Speeches and Lectures

            George Seferis Lecture , 6 May  2003, 1800, Mediterranean Museum, Stockholm  

           “There is an island …Diplomacy and Poetry, Friendship and War”   - 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”.

“Ambassadors, Members of the Swedish Academy, Staff of the Mediterranean Museum, Ladies and Gentlemen”: I would 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.

Betjeman: “But I’m dying and done for

What on earth was all the fun for ?

For God’s sake keep that sunlight out of sight.”

W.H.Auden: “Homer’s world, not ours.”

++“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, then at various times and places, in Athens, 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.”Other British friends, some closer than others, 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).

“…I sensed who you were and we became friends.

We were in a country devastated by the war-

They’d crippled even the dolls of children.

The light, quick and strong,

Bit into everything, turned it to stone.

We walked among bicycles and kites,

Watched the colours, but our talk

Strayed to that festering horror.”

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”.

It’s very important that we should acknowledge and highlight 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 sometimes saw himself , like other members of his generation, and because of the fate of the refugee Greeks of Asia Minor, his 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.”

In the poet’s own words:

“”What are they after, our souls, traveling

on rotten brine-soaked timbers

from harbour to harbour?”

Yannis Kourtsakis 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).

This year marks the 40^th Anniversary of Seferis’ 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.

++ Kjell Espmark to read the King of Asini in Swedish

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”.

I believe we need Seferis’s poetry more than ever these days.

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 involving 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 Salamis features in Aeschylus’ play, The Persians, as the location of the sea- battle 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 was much concerned with War and Justice, with Hubris: presumptious, overweening pride towards the gods, leading to nemesis, inevitable retribution and downfall).

Kjell reads.

++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. 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.

“Friends from the other war,

on this deserted and cloudy beach

I think of you as the day turns-

Those who fell fighting and those who fell years after the battle,

Those who saw dawn through the midst of death

Or, in wild solitude under the stars,

Felt upon them the huge dark eyes

Of total disaster;

And those again who prayed

When flaming steel sawed the ships:

“lord, help us to keep in mind

the causes of this slaughter:

greed, dishonesty, selfishness,

the desiccation of love;

Lord, help us to root these out…”

-Now, on this pebbled beach, it’s better to forget;

talking does no good;

who can change the attitude of those with power ?

Who can make himself heard ?

            Each dreams separately without hearing anyone else’s nightmare.

-True. But the messenger moves swiftly,

and however long his journey, he’ll bring

to those who tried to shackle the Hellespont

the terrible news from Salamis.

Voice of the Lord upon the waters.

There is an island.”

On the subject of apparently pointless and unnecessary wars, one of Seferis’ great poems is Helen .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 Troodos and also that 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)

(“It isn’t true, it isn’t true”, she cried.

I didn’t board the blue-bowed ship….

‘The nightingales won’t let you sleep in Platres.´’

…all for an empty tunic, all for a Helen.”)

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

Much Seferis criticism has involved attempts to paraphrase or gloss what the poet has written. At the other extreme, post-Structuralist approaches prefer more tentative and varied approaches to the rhetoric and intertextuality embedded in the poems and to the deconstruction of their changing, unfixed meanings (for example,the essay by Dimitris Dimiroulis in “The Text and Its Margins”, Pella, 1985). Another 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’ 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.” (Calotychos).

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.

++Kjell Espmark reads “I woke with this marble head” in Swedish.

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, such a radio-activity of the divine….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 , Koraes Professor of Modern Greek and Byzantine History, Language and Literature at King’s College London, whose biography of Seferis will be published by Yale University Press this autumn, reads 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”

++(Kjell Espmark reads this extract from Thrush, in Swedish):

(“The statues are in the museum.”

-“No, they pursue you, why can’t you see it ?

I mean with their broken limbs…”

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

“…the statues are no longer fragments.  We are.”)

Seferis’ eleventh Haiku touches on this topic:

How can you gather together

The thousand fragments

Of  each person ?

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 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:

“I want nothing more than to speak simply, to be granted

that grace.

