Words of Mercury

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  But of all these artifices, the portmanteau-word is chief. Translators’ brows are pensively knit over Mr Earwicker’s horrorscup; and how can they make it clear, in Frankfurt and Angoulême, that he was not his bloater’s kipper? We have recently seen the deep hermetic role of these devices in the poetry of Paul Cerdan and the exegetic strife they unloose. Queneau devoted a whole issue of a learned monthly to different translations of ‘Jabberwocky’; for the fount and origin of portmanteaux has been done, among other tongues, into ancient Greek and Latin (‘Coesper erat’ = coenum + vesper = brillig, broiling time); into French, and into German: once where all the double-senses were scrupulously dovetailed and once where the sounds—Es brillig war, Die schlichte Töwen/Wirrten und wümmelten im Waben’—were all right, more or less, but where the sense had to take care of itself. Of nonsense poetry away from its home ground, the best single practitioner is German; unexpectedly, perhaps. The short stanzas of Christian Morgenstern, a Bavarian who died just before the First World War, are touched (though he resembles neither) by the same unforced magic and poetical flair and above all by the inexplicable pathos that single out Carroll and Lear and make them memorable and perennially strange.

  ‘Away from its home ground’—a giveaway phrase! But this does seem to be territory where England has unintentionally staked the leading claim; and the claim is ungrudgingly allowed. Brief symptoms of an illogical poetic bent erupted at scattered points in the past—in pomanders, baillies’ bells, parrots and haycocks, a whiff, a peal or a squeak, Browning’s runaway is caught grazing on strange grass-blades, and reason closes in again—but it was never a large field; the full-grown authentic blooms are only two, but the seeds have blown far. Even so, a modern translation of the whole of Edward Lear into Romanian—Rime fără Noimă, by Constantin Abaludă and Stefan Stoenescu, brought back by John Betjeman from a tour of Moldavian monasteries—is an exotic and marvellous surprise. Isolated, trend-free, unsponsored and a work of love, the task is magnificently carried out. The enforced juggling with place-names is wholly legitimate—‘properly,’ in Romanian, is no rhyme for Thermopylae—but all the other details emerge from their transformation intact and the remoteness and scarcity of the Jumbly regions lose none of their poignancy. Even though it only reaches us by chance, an offering so different from trade figures and travel folders, Eastern Europe’s usual literary exports to the West, breathes a spontaneous and vivifying freshness into the air. These lone scholars deserve a salute from their country and from us.

  In Greece, with its strong English links, the tie-up is more predictable. In his introduction to Paris Takopoulos’s entertaining Kenē Diathēkē, Panayiotis Canellopoulos—by far the twentieth century’s most erudite prime minister—makes the Lear—Carroll connection plain. Poiémata me Zographies se Mikra Paidia, verses George Seferis wrote and cheerfully illustrated from time to time for a small relation, will please the many other children for whom, in the tide, they have been assembled and published. Seferis was devoted to Lear and these limericks are gratefully attributed to his inspiration. Like Lear’s, they are a world-gazetteer of eccentric conduct, usually with the pristine reduplication of first and last rhymes which the flight of time now seems to touch with a dying fall. The recent elaboration of the limerick, the intricacy, the multiple interior rhyming (and in many cases, of course, the hair-raising impropriety of the brief plots)—all this, in the hands of unpublished virtuosos like the late Constant Lambert, has rather spoilt us for the original simplicity of the metre. (Ironically, the unpublished Greek limericks that Seferis sometimes enclosed in letters to friends—to George Katsimbalis, to Nico Ghika, whom Lear has also prompted to seize his pen like Ingres’ violin, to Lawrence Durrell and once to me—would delight the most exacting judge.) The best pages are the translations of ‘The Nutcracker and the Sugar-tongs’ and ‘Father William,’ and the thing which really shines forth is the goodness and kindness of the writer. But this everyone knew.

