda during the War was the responsibility of the Ministry of Information. The Council did organise window displays on the social services, hostels for factory workers, community centres, modern developments in British schools, British provincial towns, the historical development of the English book, the English theatre and other subjects.

Other activities in the forties included lecture tours by Sir Howard Florey, Sir Lawrence Bragg (whose “unusual ability to interpret science to laymen made him a most popular visiting lecturer”), Dr Malcolm Sargent (who also conducted concerts), Sir Kenneth Clark, Erik Linklater, J.B. Priestley as well as T.S.Eliot.

The Council was almost the only means of cultural contact between Britain and Sweden during the war and “difficulties of transport from September 1943 onwards did not prevent its work from increasing rapidly, for Swedes now know better what the Council can do for them, partly by reason of the publicity its activities have received in the Press, and partly on account of the distribution of 16,000 copies of a brochure in Swedish describing the work of the Council in Sweden. Expansion has been noteworthy in the Anglophil Societies, in English teaching, in the publication of English books in Sweden, and in the distribution of periodicals….If the increase in the Anglophil Societies is a symptom of Swedish sentiment, the expansion of English teaching is not less so. A Gallup poll taken during the year showed that 17 per cent of the Swedish public can read English, while only 16 per cent can read German, and the figure for English is far greater among those under forty.” (BC Annual Report 1943/44).

Courses in English literature, music, history, geography and language were given at the Council’s offices in Stockholm, as well as popular English language circles for young people. A monthly periodical called “Things English” was produced by the Council for secondary schools and for younger students of English. Six thousand copies were sent out (and 2,500 annual subscriptions were quickly taken out ; by 1944/45 there were initially 7,374 annual subscribers, with 54,700 copies sold during the year). Council staff contributed to School Radio English programmes and “Mr Snodin did film teaching, using Pygmalion and Good-bye Mr Chips, in the Stockholm, Uppsala, Gothenburg and Skåne areas, and had about 10,000 attendances.”

It is interesting to speculate that the tours by T.S.Eliot and Sir Howard Florey may have helped to reinforce their claims to their respective Nobel Prizes. Eliot was back in Stockholm in 1948 to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, “for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry”.

Whatever the impact of these tours by distinguished visitors, the English language teaching contribution by resident lecturers like F.A.L Charlesworth, Albert Read and M.R.Snodin clearly had a major impact on the development of English Language teaching in Sweden after the war, both at the elementary and secondary school level, as well as in adult education (WEA/ABF), Folkuniversitet and University level, and through the formation of Anglophile societies all over the country. The Sigtuna Summer Schools seem to have made a huge impact (there were 8 courses in 1944 alone, and they were visited by the Swedish Foreign Minister on the closing days). Swedish firms donated a number of scholarships to be awarded. In 1944 there were 638 applicants for places, participants were taught by a British and Swedish staff of 69 !

The British Council’s first office was at Birger Jarlsgatan 15. The first Director, or Representative (1941-1944), was the poet Ronald Bottrall (much praised by F. R.Leavis and T.S. Eliot) . He was followed by Professor Michael Roberts, a History Professor, and then by Brigadier H.C. Travell Stronge, CBE,DSO,MC.

Early Assistant Representatives included Dr Arthur King, D.J. Gillan and R. Washbourn.

More recent Directors have included Dr Patrick Spaven, Dr Sean Lewis, John Day and Raymond Adlam.

The Council’s focus has changed over the course of 60 years. English Language Teacher-Training and Joint Research programmes have virtually disappeared, as links are now largely self-sustaining. The Arts and Cultural Relations projects remain an important area of activity; the focus has moved at times towards areas like cultural and public diplomacy and collaboration with The Embassy and other partners in the Creative Industries (eg The British Design Season in 2001, Scotland in Sweden in 2002), to reaching a wider, younger public and aspiring young professionals, and to the development of projects in partnership with Swedish groups and organisations, in a spirit of “mutuality”.

Creating a dialogue between the countries, and the creation of wider European networks is a priority, as well as the sharing of best practice eg in public and social policy, combating intolerance, science and technology.

In 1986 the Council was involved in a significant 3 day seminar on “Multiculturalism in Britain and Sweden” in partnership with the Swedish Academy (UK writers included Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguru and Grace Nichols. ) . Cultural diversity remains a significant focus, one example being the 2002 Intercult project called “Trans//Fusion”.

Information work has changed in line with developments in electronic communication. With trends towards increased use of the Internet, towards Study Abroad (between 3,600 and 4,250 young Swedes study in UK Higher Education and Further Education institutions) and greater ease of travel (not least by means of the Channel Tunnel and the Öresund Bridge and tunnel), the Council is well-placed to develop new models of cultural relations to reflect these changes in society and diverse groups’ instant information needs.

Whatever projects we undertake in future, whatever the thematic or regional focus, such as Scotland in Sweden , or a focus on the Öresund or Gotheburg/Västra Götaland regions, we shall be concerned with the better measurement of impact. Not that it was lacking in the past. In 1945, for instance, articles in the Swedish press based on Council material amounted to 3,568 column inches (circulation 3,394,142) and references to the Council’s activities to 12,243 column inches (circulation 11,211,914). Press space connected with the Council totalled 15,927 column inches (circulation 15,559,740).

Whilst our impact was being measured even in the early days, it is a pity that we cannot now go back and measure the effectiveness of all past events, like the impact of T.S.Eliot’s 1942 lecture tour on the development of Modernism in Swedish Literature, or the impact of the Sigtuna Summer Schools on the successful spread of the English language schools and business ,or the full impact of Council lecturers on the teaching of English in adult education.

As the current British Council Director, I look forward to continuing this conversation, this mutually-rewarding tradition of dialogue and exchange, and I am confident that we will be able to demonstrate and measure the impact of our future projects and partnerships. I have faith that the Council did play an important role in spreading the teaching of English in Sweden after World War II, even if we can’t take credit for the astonishing levels of fluency achieved by Swedes today !