Because we’ve loaded even our song with so much music

That it’s slowly sinking

And we’ve decorated our art so much that its features have

Been eaten away by gold

And it’s time to say our few words because tomorrow our

Soul sets sail.”

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.”

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  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”, just because it begins with the confessional “I”. The speaking subject is not necessarily the poet and we cannot take it for granted that the ‘voice’ behind the ‘I’ is the ‘voice’ of 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 people, even if he may sometimes have misinterpreted lines 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. Katerina Schina (Ithaca No 5, ibid) comments: “The younger Greek composers succeeded I imposing their music on his poetry rather like a bridle. They limited a work…”

(COULD FEATURE A  THEODORAKIS SONG HERE ?)

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

“Our mind’s a virgin forest of murdered friends.

And if I talk to you in fables and parables

It’s because it’s more gentle for you that way; and horror

Really can’t be talked about because it’s alive,

Because it’s mute and keeps on growing…”

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. Personally I go along with Beaton some of the way. For me the poem evokes a feeling or a 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.

“I woke with this marble head in my hands;

It exhausts my elbows and I don’t know where to put it down….

My hands disappear and come towards me

Mutilated.”

I have already mentioned that 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….”

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 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 be exhumed and removed !

Kalvos was, after all, buried with Anglican church rites. Seferis is 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:

“Let my fate not give me

a tomb on a strange shore;

death is sweet only

when we sleep in our own land.”

Seferis may have identified with that sentiment, but let us not forget that the poem was published in 1824, 45 years before Kalvos’ death, aged 77, on November 3, 1869. Perhaps he 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 his 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 ? It was certainly an important gesture , especially for the people of Zakynthos. Seferis had first made plans to visit Kalvos’ grave in December 1951. He initiated the repatriation process in October 1959 (details Roderick Beaton). 

The British did cede the Ionian Islands to Greece. When 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, the visual arts equivalent of Makriyannis, on May 2, 1947. The first exhibition of his paintings was held at the British Council in 1947.

The lectures at British Council in 1947 were given at the time when Rex Warner and Stephen Runciman were posted there. He gave another lecture on Dante- 700 years, on 18 October 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 he had predicted that he would one day need to speak out about the state of Greece-

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

(When will you speak again ?

           ….But where will you be the moment

The light comes, here, to this theatre ?)

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 in 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 (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 took 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).

As Roufas wrote, anonymously at the time, “At the official level, most countries were indecisive, blowing hot and cold towards the junta. Only the Scandinavian countries and Holland have adopted an openly hostile line towards the Greek regime”.

But 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 essay (on which his speech was based) was published in “Modern Greek Writers” in 1972 (the definitive version of the essay having appeared in Greek in Athens (Ikaros, 1970). It alludes indirectly to Seferis’s declaration of 1969 (“those words we are waiting for”) and the importance of words , which can be overwhelming, within the context of a poet’s life work. Levi stresses the power of context, and lets long quotations from the “magnificent and angry” poem “The Cats of St Nicholas” (Eighteen Texts, Athens, July 1970) (++ DISTRIBUTE TEXT OF POEM) speak for themselves. 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’ (ie poets’ and intellectuals’) unceasing fight “against a plague of snakes”, ie the Colonels and their kind, 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”. Professor Beaton has written (Intro. to MGL p 263) that the poem “allusively refers to the corrosive effects of evil in the body politic and to the indifference of those who stand by.” Eighteen Texts was published in English in 1972 by Harvard University Press. 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”. Whitman talks of “The Cats of St Nicholas”:

“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, somewhere out of the great legend, the myth of Greece herself, 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 the Lord”. 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 Christmas 1931, when he discovered Eliot’s poem “Marina”, in that Oxford Street bookshop:. “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 new images and 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):

“My old friend what are you looking for ?

After years abroad you’ve come back

With images you’ve nourished

Under foreign skies

Far from your own country.”

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

“There was a young girl from Uganda

Who sat under a jacaranda

An old man with an umbrella

When he saw this kopella

            Waved his carnation from a veranda.”

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:

There was a young girl of Naupactus,

Who had an affair with a cactus….’ 