  A brilliant translator as well as a poet of unparalleled gifts, Seferis was often thinking, and always rather sadly, about the ultimate incompatibility of tongues. Behind the deceptive equivalents in dictionaries the secret resonances are at war. Each word is the spearhead of an expanding phalanx of alien tribal ghosts and we can aspire no higher than the approximate. In Cairo during the Second World War Lawrence Durrell combined some of George’s half-anaesthetized sayings, uttered as he came round after an operation—understandably incongruous ones—with some of his own imaginative flights in an amusing and affectionate poem called ‘Mythologies,’ of which the last line is: ‘Men of the Marmion class, sons of the free!’ (Seferis had recently learnt—I hope the details are correct: there is no way of checking them under these deodars—that towards the end of his life, a friend of Hardy’s had given him The Waste Land and asked his opinion, which was, a week later: ‘Very interesting, but is it quite in the Marmion class?’ The haunting phrase wove itself several times into George’s crepuscular murmurs.) Later on, he translated the poem into Greek and ‘Shatterblossom,’ an imaginary figure in the poem, became ‘Anthospastes,’ the exact and perfect Greek equivalent. ‘But it’s no use, my dear!’ His soft and meditative voice began to conjure up the rival associations: shelves of anthologies and a fidgety procession of spastics receded into the distance on the Greek side, while the English grew dark with shattered hopes and Cherry Blossom Boot-Polish. He developed the comic polarity until his laughter—a slowly overmastering and infectious upheaval which set his head and shoulders soundlessly and helplessly rocking—brought his elaboration to a halt. But of course he was right, and buried somewhere in his theories lies the key to this theme.

  It was with Maurice Bowra that we last heard Seferis speak of such matters, in the sea at the bottom of a steep and pine-fringed bay in Poros, a few summers ago. They were treading water with just enough exertion to keep their animated busts afloat. Ostrich-egg smooth, the head of Seferis caught the gleam of the westering sun; immersion had flattened Bowra’s hair on a pink brow, and his energetic voice scanned the other’s discourse with staccato laughs and interjections of cheer and assent. To a listener on the terrace above, his interlocutor’s murmur could barely be heard, but now and then George’s hand emerged with a forefinger raised in illustration of an inaudible point, then dropped back beneath the water, evoking a burst of comment and an answering splash in the twilight; for the outlines were beginning to grow faint. Soon they were silhouettes, like the torsos of seals in a fjord, each the centre of expanding and overlapping hoops which rippled and widened over the still pallor until they vanished beneath the woods of the Argolid. Sounding between air and water in these Saturn rings, their voices and the random plops of their gestures could still be heard when the dark had enfolded them. Men of the Marmion class! They only broke off when a call from above summoned them to land and up the pineneedle covered steps to where candles for dinner were being lit.

  A Greek Gentleman in a Straw Hat

  Review of Edmund Keeley, Cavafy’s Alexandria: Study of a Myth in Progress (Harvard University Press, 1977), The Times Literary Supplement, 14 October 1977

  The Alexandria of the Ptolemies, Seleucid Antioch, Commagene, Sidon, Cappadocia, Osroene, the declining Greek world that sprang up in Alexander’s footprints, the shifts of doomed Byzantium, the arguments on prosody and particles of grammar while the Eastern hordes are fidgeting offstage—all this, on a preliminary ruffle through Cavafy’s Alexandria, is far enough from the Greece of school studies for the reader to feel flattered at the author’s implied assumption, however ill-founded, that his knowledge is shared. Respect for Edmund Keeley’s previous work and his translations with Philip Sherard deepen the pleasure.

  Sometimes the author explains the poet with the hushed respect of a family doctor, and his bedside manner can have the fleeting effect of a temple being walled in with opaque explanatory bricks. This single but recurring blemish is the more surprising by its contrast with the clarity of the translations—his own—whic
h shine in quotation from every other page.