I once calculated that , in just over 100 years of the Nobel Prize in Literature, around 25% of Literature Nobel Prize Winners had written their main works in the English Language. Those winners that we tend to consider as representing “English Literature” (however defined, but including belles lettres and works of literary value) -regardless of nationality or personal sense of identity- are Kipling (1907), Yeats (1923), Shaw (1926), Galsworthy (1932), Eliot (1948), Russell (1950), Churchill (1953), Canetti (1981; emigrated to England 1938; British citizen from 1952), Golding (1983), Naipaul (2001), and we might lay some claim to Heaney (1995) and White (1973), since they were born and educated in the UK. If we wish to stretch the point, we may also wish to express our pride in other winners born in the former British Empire: Walcott (1992), Soyinka (1986; educated at University of Leeds), Tagore (1913), and Gordimer (1991).

Personally, I would take even more delight in my own personal favourites among the prize-winners: Camus (1957), Seferis (1963), Elytis (1979), and Seifert (1984), but that may be because I have lived and work in Greece and in Prague, and because I deeply respect the view and criterion of Alfred Nobel, that “No consideration whatever shall be given to nationality”.

British translators like Rex Warner, Philip Sherrard and Ewald Osers played an important part in the Academy’s deliberations, one can assume, just as translators such as Joan Tate, Paul Britten Austin, Robin Fulton, Robin Young, Michael Meyer and Sarah Death played such an important part in bringing Swedish literature to the English-speaking world.

Issues of national identity and the sense of belonging are not always easy. It seems the Swedish Academy does not always find it so easy to decide on the prize-winners either.

Over the years, there has been surprise in some quarters that figures like Thomas Hardy, James Joyce, Henry James, Graham Greene, W.H.Auden, Lawrence Durrell, and other deserving English language authors, were not awarded this high (the highest) distinction. Kjell Espmark and Sture Allen admit, in “The Nobel Prize in Literature, An Introduction”, Swedish Academy, 2001, that the Academy was criticised for ignoring Graham Greene, “a frequently praised candidate until around 1970”. At least he is one of the few foreign writers who has a “Literary Stockholm” plaque, with a quotation from “England Made Me”, near Stockholm’s North Bridge. There has always been gossip and speculation about the reasons why specific writers are overlooked, and members of the Academy have occasionally spoken out or even “resigned”, eg when Kerstin Ekman and two other members of the committee “resigned” (or rather, there are three empty chairs since, once elected, they are members for life and cannot resign) over the Academy’s stand in 1989 about the fatwa imposed on Salman Rushdie; on another occasion, Lars Gyllensten revealed information about the voting and how he had intended to vote (eg concerning the occasion when William Golding was awarded the prize).

It has been suggested (by Humphrey Carpenter, in “W.H.Auden, A Biography”, Allen and Unwin, 1981) that the reason that W.H.Auden was not awarded the prize was the way in which he had described Dag Hammarskjöld’s character and ego in the introduction to the Auden/Sjöberg translation of Hammarskjöld’s “Markings”, which he suggests Leif Belfrage found unacceptable. Most of the published accounts are based on pure speculation, I have been assured by Kjell Espmark, the distinguished poet and Chairman of the Nobel Selection Committee. One respects the secrecy of the Academy’s proceedings.

This anthology is not just about writers who have been supported in some way by the British Council. That may have been the starting point. It soon began to develop as an anthology representing the best of British creative writing about Sweden, and including some outstanding examples of Swedish writing about the UK , as well as translations of Swedish writers by leading British literary figures.

The final stage in its evolution was to include some important examples in English written by non-British writers, like Paul Durcan’s wonderful poem about Stockholm, and Longfellow’s translations of Tegner. They are simply too important to leave out. Both Durcan and Heaney are published by UK publishers. It is worth pointing out that the Nordic Region (Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland) is the second largest market for British book exports after the USA (DTI UK statistics for Exports of Books).

At the end of the day, it is the reader who comes first. I am grateful to all my Swedish friends and colleagues who have suggested writers and passages for inclusion, and I also wish to acknowledge the assistance provided by the British Council’s Literature Department (especially with contact addresses).

I would like to thank all the generous Swedish hosts, who, over the years, have invited British writers to come as writers-in-residence (eg Jamie McKendrick, Barry Unsworth, Marion Lomax/Robyn Bolam, Caryl Phillips, Raman Mundair, Clive Sinclair, Kevin MacNeil ) to the Universities of Lund, Uppsala, Stockholm, Gotheburg and Malmö; to the English Society at Uppsala, the International Poetry Days in Malmö, the Gothenburg International Book Fair, the Stockholm Poetry Festival, the International Writers’ Stage at Kulturhuset, the Swedish Institute, the Swedish Academy, publishing houses like Bonniers and Norstedts.

In the two years that I have been in Sweden, visiting writers supported by the British Council have included Tony Harrison, Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze, Dannie Abse, Adrian Mitchell, Jamie McKendrick, Katherine Pierpoint, Sophie Hannah, Ruth Fainlight, Stephen Knight, Diran Adebayo, Tony Parsons, Alan Sillitoe, Raman Mundair, and a wonderful line-up of Scottish writers came in 2002: Janice Galloway, Ian Rankin, Jackie Kay, Alan Warner, Kevin MacNeil, Kate Clanchy, Roddy Lumsden, David Greig and Gregory Burke. This is to thank the writers for giving up their time and for giving their audiences so much pleasure.

Most of all I wish to thank Dr Judith Black, my co-editor, who has done an absolutely outstanding job and assumed the lion’s share of the work for editing this anthology.

Gary Pulsover, of Arcadia Books, expressed his enthusiasm for the project at an early stage, and I feel sure that the readers will be fascinated by and delighted with the results.

Ever since the first English poem, Widsith ( the oldest in English, probably the earliest of any Germanic people), British poets have been consistently conscious of Sweden and the Swedes:

Sometimes I think that the life of a British Council staff-member resembles that of Widsith, the wandering minstrel, travelling in foreign lands, far from his/her folk, friends and kin.

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A British Tribute to George Seferis to mark the fortieth anniversary of the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature

The audience listens, while taking their seats, to Seferis’ recorded reading of “In the Kyrenia District”.

