From the Elephant's Back

by Lawrence Durrell

  And still today I’m here on Friday, Saturday.

  Sunday I’ll say good-bye and go to the wilderness,

  To the flocks of the nightingales and the fat shadows,

  To lay me down at ease and gather an hour’s sleep,

  To listen to the nightingale’s songs and the birds’ plaints:

  How they all curse the eagle who carries off their young:

  “May you gnaw off your own talons, O eagle your own claws,

  For snatching away my mate from out of my arms,

  The one that I held in my arms and so sweetly kissed.”

  (Macedonian Folk-song)[21]

  The funeral and marriage songs of the peasant had been flowing on for centuries like an underground river, with their rare wealth of symbolism and the spontaneous purity of their poetic form. The poet whose sensibility was not deadened by literary prejudice found in the folk-poetry of the country a stockpot of imagery and symbol upon which to draw at will. The Greek, like the Elizabethan, chose freedom rather than bondage.

  Solomos was the first major poet to draw boldly upon this fund of riches; but to its influence he added both the personal accent of a great poet and a flavour of European intellectual sophistication, for beyond the very real and ardent nationalism of his work lies a metaphysical preoccupation with the nature of human values—a preoccupation generally foreign to peasant and pastoral poetic traditions, and which must be admitted as a part of the European heritage. Folk-poetry is not founded upon the struggles of the individual ego as the poetry of Solomos is; it expresses the feelings and beliefs of a community. But in Solomos (though what he said represented the common spirit and voice) the relation of the poet to his public has changed. Solomos has become symbolic as an individual; a personal expression of the common voice.[22]

  For Solomos, then, the liberation of Greece was something deeper than a romantic fanfaronade; he, a Greek educated largely in Italy (a Greek, moreover, who had to relearn his mother language before he was able to write poetry in it) saw the implications of the whole pattern. He saw that behind the question of territorial freedom for Greece, the question of political balance, lay the whole unexplored question of human freedom itself, the quintessence of the idea of liberation. This was something which embraced the whole area of the individual human soul—a personal and religious question as much as a national one. It is precisely this that distinguishes his voice from that of any other poet before him. His great poem, The Free Besieged,[23] is set up as solidly as a monument, as clearly as a marker, to indicate the exact point at which Greece became once more part of that European tradition which she herself had nourished from ancient times. Byron could wish for no finer monument to his self-sacrifice than the works of Solomos. The Greek poet, living in Xante, was able to see the clouds of smoke and to feel the ground tremble under the Turkish cannonade as the Turks closed in on the town. In that strange, unfinished poem, The Woman of Xante, which was found untitled among his papers long after his death, he describes the scene with all the freshness of an eyewitness. The refugees, who had crowded into Xante, had become public beggars for alms, though they were not schooled to it. But hunger drove them out into the open street, conquering their shame. The poet follows them to the seashore:

  1. And I followed the women of Missolonghi, they lay down upon the sand, and I kept behind a hedge and watched.

  2. And each one of them put her hand to her breast and took out what she had gathered, and they collected it all in a pile.

  3. Then one of them spread out a hand to touch the shore. “My Sisters” she shouted aloud.

  4. “Listen and see whether you ever felt such an earthquake as now strikes Missolonghi. Perhaps we are winning, or perhaps the town is falling…who can say?”

  5. And inside me I heard a tremendous disturbance, and the spirit of Missolonghi suddenly took possession of me…

  6. And I raised my eyes to heaven to pray with all the warmth of my spirit when I saw, lit by a wheel of perpetual sparks, a woman with a lyre in her hand, who hovered in the air above the smoke of battle.

  7. I hardly had time to wonder at her robe as black as a hare’s blood and at her eyes and so on…when the woman stood still in the smoke and watched.

  8. She spread out her fingers upon the lyre and I beard her sing.

  i. Since daybreak I’ve taken

  ii. The road of the sun,

  iii. A lyre at my back

  iv. From one shoulder hangs down

  v. From where daylight broke

  vi. To where darkness came on.[24]

  The scattered mass of notes and chapter-headings which compose this, the last of Solomos’s works, was only given to the public in 1927.