  Apart from this puzzling foible, all is gain. Nobody is better equipped than the author for dovetailing the spiritual and physical worlds of Cavafy (for which Alexandria is both the reality and the symbol) and for unravelling the historical and geographic background of the poems. He conducts us first through the seedy modern township itself. Arab at last, it is only remotely akin to the blacked-out, jolly, rather wicked wartime port, scented with kebabs and drains and jasmine and soon to be doubled by Justine’s fantastic metropolis, which many of us remember. Closer in spirit to the Egypt of the Lagids than to Nasser’s, it was still not very different from Cavafy’s Judaeo-Hellenic Franco-Levantine city: a cosmopolitan, decadent, and marvellous hybrid, old in sin, steeped in history, warrened with intrigue, stuffed with cotton, flashing with cash, strident with cries for baksheesh, restless with conjuring tricks and, after sunset, murmurous with improper and complicated suggestions. The place is a palimpsest in reverse, where the earlier centuries are the clearest and by far the most interesting; and, by dividing it up into the literal city and the metaphoric, the sensual and the mythical, Mr Keeley traces the poet’s relationship with all of them and demonstrates in detail Cavafy’s spiritual immersion in the entire Hellenistic past.

  How closely his attitude to beauty and letters and hedonism—and especially to erotic matters—tallied with theirs! The company of the Jupiens and the Morels of the Rue Rosette with their slim wrists and their wide Fayoum eyes, and his random café encounters in the Attarine quarter, were touched and transposed for him by all the charm of similar unions beside the Nile or the Orontes twenty centuries ago. Written with less skill, depicting, as some of them do, the homosexual equivalent of a vieux marcheur brooding over former embraces—pale brows of yesteryear, transports in hired rooms (though not the blue-chinned waterfront ambience of rough stuff, the dirty singlets, onions and crabs so deftly captured in Mr Hockney’s drawings)—these particular poems might have ended in absurdity. A lesser hand could have turned his ancient world into Jean Bosschère’s illustrations for Pierre Louÿs, with a dash of Art Déco and Lalique thrown in; it could have evoked waxwork Alma Tadema arrangements of goblets and petals and tired ephebes wilting along the marble; or, at its unluckiest, those tinted postcards of wreathed Taormina striplings taken at the turn of the century by a German baron and sought after still.

  The metrical languors of Canopic youth, the lament in Antioch for spoilt and gifted favourites laid low by excess, Iasys dead and defutatus ere his prime—all this is beset with literary peril. Votaries bent only on this facet of the Cavafy polyhedron might have reduced his poems to sodality passwords and the literature of a clique.

  How does he escape? ‘Because he is a poet of the highest order?’ This is true but unhelpful, suggesting, as it might, the masking of heterodoxy in elaborate stylistic cocoons—indeed, from the last paragraph, one might assume a wild proliferation of ornament. In a very complicated way it is the exact reverse. Auden wrote that no other poet used language more simply than Cavafy. It may appear so in translation, but the original, which perplexed his Greek contemporaries, is a unique and cunning alloy in which the fragments of legal diction and ancient Greek and inscriptions on tombs and old chronicles—one can almost hear the parchment creak and the flutter of papyrus—are closely haunted by the Anthology and the Septuagint; it is contained in a medium demotic perversely stiffened with mandarin and beaten at last into an instrument of expression which is austere and frugal in the extreme. (E. M. Forster thought that Cavafy’s literary ancestor, if he had one, might have been his fellow-citizen Callimachus; but he is much closer to Simonides, to the terseness even of the Lacedaemonians, whom—writing under the guise of an Alexandrian in 200 BC—he affected to scorn.)

  Against the rigorous background of his verse, his occasional use of repetition has a great cumulative force, and explicit emotion unfolds with the suddenness of a blossoming walking-stick; but, generally speaking, the scarce elaboration and adornment are always relevant and it is usually from the gaps between the words that the pomps and the garlands form in the air. Perhaps his singularity is best hit off by the attitude Forster used to detect when he ran into him between his office and his flat in the Rue Lepsius: ‘a Greek gentleman in a straw hat, standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the Universe.’

  A book like this should instruct, touch off new trains of thought, promote fruitful discord and, above all, send the reader back to the original. Mr Keeley does all this, and, as the spell of the original returns, a familiar and interlocking question takes shape as well: why, almost alone among Greeks, has Cavafy won his large following abroad? His verbal felicities, after all, and the strange fabric of his language evaporate perforce in translation; only the bare thoughts remain; and as it is chiefly through English that he has reached the Gentiles, these versions are very important.

