Comments & modern Greek artists: We arrived at the light...

Greek poetry & Greek artists, Greek painters, modern Greek painting


Yannis Stavrou, Piraeus ΙΙ, oil on canvas

We arrived at the light. And the light cannot be explained; it can only be seen. The rest of this scenario may be filled in by the reader—after all, he has to do something too; but let me first recall the last words of Anticleia to her son:

The soul, like a dream, flutters away and is gone.
But quickly turn your desire to the light
And keep all this in your mind.

(George Seferis explains his poem "Thrush" to his friend Katsibalis)*

George Seferis
THRUSH

Ephemeral issue of a vicious daemon and a harsh fate,
why do you force me to speak of things that it would be better for you not to know.

SILENUS TO MIDAS


I

The house near the sea

The houses I had they took away from me. The times
happened to be unpropitious: war, destruction, exile;
sometimes the hunter hits the migratory birds,
sometimes he doesn’t hit them. Hunting
was good in my time, many felt the pellet;
the rest circle aimlessly or go mad in the shelters.

Don’t talk to me about the nightingale or the lark
or the little wagtail
inscribing figures with his tail in the light;
I don’t know much about houses
I know they have their own nature, nothing else.
New at first, like babies
who play in gardens with the tassels of the sun.
they embroider colored shutters and shining doors
over the day.
When the architect’s finished, they change,
they frown or smile or even grow stubborn
with those who stayed behind, with those who went away
with others who’d come back if they could
or others who disappeared, now that the world’s become
an endless hotel.

I don’t know much about houses,
I remember their joy and their sorrow
sometimes, when I stop to think;
again
sometimes, near the sea, in naked rooms
with a single iron bed and nothing of my own,
watching the evening spider, I imagine
that someone is getting ready to come, that they dress
him up*
in white and black robes, with many-colored jewels,
and around him venerable ladies,
gray hair and dark lace shawls, talk softly,
that he is getting ready to come and say goodbye to me;
or that a woman—eyelashes quivering, slim-waisted,
returning from southern ports,
Smyrna Phodes Syracuse Alexandria,
from cities closed like hot shutters,
with perfume of golden fruit and herbs—
climbs the stairs without seeing
those who’ve fallen asleep under the stairs.

Houses, you know, grow stubborn easily when you strip
them bare.



II

Sensual Elpenor

I saw him yesterday standing by the door
below my window; it was about
seven o’clock; there was a woman with him.
He had the look of Elpenor just before he fell
and smashed himself, yet he wasn’t drunk.
He was speaking fast, and she
was gazing absently toward the gramophones;
now and then she cut him short to say a word
and then would glance impatiently
toward where they were frying fish: like a cat.
He muttered with a cigarette butt between his lips:
—“Listen. There’s this too. In the moonlight
the status sometimes bend like reeds
in the midst of ripe fruit—the statues;
and the flame becomes a cool oleander,
the flame that burns you, I mean.”

—“It's just the light… shadows of the night.”

—“Maybe the night that split open, a blue pomegranate,
a dark breast, and filled you with stars,
cleaving time.
And yet the statues
bend sometimes, dividing desire in two,
like a peach; and the flame
becomes a kiss on the limbs, a sobbing,
and then a cool leaf carried off by the wind;
they bend; they become light with a human weight.
You don’t forget it.”

—The statues are in the museum.”

—No, they pursue you, why can’t you see it?
I mean with their broken limbs,
with their shape from another time, a shape you don’t
recognize
yet know.
It’s as though
in the last days of your youth you loved
a woman who was still beautiful, and you were always afraid,
as you held her naked at noon,
of the memory aroused by your embrace;
were afraid the kiss might betray you
to other beds now of the past
which nevertheless could haunt you
so easily, so easily, and bring to life
images in the mirror, bodies once alive:
their sensuality.
It’s as though
returning home from some foreign country you happen
to open
an old trunk that’s been locked up a long time
and find the tatters of clothes you used to wear
on happy occasions, at festivals with many-colored lights,
mirrored, now becoming dim,
and all that remains is the perfume of the absence
of a young form.
Really, those statues are not
the fragments. You yourself are the relic;
they haunt you with a strange virginity
at home, at the office, at receptions for the celebrated,
in the unconfessed terror of sleep;
they speak of things you wish didn’t exist
or would happen years after your death,
and that’s difficult because…”

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

—“…because the statues are no longer
fragments. We are. The statues bend lightly… Good
night.”

At this point they separated. He took
the road leading uphill toward the North
and she moved on toward the light-flooded beach
where the waves are drowned in the noise from the radio:

The radio

—“Sails puffed out by the wind
are all that stay in the mind.
Perfume of silence and pine
will soon be an anodyne
now that the sailor’s set sail,
flycatcher, catfish, and wagtail.
O woman whose touch is dumb,
hear the wind’s requiem.