“Your Excellencies, Members of the Swedish Academy, Director and Staff of the Mediterranean Museum, Friends of Greece, Distinguished Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen”: The title of this lecture indicates that I intend to talk about the themes of diplomacy, friendship and war in the poetry and prose of Seferis, but also to explore some of the problems faced by a diplomat who happens to be a poet or writer. In particular, as this is a British tribute, I intend to survey Seferis’ relationship with Britain, the British Council, the BBC, and his British friends, as they changed over time and in the light of political events, and some of his preoccupations during his own diplomatic postings to Britain.

This year marks the 40^th Anniversary of his Nobel Prize for Literature. Some of you may ask why I was asked or agreed to give this talk as I am not an academic. Firstly because I have a personal interest in Greek literature and poetry and I have been researching – and more importantly, enjoying it- for many years. I also have a keen interest in cultural diplomacy in both its national and European dimensions. I’m delighted to be able to make a small contribution to the cultural programme of the Greek Presidency.

I happen to believe that Seferis’ poetry has retained its relevance for Europe and the world, and I hope I shall be able to demonstrate why this is so. But the lecture is more of a partial survey than a thesis. There is no single argument. Seferis’ poetry is complex, but I shall illustrate my survey with some short extracts I will read myself, and some longer poems and extracts will be read in Swedish by the distinguished poet, Member of the Swedish Academy and Professor Emeritus Kjell Espmark.

We shall also have the pleasure of hearing three poems set to music and sung. That is the only roadmap I can offer you at this stage, except to give you a clue as to why the phrase “There is an island” appears in the title. This comes from Seferis’ poem “Salamis in Cyprus” and from the messenger’s speech in Aeschylus’ play “The Persians.” The reason for including it will I hope become more clear very soon..

I ‘d like to set the stage for this British Tribute to George Seferis by briefly mentioning some of Seferis’ many British friends, but before I do, let’s listen to a satirical poem about British expatriates in Cyprus in the 1950s, called In the Kyrenia District. Seferis places two quotations, from John Betjeman and W H Auden, at the top of the poem.

++“In the Kyrenia District” to be read in full by Kjell Espmark in Swedish :

So who were Seferis’ British friends ? Lawrence Durrell (initially with Henry Miller, later in Athens again, in Kalamata, Cairo, Cyprus)

Rex Warner (Athens, then much later in the USA). Seferis’ diary 25 January 1947:

“There is something solid about this man; I feel a steadily growing friendship for him”. I’ll quote from his poem “Letter to Rex Warner” in a moment. Rex Warner wrote of Seferis (intro. to “King of Asine” 1948: “One knows him first as a poet and a diplomat, but cannot know him long without knowing him as a friend.” Rex Warner was a classicist, translator, poet and novelist.

Other friends included Steven Runciman (Athens, Scotland); Maurice Bowra ; Bernard Spencer (Cairo); Patrick Leigh-Fermor (Cairo); Osbert Lancaster (44-45 Press attaché): Robert Liddell (Cairo); Olivia Manning and Reg Smith (Cairo); Peter Levi; Philip Sherrard (Keeley, p 114); Maurice Cardiff; C. M. (Monty) Woodhouse; C Day-Lewis; T.S.Eliot ; E.M.Forster ; W. H. Auden.

++ Read from Letter to Rex Warner (Rex Warner was the Director of the British Council Institute in Athens at the time they first met).

Seferis’s American friends included Henry Miller and Edmund Keeley. There were occasionally professional tensions between Seferis and his translators, as is clear from his correspondence with Keeley. Seferis felt closer, personally, to Rex Warner, but most of the English translations I shall quote come from Keeley’s and Sherrard’s “Complete Poems of George Seferis”.

We should also acknowledge the roles of Katsimbalis, Savidis, Valaoritis, Stephanides in assisting the British translators,& the self-evident importance of the translations in establishing his reputation internationally, and in connection with the Nobel Prize.

Seferis saw himself, like other members of his generation, and because of the fate of the refugee Greeks of Asia Minor & his own homelessness- his lost homeland- as a kind of modern Odysseus. As Anders Österling said in his Nobel Prize Presentation Speech: “He often expresses his grief and bitterness through the medium of a central narrative figure, a kind of Odysseus with features borrowed from the old seamen in the lost Smyrna of the poet’s youth.”

Yannis Kiourtsakis comments: “The question of the lost homeland becomes an expression of the impossible return, not only of the Greek, but of contemporary man – a symbol of his universal exile” (Ithaca Magazine, no 5, Sept-Oct 2000).

Seferis was awarded the’ Nobel Prize “for his eminent lyrical writing, inspired by a deep feeling for the Hellenic world of culture”….”it has rightly been said that he, better than anyone else, has interpreted the mystery of the stones, of the dead fragments of marble, and of the silent, smiling statues”. The Presentation speech by Anders Österling also mentions the connection between Asini and Sweden because of Swedish archaeologists’ successful excavation of this site.

Let’s listen to the King of Asini at this point,to celebrate the link with Sweden.

In his Nobel Banquet Speech, Seferis said “I belong to a small country. A rocky promontory in the Mediterranean, it has nothing to distinguish it but the efforts of its people, the sea, and the light of the sun.” In the same speech ( p 159-160 Dokimes) Seferis talks of the need for poetry in difficult times: “I believe this modern world we live in, tyrannized by fear and anxiety , needs poetry”.

In Edmund Keeley’s “A Conversation with George Seferis”, which took place in December 1968, at the end of a 3 month fellowship at Princeton University, Seferis described the Nobel Prize as an “accident, not an appointment “ ie not an appointment carrying the burden of personal responsibility for making public statements

It’s 50 Years since Seferis visited Cyprus (Summer 53),& met up again with Lawrence Durrell, then teaching there; Seferis wrote “Salamis in Cyprus”, in November.

Kjell Espmark will read Salamis in Cyprus in Swedish (first it’s worth pointing out that the Greek island of Salamis-(or rather the narrow straits between the island and the coast of Attica- features in Aeschylus’ play, The Persians, as the location of the great sea- battle of 480 BC, and serves as a symbol of victory for the Greeks; it’s where the Persians suffered unexpected defeat and the nemesis that followed the hubris of Xerxes’ fatal misjudgement. “There is an island…Nysos tis esti”: Seferis appropriates these associations with respect of the other Salamis in Cyprus. He was much concerned with War and Justice, with Hubris: presumptious, overweening pride towards the gods, leading to nemesis, inevitable retribution and downfall).