  It was impossible that the new spirit of Greece should not press other poets also into its service as vehicles of expression. With the name of Solomos should be bracketed that of a lesser poet, but one whose taut metaphysical verses also breathed a European spirit. Calvos, like Solomos, owed much to his education in Italy, and perhaps more to a long residence in England, where he twice married, and where he was buried. His great Ode to Death has been translated and published among the papers of that gifted young Greek poet Capetanakis, whose own untimely death in 1944 was a serious loss both to English and Greek letters, since he wrote in both languages with equal felicity.[25]

  Greek poetry between 1890 and 1920 was dominated by the voice of two other poets of European stature. Perhaps only the difficulty of the language has kept the English-speaking peoples unaware of Palamas and Kavaphis[26] as poets of magnitude and force. It may be that neither poet has yet inspired a translator brave and accomplished enough to render him in English, though a number of essayists, Professor Bowra, Mr. E.M. Forster, and Mr. Robert Liddell,[27] have drawn attention to the powers and beauties of Kavaphis, and Mr. Liddell has also published more than one translation distinguished by lucidity and feeling. But it is doubtful whether an English translator will ever quite manage to capture the wry, almost banal exactness of Kavaphis’s poems, many of which are constructed like short stories and depend on situation as much as poetic accent.

  His most famous pieces like Ithaca, The Coming of the Barbarians, and The City,[28] have been attempted by numerous hands but so far without the full measure of success that these remarkable productions deserve. Kavaphis himself was an Alexandrian and his work has some of that calm grace, that exhausted repose which suggest the refinements of the Museum, with more than a touch of orientalism. But to this eastern note of licence, of richness (which appears most markedly in his magnificent love-poems) he adds the more sophisticated preoccupations of a twentieth-century man. Some of his work would be considered displeasing by puritans, for much of the subject-matter belongs to the untranslated portions of the Greek anthology.[29] But in no other Greek writer does passionate experience contribute so finely to the structure, the shape, the very grain of what he expresses. In him we find experience completely digested and transmuted. He is not a painter of emotions merely, but a great ironic critic of life. His simplest poems are deceptive in the way that all really profound writings are deceptive; the fabric of the writing is painfully simple. Everything is in the flavour and taste of the word chosen, and the experience recorded. How will it ever be possible to render him in English?

  FAR AWAY

  I would like to put a memory on record…

  It has faded by this time…as if nothing remains of it…

  It lies far away back in my salad days.

  Skin as if made from the petals of jasmine…

  That remembered August—(was it August?)—

  One evening it was…I can scarcely recall the eyes…

  They were blue I think…yes blue, a sapphire blue.[30]

  His death in 1933, and the death of Palamas late in the war, set a term to the Greek poetry of the early twentieth century; though Palamas enjoyed a priority in reputation due perhaps to a longer working life.

  Of those poets who are still living and producing the und
oubted senior is Mr. Anghelos Sikelianos,[31] whose passionate and flamboyant writing marks him as a national poet in the direct line of descent from Solomos and Palamas. In 1942 his little group of Akritan Songs, which were widely circulated by the underground movement, struck a chord that is still echoing in Greece, and set a seal upon his reputation as Greece’s greatest living poet.

  Mr. George Seferis, born in 1900, occupies a position which, at the risk of over-simplification, might be described as analogous to that of Mr. T.S. Eliot in England.[32] The publication of his The Turning Point in 1931 brought a new influence and a new voice to Greek verse. The reception of this poem was marked by criticism reminiscent of that which greeted The Waste Land in 1922. Critics complained of obscurity. But Palamas, the old poet, himself described this first fruit of a new talent as a real turning-point in Greek literature. Since then Mr. Seferis has added to his reputation with further volumes of verse and has achieved the well merited distinction of translation into both French and English. His technique derives from the same French sources as those of Mr. Eliot,[33] and this accounts for a superficial resemblance in manner; but by temperament Mr. Seferis is contemplative rather than mystical, and sensual instead of puritanical. His poems render admirably the taste and touch of common things, the warmth of sunlight, the perfume of flowers. The ambience of his poetry is the ambience of the Greek landscape, with its warm ringing tones or light, its islands like primitive sculptures, its statues and cypresses. Mr. Seferis is a national poet only in the sense that he is absolutely Greek.