“Drained is the golden keg
the sun’s become a rag
round a middle-aged woman’s neck—
who coughs and coughs without break;
for the summer that’s gone she sighs,
for the gold on her shoulders, her thighs.
O woman, O sightless thing,
Hear the blindman sing.

“Close the shutters: the day recedes;
make flutes from yesteryear’s reeds
and don’t open, knock how they may:
they shout but have nothing to say.
Take cyclamen, pine-needles, the lily,
anemones out of the sea;
O woman whose wits are lost,
Listen, the water’s ghost…

—“Athens. The public has heard
the news with alarm; it is feared
a crisis is near. The prime
minister declared: ‘There is no more time…’
Take cyclamen… needles of pine…
the lily… needles of pine…
O woman…
—… is overwhelmingly stronger
The war…”

SOULMONGER*



III


The wreck “Thrush”

“This wood that cooled my forehead
at times when noon burned my veins
will flower in other hands. Take it, I’m giving it to you;
look, it’s wood from a lemon-tree…”
I heard the voice
as I was gazing at the sea trying to make out
a ship they’d sunk there years ago;
it was called “Thrush,” a small wreck; the masts,
broken, swayed at odd angles deep underwater, like
tentacles,
or the memory of dreams, marking the hull:
vague mouth of some huge dead sea-monster
extinguished in the water. Calm spread all around.

And gradually, in turn, other voices followed,*
whispers thin and thirsty
emerging from the other side of the sun, the dark side;
you might say they longed for a drop of blood to drink;*
familiar voices, but I couldn’t distinguish one from the
other.
And then the voice of the old man reached me; I felt it
quietly falling into the heart of day,
as though motionless:
“And if you condemn me to drink poison, I thank you.
Your law will be my law; how can I go
wandering from one foreign country to another, a rolling
stone.
I prefer death.
Who’ll come out best only God knows.”

Countries of the sun yet you can’t face the sun.
Countries of men yet you can’t face man.

The light

As the year go by
the judges who condemn you grow in number;
as the years go by and you converse with fewer voices,
you see the sun with different eyes:
you know that those who stayed behind were deceiving you
the delirium of flesh, the lovely dance
that ends in nakedness.
It’s as though, turning at night into an empty highway,
you suddenly see the eyes of an animal shine,
eyes already gone; so you feel your own eyes:
you gaze at the sun, then you’re lost in darkness.
The doric chiton
that swayed like the mountains when your fingers touched it
is a marble figure in the light, but its head is in darkness.
And those who abandoned the stadium to take up arms
struck the obstinate marathon runner
and he saw the track sail in blood,
the world empty like the moon,
the gardens of victory wither:
you see them in the sun, behind the sun.
And the boys who dived from the bow-sprits
go like spindles twisting still,
naked bodies plunging into black light
with a coin between the teeth, swimming still,
while the sun with golden needles sews
sails and wet wood and colors of the sea;
even now they’re going down obliquely,
the white lekythoi,
toward the pebbles on the sea floor.

Light, angelic and black,
laughter of waves on the sea’s highways
tear-stained laughter,
the old suppliant sees you
as he moves to cross the invisible fields—*
light mirrored in his blood,
the blood that gave birth to Eteocles and Polynices.
Day, angelic and black;
the brackish taste of woman that poisons the prisoner
emerges from the wave a cool branch adorned with drops.
Sing little Antigone, sing, O sing…
I’m not speaking to you about things past, I’m speaking
about love;
decorate your hair with the sun’s thorns,
dark girl;
the heart of the Scorpion has set,*
the tyrant in man has fled,
and all the daughters of the sea, Nereids, Graeae,*
hurry toward the shimmering of the rising goddess:
whoever has never loved will love,*
in the light:
and you find yourself
in a large house with many windows open
running from room to room, not knowing from where to
look out first,*
because the pine-trees will vanish, and the mirrored moun-
tains, and the chirping of birds
the sea will drain dry, shattered glass, from north and south
your eyes will empty of daylight
the way the cicadas suddenly, all together, fall silent.

Poros, “Galini,” 31 October 1946

----------------------

© Translation: Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard
From: Collected poems
Publisher: Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1981

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Yannis Stavrou, G. Seferis, mixed technique

* Letter on The Thrush

Seferis´ letter to Katsibalis

At the end of 1949 my friend George Katsimbalis asked me to write him a letter that might help the well-intentioned reader to read my poem “The Thrush” more easily. * The fact was that at that time this poem appeared to be utterly incomprehensible. I sat down, and in the lighthearted way which one has when writing to a friend, I wrote out for him a kind of scenario. “So,” I wrote, “it may well be that some day “The Thrush” will be shown as a film.” A few people understood what I was driving at; others turned my words against me or hastened to ascribe to me inconceivable intentions; they thought I was trying to give a definitive interpretation of a poem or, more precisely, to complete a poem of mine with a piece of prose. I have now reread this letter and I think that both the first and the second class of readers have already derived whatever good or bad they could from it. Here I am reprinting only the concluding passages, since they contain a few of those more general thoughts that, I think, have their place in this book.