I will also read part of this poem in English, but first I want to mention the view of some critics that the reference to “Friends from the other war” is to the British friends Seferis mixed with in Cairo during the Second World War, such as Durrell and Spencer, when they were “on the same side” , before the Cyprus conflict poisoned the atmosphere and the climate for trust and friendship. Seferis also cites the wartime prayer of Commander Lord Hugh Beresford, RN, who died in the Battle of Crete: “O God our loving Father…Help us to keep in mind the real causes of war: dishonesty, greed, selfishness, and lack of love, and to drive them out of this ship, so that she may be a pattern of the new world for which we are fighting….” Seferis had read this prayer in a South African newspaper in September 1941.

On the subject of unnecessary wars waged on the basis of empty illusions; on the themes of pointless slaughter & bloodshed, suffering & loss of life, and the idiocies of men, the poem “Helen”, ostensibly about the Trojan War and Helen of Troy, is one of Seferis’ great poems . I must first explain that the line “The nightingales won’t let you sleep in Platres” seems to refer to the location of Colonial Governor’s lodge in the Troodos Mountains of Cyprus. I chose this poem to show just how relevant Seferis remains today, and at a time when the Cyprus issue is still not resolved.

++Kjell Espmark reads, in Swedish, some extracts from Helen (Swedish only, not in English)

The only comment I feel I can make is this: the nightingales still won’t let us sleep.

The critic, Vangelis Calotychos, comments that “Though his highly influential early collections employ symbolist techniques and blank verse, Seferis does not want to be wholly associated with foreign, avant-gardish poetic trends. He sought to temper his devotion to European modernism with a certain brand of traditional ‘Greekness’.”

Seferis finds this traditional Greekness in poets like Solomos and Kalvos, as well as in the “humble art” of the naïve, ‘primitivist, fustanella-clad’ (or white kilt-wearing) artist Theophilos, the simple prose memoirs of General Makriyannis, in the traditional shadow-theatre of Karaghiozis

”By courting this more unrefined or Romeic strain of Greek culture, Seferis is seen to be incorporating the populist as well as the more solemn and lofty Hellenic model of the culture into his canon.” (CalÓtychos).

But the Mediterranean Museum is the right place for this lecture, as Seferis was also a poet much obsessed by the past, by archaeological sites, by statues and marble relics; by Cyprus as well as the fate and history of Greece and Greek peoples around the Mediterranean.

Rex Warner, in his introduction to the 1948 volume, “The King of Asine and Other Poems”, writes: “There is no land and sea so haunted with gods and heroes as the land and sea of Greece. Indeed there is something disturbing and oppressive as well as inspiring in the thought of such a weight and variety of history…To be conscious of such a past may well mean to be overwhelmed by it, and there are certainly many Greeks who, perhaps because the weight of it all is too heavy for them, seem to try to free themselves from one or more of their great traditions…To feel the whole of the past is a task which is certainly beyond the power of most people, and for a Greek poet the task is extraordinarily difficult.”

Professor Roderick Beaton , whose biography of Seferis will be published this autumn, interprets the poem as follows:

“The Greeks were liberated as a modern nation only to find themselves burdened with an incomprehensible weight- the statues, the relics that is, of the ancient past.” Beaton elaborates further on the meaning of the poem in the London George Seferis Centenary Celebrations (May 2000) booklet: “The ancient marble, the statue, has been irrevocably mutilated by the years that separate the living craftsman, who once made it, from the poet, the craftsman of today. As a result, the marble head is silent, it can teach him nothing. But the modern craftsman cannot escape this destiny that has been thrust into his hands at the very moment of waking: the unbearable weight of the past drags him down. The modern craftsman is impotent after that. The hands that should have turned his own creative impulses into works of art are amputated by his unwilling clinging to the past, in the form of the statue.”

Against this interpretation one might argue that Seferis is repeatedly stressing the living and enriching continuity of Greek language and culture from Ancient to Modern Greek times. Professor Beaton (Intro to MGL p 205-206) has commented on Seferis’s “synthesis of the different epochs of Greek culture” and how “a wealth of ancient allusions adds historical depth and literary complexity to his poems.”.

And, as Calotychos writes: “For Seferis, Hellenism did not die with the decline of the Golden Age of Ancient Greece. His own concept of ‘true Hellenism’ had survived up to the present, often having lain dormant or mute but never totally destroyed.”

In his Nobel Banquet Speech Seferis stressed that “The Greek language has never ceased to be spoken. It has undergone the changes that all living things experience, but there has never been a gap.”

Statues, real or symbolic, play a ghost-like role in this dialogue from the poem “Thrush”

Perhaps, after all, we shouldn’t be presenting contemporary Greek cultural events in the context of a museum devoted to the past? We too may feel haunted, burdened by the presence of lifeless marble and statues.

An alternative argument has sometimes been put forward that by turning his poems into popular songs, by setting them to music, Theodorakis and other contemporary composers like Moutsis have restricted and limited the meanings and associations of the poem-on-the- page. They may also have altered the meaning completely- if indeed we can ever hope, or should ever try, to fix the meaning of a poem in concrete. In the poem, “An Old Man on the River Bank” (June 1942) seems to anticipate the possibility that composers might complicate, distort or work against the poet’s ideas:

Clearly the poetry-reading public found his poetry like Thrush less than simple. Too decorated with symbol and myth, perhaps.

There are several relevant and more critical recent articles, in Ithaca Magazine no 5, Sept-Oct 2000. Thanassis Valtinos comments on Seferis’ “affectation” and “abundance of craft…Even though he noted that we have overloaded art with trimmings, he didn’t avoid the same mistake himself.”

The young poet, Stratis Pascalis, writes: “As I grow older, what bothers me about him is the lack of verve. He often became verbose…One sometimes has the impression that he writes from a position of security and that he is not at all concerned about life or art from the point of view of their risk, excitement, vitality. His expression becomes conservative in the end and his plainness takes on the character of a sagely transformed cerebral affectation….He was an embodiment of the poet-savant.”