  There is never any doubt about meaning. It is a problem of ear more than scholarship. The clear prose crib which Constantine Trypanis appends to the poems in the Penguin Book of Modern Greek Verse will be a blessing for many. Of the metrical translations, all are good in their different ways. Naturally, there is plenty of metaphrastic swerve—dodging the ski-tracks of forerunners, that is—and each has its drawbacks. It is hard not to enjoy the versions of the poet’s friend George Valassopoulos, all the more so as Cavafy, who spoke excellent English, must have vetted them. The late John Mavrogordato has a strong whiff of the same aura, though some terseness vanishes in his rigid following of the original metres and rhyme-schemes. The later ones are more free. Rae Devlen, otherwise excellent, jars ear and eye with an almost non-existent word for ‘unlawful’—‘the so deviate sensuous delight,’ ‘the deviate desire of the flesh,’ ‘the beauty of deviate attraction.’ More disturbingly, her notes speak of the absence of a Byzantine empress, in 1347, ‘from Istanbul.’ (Cavafy would have turned in his grave; she has literally jumped the gun by 106 years—the gigantic siegepiece, that is, which Mehmet II cast in Adrianople and lugged across Thrace to blow a hole in the Theodosian Walls for the Turks to pour through howling.)

  Several problems plague the translator. Herakles triumphed over Hercules long ago; rightly; but the tendency of some translators to transliterate time-honoured Greek names into demotic forms—in the hopes of freshness, no doubt—must pucker many brows. Describing a young prince as ‘almost a Selefkid’ will give long enough pause to a non-modern Greek-speaker for early Charlie Chaplin films to spring more nimbly into the void than the royal line of the Seleucids; and if this young Selefkid is made to reign over a Cappadocia spelt Kappadokia, the gap between poet and reader grows wider still. After all, Anglo-Greek proper-name formations, already familiar in Chanticleer’s learned discourse in The Nun’s Priest’s Tale, have been in the bloodstream of English bipeds for thirty or forty generations, and Selefkids are as worrying as München and Firenze in the mouths of returned holiday-makers and the capital of Hungary made to rhyme with ‘enmeshed.’

  Vexatiously for Anglo-Saxon translators, Greek—and even Cavafy’s spare diction—has more syllables than English. His interpreters very properly stick to his thrift and often the English words are like small peas in a rather large pod—the line is over too quickly. There is no way out of this trouble, and it leads to a trap which augments it. Bent on demonstrating that Cavafy is a demotic poet, translators overdo the short forms of verbs—‘I’ll,’ you’ve,’ ‘he’s,’ ‘she’ll,’ ‘we’ve’—and this treads on the accelerator when a touch on the brake would have helped. Worse still, it sets a tone which is too affable and too breezy. With notable exceptions Cavafy’s propria persona is ruminative and solemn. Better by far to sin through formality. The most dangerous are the poems where the speech is genuinely informal. Disguised as godsends, false equivalents in slang rush into translators’ minds. Discrepant by their very nature in time and place and associative field, these dread sounds are not windfalls at all but grenades with the pins out, to be flung back be
fore they can blow up the poems they land in.

  The best of his modern translators are Kimon Friar, who manoeuvres deftly through hazards of pace and vocabulary, and the expert team of Mr Keeley himself and Philip Sherard. It is precisely the dark forces haunting the border between idiomatic and colloquial which are leagued against these daring partners; and if their sallies across it have left scars, their own surgery has effaced the most serious. In an earlier Selected Verse, a Byzantine noble, cursing his failure to change sides when John VI Cantacuzene seized power, blamed it on ‘bogus information’ and ‘phoney talk.’ There was no slang in the original and the injected raciness surrounded ‘bogus’ (for this reader) with visions from Vile Bodies, while ‘phoney’ impinged through a mashed cigar; and to describe the vain display of the Alexandrian kings as ‘show business’ seemed equally out of key. In their recent complete edition, however, these have all been set right. But others linger.