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 may have lived long, he may have acquired much learning, he may have been trained as an acrobat. When, however, the time comes for him to create, the mariner’s compass that directs him is the 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 unnecessary or that are just sufficient for the creation of this something: the poem. He does not think of these materials; he fingers them, he weighs them, he feels their pulse. When this instinct is not mature enough to show the way, the most fiery sentiment may become disastrous and useless, like frozen ratiocination; it will be able to do nothing but stammer. Poetry, from a technical point of view, may be defined as “the harmonic word”—with the greatest possible emphasis on the term “harmonic,” in the sense of a conjunction, cohesion, correlation, opposition of one idea to another, of one emotion to another. Once I spoke of a “poetic ear”; I meant the ear that can discern such things as these.

I think that this kind of hearing, as I define it, is less common in Greece now than it was among the Ionians in the time of Solomos; less common also than is usual in present-day Europe. Perhaps this is due to lack of care, perhaps to our linguistic anarchy, perhaps to the fact that here the evolution of our poetry has been too rapid and nobody has really been able to keep up with it. Generally speaking, in Greece there is less response than one might expect from the trained listeners to poetry. To this, I think, must be attributed the fact that we observe so many and such gross mistakes in our poetical judgments. However it may be, one needs an ear to hear poetry; the rest is just chatting round the fire at Christmas, as I am doing now.

I think of this as I try to understand how it came about that in “The Thrush” I had to substitute Socrates for Tiresias. My first answer is that I saw elsewhere the tones that were necessary for the ensemble that I was attempting to complete; the idea of the Theban never even occurred to me. Then—autobiographically—because the Apology is one of the books that has most influenced me in my life; perhaps because my generation has grown up and lived in this age of injustice. Thirdly, because I have a very organic feeling that identifies humaneness with the Greek landscape.

I must say that this feeling of mine, which is shared, I think, by many others, is often rather painful. It is the opposite of that state of ceasing to exist, of the abolition of the ego, which one feels in face of the grandeur of certain foreign landscapes. I should never use such adjectives as “grand” or “stately” for any of the Greek landscapes I have in mind. It is a whole world: lines that come and go; bodies and features, the tragic silence of a “face.” Such things are difficult to express, and I can see the boys getting ready to take up the mocking chorus: “the graverobber of Yannopoulos.” However it may be, it is my belief that in the Greek light there is a kind of process of humanization; I think of Aeschylus not as the Titan or the Cyclops that people sometimes want us to see him as, but as a man feeling and expressing himself close beside us, accepting or reacting to the natural elements just as we all do. I think of the mechanism of justice which he sets before us, this alternation of Hubris and Ate, which one will not find to be simply a moral law unless it is also a law of nature. A hundred years before him Anaximander of Miletus believed that “things” pay by deterioration for the “injustice” they have committed by going beyond the order of time. And later Heraclitus will declare: “The sun will not overstep his measures; if he does, the Erinyes, the handmaids of Justice, will find him out.”

The Erinyes will hunt down the sun, just as they hunted down Orestes; just think of these cords which unite man with the elements of nature, this tragedy that is in nature and in man at the same time, this intimacy. Suppose the light were suddenly to become Orestes? It is so easy, just think: if the light of the day and the blood of man were one and the same thing? How far can one stretch this feeling? “Just anthropomorphism,” people say, and they pass on. I do not think it is as simple as that. If anthropomorphism created the Odyssey, how far can one look into the Odyssey?

We could go very far; but I shall stop here. We arrived at the light. And the light cannot be explained; it can only be seen. The rest of this scenario may be filled in by the reader—after all, he has to do something too; but let me first recall the last words of Anticleia to her son:

The soul, like a dream, flutters away and is gone.
But quickly turn your desire to the light
And keep all this in your mind.
[Odyssey XI, 222-224]

Something like this was told to me by that small ship, sunk in the harbor at Poros, that in the happy days used to sail on errands to supply the naval establishment.

I hope that all this has shown you that I am a monotonous and obstinate sort of man who, for the last twenty years, has gone on saying the same things over and over again—things that are not even his own…

And now, since we have forgotten about it entirely, do me the favor to read, as though it were a Christmas carol, the poem called “The Thrush.”

Happy New Year,
G.S.
Ankara
27 December 1949

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George Seferis

© Translation: Rex Warner and Th. D. Frangopoulos From: On the greek style ,1966
Published: Atlantic-Little, Brown