There is a good 1971 lecture or essay by the poet Takis Sinopoulos entitled “The Open and Closed Poem in George Seferis” which discusses both the cryptic, difficult symbolist poems, as well as the more open and easily- accessible poems. I have to declare that I prefer the “open” poems, more than the dense symbolist ones. I have less patience than I used to have as a student for either guess-work or post-structuralist approaches. But I love individual lines and sections, and the overall sound and music of the difficult poems. Dimitris Dimiroulis, quoting the verse I have just read, argues that we should not take this stanza as a “straightforward statement about his artistic intentions… The speaking subject is not necessarily the poet …the stanza does not necessarily constitute a more reliable statement for Seferis’s poetics than any other of his poems”.

It would be Theodorakis who, by composing musical settings, made the songs communicate to the mass of the Greek people, even if he may sometimes have misinterpreted lines or punctuation marks when setting them. One cannot blame him for that. They are often difficult to understand, even after many close readings. Beaton argues that Seferis was “not best pleased” with Theodorakis’ settings of his poems. Theodorakis claims that Seferis and his wife sincerely liked the settings. The song “Sto periyiali to krifo”, based on a short Seferis poem, became so beloved in Greece that it was sung with great passion at Seferis’ funeral.

++KONSTANDINOS BIZOPOULOS SINGS “Sto periyiali to krifo”, with guitar accompaniment.

In the poem, The Last Stop ( October 1944), Seferis writes, about war and modes of communication:

Capri-Karka believes that Poem 3 from Mythistorima refers to Orestes waking up “with the marble head in his hands”- “the heavy task to kill his mother in order to avenge his father’s death.” Mythistorima is so rich in allusions to ancient drama, to Homer, and to the Asia Minor catastrophe, that it works on a number of levels. Seferis works with many tones and associations, some conscious, some unconscious. I go along with Beaton, some of the way. For me the poem evokes a feeling or a psychological complex that is common to many writers in English, that they work under the heavy burden and shadow of Shakespeare, that everything they attempt to do is bound to be second-rate or derivative because Shakespeare said it all, better than any other writer before or since. Harold Bloom has written extensively on “The Anxiety of Influence”.

Seferis’ poetry is full of references to broken and mutilated statues. Professor Roderick Beaton talks of Seferis’ rejection of the “piling up of cultural debris to infinity”.

Henry Miller writes enthusiastically of Seferis (Colossus of Maroussi, 1941, p 39 and 109): “The man who has caught this spirit of eternality which is everywhere in Greece and who has embedded it in his poems is George Seferiades….” (Seferiades was his real name). But as Professor Beaton says, Seferis is only committed to the kind of immortality that can still be felt in the vital myths and language of Ancient Greece. But he associates statues with attempts to “keep alive ‘the letter’ of ancient Greece and to deny freedom of expression to the Greeks of today.”

Seferis was haunted by the more recent past as much as by the statues and myths of ancient Greece. In his Nobel Prize Lecture of December 11, 1963, “Some Notes on Modern Greek Tradition”, Seferis also seeks to demonstrate the continuity and immortality of modern Greek poets, like Andreas Kalvos and Dionysios Solomos, the two “national poets” of Modern Greece, both from the Ionian Islands. Kalvos was “one of the most isolated figures in Greek literature” he says. Seferis was in fact obsessed by Kalvos’ fate.

Seferis arranged for Andreas Kalvos´ remains (and for the remains of his second English wife) to be repatriated, brought back to Greece from England .(Dokimes vol 2 “Kalvos, 1960”). Seferis was clearly haunted by the idea of this “faceless man, clad in black, striking his lyre on an isolated promontory”, this isolated Ionian Islander living and dying in Lincolnshire, England, but he gave no real thought to the possibility that Kalvos and his wife may not have actually wanted to have their skeletons exhumed and removed !

Kalvos was, after all, buried with Anglican church rites. Seferis is sometimes rather rude about draughty rooms in England,, and about the puritan Anglo-Saxon way of life, the typical smell of bacon and eggs frying in the pan, in the damp and foggy country. He finds it hard to imagine Kalvos, the Ionian Islander, living “in exile” for eighteen years without speaking a word of Greek, even dreaming in a foreign language. But perhaps Kalvos was happy in England (he married two British women remember, in the course of his life) and wanted to be buried there, in spite of his first , most famous patriotic ode about Zante, which ends: “May Fate not give me a foreign grave, for death is sweet only to him who sleeps in his homeland.” In Sherrard’s translation:

Seferis may have identified with that sentiment, but let us not forget that the poem was published in 1824, 45 years before Kalvos’ death. Perhaps Kalvos had grown to like the English way of life, even the draughty rooms and damp, foggy atmosphere and the smell of fried eggs and bacon ! Seferis imagines Kalvos’ wife as an old woman, but in fact she was twenty years younger than Kalvos. The smell of bacon in the mornings, and the cold, had upset Seferis personally when he lived in Hampstead in October 1931. In the end I think Seferis was right, and that Kalvos’ soul rests at peace in Zakynthos. I just hope his beloved wife feels the same way.

The British may be reluctant to return certain items to Greece, but we did not prevent Seferis from arranging to have the remains of Mr and Mrs Kalvos disturbed, dug up and packed off to Greece courtesy of Olympic Airlines on March 19^th 1960- after lying perfectly happily for about 90 years in English soil (in the case of Mr Kalvos).. Such are the priorities of poetically-minded diplomats, perhaps ?

The British did cede the Ionian Islands to Greece. When the historian C M Woodhouse stayed with Seferis in Beirut in late Summer 1953, Cyprus was much on their minds. Woodhouse writes: “By coincidence, the earthquakes in the Ionian Islands that year had been followed by tremors in Cyprus. Clearly there was a geological connection, George mused. But what did it signify ? That Cyprus, like the Ionian Islands, should be joined to Greece ? Or that the Ionian Islands, like Cyprus, should rejoin the British Empire ? There was always a strain of melancholy underlying his humour.” Once Seferis presented him with a book which “illustrated his delight in demotic Greek. It was Memoirs by Makriyannis, the hero of the war of independence who had taught himself to read and write in his thirties so that he could record them On the fly-leaf George wrote: ‘For my learned friend Monty, this illiterate my master in Greek’. Thus was formed the style which later won for him the first Nobel prize ever awarded to a Greek.”