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.

++SING Moutsis SONG “Einai palio to limani” (Mythistorima 9)

One aspect of diplomatic work, especially during wartime or international tensions or hostilities is Propaganda, 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….”

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. In the same year (1960), the Keeley and Sherrard, Six Poets of Modern Greece collection appeared. Much earlier Theodore Stephanides and George Katsimbalis had included three Seferis poems in a volume called “Some Modern Greek Poets” (1930s), which had an introduction by John Drinkwater. We should stress once again the role played by Katsimbalis and Valaoritis. As 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 - 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.” Rex Warner acknowledged the help and collaboration of George Savidis and George Katsimbalis in a similar way.)

There is another interesting in 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 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 it 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 Erinyes, 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 Erinyes. And this norm of justice holds even in the realm of nature. “Helios will not overstep his measure”, says Heraclitus, “otherwise the Erinyes, 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 Papadopoulos.

++Kjell Espmark reads On Gorse, in Swedish.

“Sounion was lovely that spring day-

the Feast of the Annunciation….”

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”. The first draft of  Ritsos’ poem (not the final version) was written on 21.3.1968, but not published until 1971 in French , Swedish , German and English translations. 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. ++DISTRIBUTE TEXTS OF ON GORSE and Ritsos’ AFTER THE DEFEAT)

Although totally committed to the Greek language, Seferis also commented on the English language (eg  Letter to a Foreign Friend, On the Greek Style, p 165: “I remember the time- it now seems so long ago- when I was making my first faltering discovery of London, which I thought of as a gigantic seaport, and of the English language, whose music sounded so much more fluid than that of my own tongue”. His first published poem, Fog, was written in London at Christmas 1924. He may have liked the English Language, but not the English Light, or lack of it.

Language and Light: two distinctive differences between Britain and Greece. Is it Greek light that makes the real difference? Many writers have remarked on the quality of the Greek light, but few as eloquently as Seferis, in his Letter to a Foreign Friend:

“None of our traditions, Christian or pre-Christian, have really died out. Often when I attend the ritual procession on Good Friday, it is difficult for me to decide whether the god that is being buried is Christ or Adonis. Is it the climate? Is it the race ? I can’t tell. I believe it’s really the light. There must surely be something about the light that makes us what we are. In Greece one is more  friendly, more at one with the universe. I find this difficult to express. An idea becomes an object with surprising ease. It seems to become all but physically incarnated in the web of the sun.”

Friendship, sunshine, light. George Seferis brought all these elements into the lives of others, both Greeks and British. In a letter to Katsimbalis he writes “However it may be, it is my belief that in the Greek light there is a kind of process of humanization.”

I’m not sure I really know what he means. I’m not sure that Greeks really know what the apparently simple poem-song “Denial (“The Secret Seashore”) is  actually supposed to mean, let alone a poem like The Thrush. Perhaps it doesn’t matter. The words and phrases sound beautiful , harmonic, and significant. They, we, make the lines and the poem mean what we want it to mean. That is one of the joys of interpretation, pre-or post-structuralist. As Seferis wrote to Katsimbalis on 27 December 1949: “My dear George, any explanation of a poem is, I think, absurd. Everyone who has the slightest idea of how an artist works knows this.” He talks about the artist’s “sure instinct that knows, above all, how to bring to light or to sink in the twilight of his consciousness the things (or, as I should prefer to say, the tones) that are necessary, that are necessary or that are just sufficient for the creation of this something, the poem.”

 If you have time, I would like to suggest that some of you might like to listen to Seferis speaking in English on the BBC (his 1969 statement and his 1959 poetry reading on the Third Programme). From web site    www.bbc.co.uk/greek/seferis.shtml

 But before that we will listen to Theodorakis setting of Denial (The Secret Seashore), the song that everyone sang at his funeral. We can also compare a live version of Ligo Akoma with the BBC recording and first broadcast of “Ligo akoma” (A Little further”)

 2 SONGS

Thank Kjell, the singer, Margarita, the Ambassador, etc, the audience for their patience.  END.