Seferis, in his Nobel Prize Banquet Speech said: “One of my masters exclaimed at the beginning of the last century, “We are lost because we have been unjust.” He was an unlettered man, who did not learn to write until the age of thirty-five.” “I compare him to one of those old olive trees in our country which were shaped by the elements and which can, I believe, teach a man wisdom….No other man has taught me more how to write prose.”

If Makriyannis had always been especially dear to him and was a big influence, so of course was Homer; as were the French symbolists and T S Eliot, whose work (the poem Marina) George Seferis first discovered by chance in an Oxford Street bookshop in December 1931. Seferis gave a lecture comparing Kavafy and Eliot at the British Council in Athens on December 17 1946. He also translated into Greek a number of Eliot’s works. His version of The Waste Land ,which he began in 1933,was published in 1936.

Seferis also gave a lecture at the British Council on the wonderful, naive painter, Theophilos, on May 2, 1947. The first exhibition of his paintings was held at the British Council Athens in that year.

This was at a time when Rex Warner and Stephen Runciman were in charge of the British Council and Institute, but Seferis gave another lecture on Dante at the Council in 1966.

We should not neglect to mention Seferis’s BBC broadcasts in the 50s and 60s : on Nikander Noukios, a Corfiot traveler who visited England in 1545, BBC 29.4.52; on the Death of Sikelianos, broadcast 7 July ´51; he read his poetry on the BBC Third Programme in1959; and, most famously, he broke his silence in his statement against the Junta on 28 March 1969; he recorded it and had it broadcast in Greek and English (BBC 9pm).The complete statement was published in Encounter in July 1969.

Almost as if predicting that he would one day need to speak out about the state of Greece, he wrote the next poem, “When will you speak again” from Three Secret Poems.

++Kjell Espmark reads “When will you speak again” in Swedish from On Stage, Three Secret Poems.

Peter Levi , in his book The Hill of Kronos (1980) gives an account of the lecture he planned to give on Seferis at the British Council in Athens in 1970/71 but which was cancelled, or at least postponed, against his wishes. A former British Council colleague, who I consulted this March, and who had arrived in Athens in the wake of this event, believes that Billy (William) Ball, the British Council Director who initially cancelled the lecture, was treated dishonourably and badly by senior British officials, who failed to support him and who asked for him to be withdrawn from his post (followed by his early retirement). “Ball was trying to defend the Council’s non-political standing,” said my colleague. Peter Levi had walked in announcing that he intended to give the lecture but then refused to show Ball his speech or notes; it seemed clear to Ball he had a political agenda, and the Council could not promote political activities: but everything was political in those days after the publication of “Eighteen Texts” (July 1970), which opened with Seferis’ “The Cats of Saint Nicholas”, and after his March 1969 public statement and broadcast against the Colonels. Levi apparently “ hit the roof” (he had “a fiery temper”) when, in 1970, Ball asked to see the manuscript of the text; Levi called in the Ambassador. Ball had taken the view that this was likely to be an inappropriate political lecture, hard for the Council to condone,, even if it was presented (“disguised”) as something literary.

Keeley wrote that “The effect (of Eighteen Texts) was to put Seferis at the centre of opposition to the regime’s control over the intellectual life of the country, to make him gradually the unchallenged leader of dispossessed students and the silent voice of those with no public outlet for their own brooding sense of injustice.” (Keeley MGP p 113).

Many countries, apart from the Scandinavian countries and Holland, were indecisive- at least on the official front- about the Junta at the time.

The lecture eventually went ahead at the British Council, with George Seferis apparently chuckling with glee and quoting an old British war-time song to the effect that Mr Ball had only one ball, or no balls at all !

Levi had reported the case to The Daily Telegraph who took up his cause and criticised the Council. In retrospect it is possible to imagine that both the Embassy and the British Council Director thought, even if they were misguided in this respect, that they were trying to protect George Seferis himself from further trouble, as the regime had tried since 1969 to portray and discredit him as a senile communist-sympathiser “adding his own yelp to that of organized anti-Hellenic hysteria cultivated in all communist states, and some Western countries” (Labrys).

Levi’s lecture, as it appeared in essay-form in 1972, stresses the power of context, and lets long quotations from the “magnificent and angry” poem “The Cats of St Nicholas” speak for themselves.(“The Cats” was first published in Eighteen Texts, Athens, July 1970) (++ DISTRIBUTE TEXT OF POEM) . He describes Seferis’ “voice of black lamentation” in this “poem of despair and the acceptance of despair that was written in 1969”, a poem “about real events and what they mean”.

Levi seems almost to be implying that this allusive poem is an overt and transparent allegory or fable about the cats’ (read “ poets’ and intellectuals”) unceasing fight “against a plague of snakes” (read the Colonels and their network), although Seferis himself seems to have had in mind a longer period of Greek history- forty years of drought, “generations of poison, centuries of poison”. The poem was written on 5 February 1969, but in fact an earlier draft had been written, according to Keeley, for the 1955 Cyprus volume (p 112). On its publication in Eighteen Texts it was “taken to be a fable that pointed to the possibility of heroic resistance to the oppression of the Colonels. And the poet did nothing to inhibit this widely accepted reading”.

Eighteen Texts was published in English in 1972.In the foreword, Cedric Whitman writes: “These texts are a warning, not because any of the authors poses a conspiratorial threat, but because all are committed to a Greece that is free”.

“In Greece, the cat is a fierce animal. Seldom domesticated, it is a fighter, and it is no wonder that the legend arose that legions of them slew poisonous snakes on a famous promontory of Cyprus. They suffered from the poison; many died, but the others, well fed by the good monks of Saint Nicholas, destroyed the snakes who had taken the place of the human population. There are some legitimately dangerous snakes in Greece; but when they displace humanity, and take on externally human form…. one hears the ringing of the bell of Saint Nicholas summoning the cats to food in the evening, and in the morning to battle, with snakes. Hideous as that fight may be, it is better than becoming a Plaster Cast.”

In a letter of 24 December 1969 to Senator McCarthy he enclosed a copy of “The Cats” and wrote: “Since our new regime I don’t publish in Greece anymore. This situation which lasts almost three years is now becoming burdensome to me and I am trying to find an outlet. It is not quite so easy…..In writing the poem I had in mind the evil unconsciously absorbed, if I may put it so.”

Capri-Carka p 199 also points to a link with the Civil War, citing his journals. Seferis wrote on St Nicholas’ day (Dec 6) of 1944: “A black day. The mutual slaughter started since dawn”. The cycle of hatred is “self-destructive” and poisons everyone. The poem can be read specifically or more universally, or it can be taken to refer to the Civil War as well as the Cyprus conflict and the Military Dictatorship.

In 1967 he had written about his isolation from the world of Greek party politics (quoted by Philip Sherrard in “The Wound of Greece)”: “And now, after passing a whole life rocked by military movements, dictatorships, political changes, uprisings, destructions and disappointments- after living through all this, in the flesh, as I might put it, as a civil servant, I find it sad and burdensome to conclude that over all these years we have not made the slightest step forward in these matters. And when a country does not show any change for the better in forty years, this means that it is falling head-long”.

Kevin Andrews, writing in September 1971 about the death and funeral of Seferis, refers to his public statement broadcast by the BBC in March 1969: “The only difficulty for the military regime was that he had denounced it. Only once, and briefly, but in such words that their echo has not yet died out….Enough to frighten once even the British Council in Athens into canceling, for a long period, a lecture on his poetry by Peter Levi”.

These are some of the dilemmas faced by diplomats and cultural diplomats. Seferis knew only too well about the compromises that sometimes had to be made as a result of a diplomatic career. He served in various official posts, with varying duties, in the UK – and finally as Ambassador.

From 1931-1934 he served at the Greek Consulate in London. From 1951-52 he was Counsellor at the Greek Embassy in London. He was Ambassador from 1957-1962. Professor Beaton points out (Intro to MGL p 337) that Seferiadis the diplomat was obliged to write in katharevousa (artificial Purist Greek) throughout his career; Seferis (his pen-name) the poet “wrote the poetry and essays in demotic…with no trace of the language of Seferis the diplomat.”

But service overseas also brought its rewards and inspirations. Seferis discovered and was influenced by the poetry of Yeats and Eliot: he made translations of Eliot and wrote an introduction to his work. At his second meeting with Eliot, 15 October 1951,Eliot asked him: “Do you have any time left for your own work?” “At the moment, not a single minute”, replied Seferis. ”The good thing is that at least you don’t have any official duties in the field of Literature. I remember that on the other occasion, when somebody asked you if you were the Cultural Counsellor at the Embassy, you replied with a note of great relief, “No, thank God””. On another occasion (7 February 1952), Eliot asked Seferis how he was managing to balance the transitions between his private and public work. It was a problem that taxed them both, although they both recognized that a poet should have another occupation apart from the creation of poetry. In the course of his December 1968 Princeton conversation with Edmund Keeley, Seferis was asked whether his professional career as a diplomat had affected the imagery or themes of his poetry. Seferis thought not, (apart from some lines from “Last Stop”- “Souls shriveled up by public sins,/ Each one his rank and position, like a bird in its cage”) but it was important for him to have a job which was not related to his creative work. He did complain about suffering from the lack of time, but recalled Eliot’s view that “it is better not to have time because it is the subconscious which is doing the poetical work”.( Keeley, A Conversation , p 56-58).

His literary “relationship” with Eliot, incidentally, went back to 1931, when he discovered Eliot’s poem “Marina”, in that Oxford Street bookshop. The lines that particularly impressed him were:. “What seas what shores what gray rocks and what islands/ What water lapping the bow/ And scent of pine…”

In his essay on “Seferis’ ‘Political’ Voice” ( MGP p 95) Keeley writes that “As a diplomat sometimes at the center of political action, he inevitably felt a degree of tension between his public responsibilities and his more private obligation to the muse.” When Keeley asked him if, as a poet, he ever found his life in the diplomatic service a burden, Seferis answered, “Only when my public life begins to enter my dreams.”

Alongside the fresh images and renewed inspiration generated by foreign travel, his diplomatic postings often caused Seferis great loneliness and homesickness; he felt cut off and isolated in Albania and South Africa. Here are some lines from the poem, The Return of the Exile (1938):

But Seferis always had a good sense of humour, sometimes bawdy. He wasn’t always sombre and serious.

He sent that to Lawrence Durrell in November 1941, when he was at the Greek Legation in Pretoria. In his letter Seferis wrote: “I think that limerick writing is a good exercise for lonely men, and suppose that genre has been created in England because all of you are lonely like islands.” In 1948, Rex Warner writes that Seferis’ melancholy “is always giving place to his own individual and charming humour. He has written limericks in Greek.”

He was still at it thirty years later, in 1971. On the same day that he would write his last great poem, “On Gorse”, over lunch he spoke of limericks to his friends, including Peter Levi ”George confessed to having written one in English. ‘If I can remember it, my dear, it was like this:

Then he noticed that all the tables around had fallen silent. They were listening with baited breath. He refused to go on. I shall never know how it ended, and not for the lack of many guesses.”

Perhaps it’s fortunate that Eliot was a greater influence than Edward Lear. I suspect he would not have won the Nobel Prize on the basis of his limerick-writing skills. But he clearly enjoyed writing bawdy verse.

Friendship, as well as issues of betrayal, loyalty, injustice ( “Friends from the other war….There is an island”) is an important theme in the poetry and personal life of Seferis, touched on in this poem from Mythistorima, set to music by Moutsis.

++Maria Zottele sings Moutsis’ setting of “Einai palio to limani” (Mythistorima 9)

One aspect of diplomatic work, especially during wartime or international tensions or hostilities is Propaganda (whatever it is called), and the practice of propaganda can put a strain on the oldest of friendships, loyalties and alliances. Seferis served in a Press and Information role in Cairo, Lawrence Durrell accepted a similar position in Cyprus. Durrell( to Miller letter, May 44 ,p.193): “George Seferis…is feeling happier and happier now that he has dropped propaganda”.

Interestingly, Sinopoulos points out that Seferis,, as Director Press Services to the Greek Government in Cairo, himself “helped to organize a successful exhibition of photographs and documents from occupied Greece under the title ‘Two Years of Slavery-Two Years of Struggle’. Sinopoulos quotes Seferis’ words in the catalogue: “Real experience changes man.”

Concerning Durrell and Cyprus, Seferis wrote a letter to George Theotokas in December 1954: “I have considerable and bitter doubts whether Durrell, who has been put in charge of propaganda on the island, would have the same moral strength. I am very much afraid that he who asked me in the forties whether I was a pacifist has now set his cap at a Lieutenant-Kiplingship……What I beg you to consider is the fact that it is I who write this, I who love England more than any other foreign place and most of whose real friends are there. My acquaintance with Cyprus has cost me, because I saw from close-up what felicities the monkeyshines of the colonials can lead to….” (Labrys, 1983, trans. John Stathatos).

In his book “Legacy of strife, Cyprus from rebellion to civil war” (1964) Charles Foley gives a good brief pen-portrait of Durrell, who had just taken over the post of Government Information Officer and had to give out the “official point of view”, but who was “as free from humbug as any Cyprus official could be”.( p. 17). John Stathatos notes (Lambrys 1983) “Though it cooled for a while as a result of the Cyprus conflict, it is only fair to point out that the friendship between Seferis and Durrell survived the indignation which had provoked this particular passage.”

I like to recall that it was British Council staff who first helped to translate the poetry of Seferis: Bernard Spencer, Lawrence Durrell, Rex Warner.

The Rex Warner translation was almost certainly used the Swedish Academy’s Nobel Committee. He acknowledged the help and collaboration of George Savidis and George Katsimbalis. Lawrence Durrell admitted in an interview with the Aegean Review (Fall/Winter 1987), when asked which of the poems he translated for the 1948 volume, The King of Asine and Other Poems: “We all worked on them, as our Greek was- I mean, except for Nanos (Valaoritis) - defective. As we knew the subject, we knew our creator, and Seferis was a friend, we wanted to lend as much as we could of our particular power. Nanos would verify that the right electric contact was made and that we’d got as near in appositeness to the original as possible. So we rather hung back from taking responsibility in the matter. We acted more as consultants, if you like.”

There is another interesting, if uncomfortable, anecdote concerning Seferis’ relations with British Council staff, apart from the episode relating to the canceling of the Peter Levi lecture:

This one concerns Maurice Cardiff in Cyprus (Seferis’ Letter to Theotokas, 28.12.54): “Before my friend Maurice Cardiff, who runs the local British Council, I Seferis felt like a quisling and told him so when I explained in all sincerity why I had no intention of setting foot in his institute”—nine months later on the night of 12 Sept 1955 the British Institute and library in Cyprus was burnt down (nb a quisling is a person who betrays his own country by helping the occupying enemy force; Quisling was a pro Nazi Norwegian leader). In Bitter Lemons, Durrell writes, p. 110: “Another old friend, Maurice Cardiff, has returned to the island where he represents the British Council- surely an inspired choice, for he was part-editor and founder of the old Anglo-Hellenic review. He promises to find me some teaching to do…he is a most welcome addition to the ranks of exiles; but more important, he has established firm links with the few Greek intellectuals on the island and is much beloved.” Seferis says of his old friend Cardiff, when he told him (nine months earlier) that he would not set foot in the British Council Institute: “It is to his credit, and I salute him for it, that he understood my position and was able to show me how ashamed he felt about this monstrous culmination of the logic of our times.” As we have seen, Seferis was much less sure if Durrell would show the same moral strength, having been put in charge of propaganda and PR for the British colonial government, possibly on the recommendation of Cardiff himself.

Seferis, one feels, found any form of official propaganda or “spin-doctoring” distasteful, even if he had on occasion, in certain postings, to become professionally involved with the art himself. At the end of his Nobel Prize Lecture nearly 40 years ago, Seferis said: “A great worker for our liberty, Righas Pheraios, has taught us: ‘Free thoughts are good thoughts’. But I should like our youth to think at the same time of the saying engraved on the lintel above the gate of your university at Uppsala: “Free thoughts are good; just thoughts are better”.

Just thoughts, Justice: key themes in Seferis’ poetry. War, justice, hubris and nemesis, the avenging Furies (themes that run through poems like Helen, Salamis in Cyprus,& On Gorse).In his letter on The Thrush to Katsimbalis 27 December 1949, he talks about Hubris and the Furies, the Erini-es, the handmaids of Justice, making unjust people pay for their sins. And in his Nobel Prize Banquet Speech, Seferis said “In the tightly organised classical tragedies the man who exceeds his measure is punished by the Eriny-es. And this norm of justice holds even in the realm of nature. “Helios will not overstep his measure”, says Heraclitus, “otherwise the Eriny-es, the ministers of Justice, will find him out.” A modern scientist might profit by pondering this aphorism of the Ionian philosopher.”

His wonderful and powerful last poem, On Gorse (or On Aspalathoi) was written on 31 March 1971 and almost predicts the fate of Colonel Papadopoulos.

Edmund Keeley comments on its relevance to the dictatorship (MGP p 112): “in this instance suggesting what Seferis’s statement had already prophesied; that doom lay in store for tyrants who ruthlessly imposed their arrogant will on others”. Peter Levi was with Seferis on that day-trip to Sounion. “The gorse was in full flower…I asked him the Greek word for gorse…..George Seferis was sure it was an ancient word, aspalathos, that had survived. That night he had found his word in Plato. Soon afterwards he wrote…his last, terrible poem. The phrase ‘again in the spring season’, which occurs in it comes from a famous song of the war of independence. The rest is clear enough.” Levi p 174-5.

I looked up the reference in Plato’s Republic, Book 10, myself: “Where is Ardiaeus the Great ? Now this Ardiaeus had been tyrant in a certain city of Pamphylia just a thousand years before this time and had put to death his old father and his elder brother and had done many unholy deeds”. He was punished as Seferis describes, quoting the passage from Plato.

I find it quite instructive to compare this poem with Ritsos’ “After the Defeat” of 1968. Both poets are concerned with the oppressive actions and deeds of tyrants. Ritsos is the more optimistic of the two (and talks of the country’s honour, of people’s fear, of exile, of the loss of freedom of expression), although it can be argued that he suffered more during the dictatorship. Seferis is more concerned with justice, hubris, retribution.

Although totally committed to the Greek language, Seferis also commented on the English languag