  Sleep like the green leaves of a tree wrapped you round.

  Like a tree you breathed in the calm light,

  In the lucent source I discovered your form:

  Eyelids shut, eyelashes brushing the water.

  My fingers in the smooth grass found your fingers,

  For an instant lay on the pulse,

  Sensible of the heart’s pain in another place.[34]

  Enough has been said to indicate that not only has our Philhellenism undergone a radical change for the better but that the modern Greek has become more than worthy of the admiration that was too often in the past reserved for his ancestors. The poetic tradition indicates clearly that Greek literature is struggling out of the swaddling-clothes of purely political or national aspiration towards a universal validity, a European significance. The span from Solomos to Mr. Seferis is a little over one hundred years; yet those who measure the growth of a national consciousness not in terms of politics or economics but in terms of literature will be able to see, even within this small span, the evolution of a national temperament through the influence of its poets, Greece has turned her face towards Europe; and in the darker moments when political affairs and misunderstandings appear to separate us and make us despondent about the future of Greece, we do well to remember how nobly the Greek poets have carried the flame lit for them by the English poets of 1820. It would gladden the boyish heart of Shelley, and the sad heart of Byron, if they could return to witness it.

  A Cavafy Find

  1956

  AN INTERESTING DISCOVERY of three hitherto unknown poems by the Alexandrian poet C.P. Cavafy has recently been discussed in the pages of Cyprus Letters by the scholar A. Indianos.[1] These poems were unearthed from an old scrapbook in the possession of the Countess Chariclea Jerome Valieri, who lives in Cyprus, and who is the daughter of Cavafy’s brother, Aristides.[2] They are the earliest known work of the Alexandrian master, and while they are not equal to the work of his maturity, they show, despite the conventional lyrical form in which they are written, touches of the true Cavafian irony and actuality: the way, for instance, in which he discusses emotions in terms of simple humble objects “the cheap cretonne dress” and the “cheap bracelets on her arms.” The word “cheap” he always uses with emotion to offset the values these shopworn objects, bodies, ears, hands, eyes, etc., represent in the eyes of the lover who invests them with his own feelings. Indeed all the grandeur of Cavafy lies in this patient, loving, miserly way of looking at objects[3] and events—reinfecting memory time and time again with the passionate actuality of something that has disturbed him—so that the resulting vibration in words become significant and powerful, and the poem as a whole comes over. Lovers of his verse will be interested in these early examples. Even though, perhaps, in their English versions, they lose something of their natural strength.

  MY FRIENDS, WHEN I WAS IN LOVE[4]

  My friends, when I was in love,

  It was many years ago

  I did not share the same earth

  With other mortal beings.

  Lyrical was my turn of mind

  And though so often deceptive

  It gave me happiness

  Abounding life and warmth

  Whatever the eye took in

  Was rich in beauty,

  The palace of my love

  A nest appeared to me

  A cheap cretonne dress

  The one she used to wear

  I swear when first I saw it

  Seemed of the finest silk

  The two cheap bracelets

  She wore on her wrists

  Seemed to me precious stones

  Adorning some great lady

  On her head she wore

  Mountain flowers—

  The loveliest of all bouquets

  They seemed to me.

  Smooth the walks we took

  Together arm in arm,

  Nor thorn or brambles there,

  Or if there were earth hid them

  Today the orator and the sage

  Cannot move me half as much

  As a single sign from her did

  In those old days

  My friends when I was in love

  It was many years ago

  I did not share the same earth

  With other mortal beings.

  FLOWERS OF MAY

  All the Year’s flowers blossom in May,

  But of them all Youth is the loveliest,

  But how soon it fades, never to come back;

  Only the flowers always adorn the ground.

  All the Year’s flowers blossom in May,

  The same ones, but my eyes don’t see them,

  And other hands put them in other bosoms,

  Spring comes and ebbs, but no two springs alike

  The sweets of each are different.

  All the Year’s flowers blossom in May,

  But they do not always wait upon our happiness,

  The same flowers give joy and bitterness,

  Growing on graves we mourn for,

  Adorning the scented fields.

  Again May comes, and the flowers rise,

  But it is difficult to see her from the window,

  And the pane dwindles, diminishes, disappears.

  The mournful eye grows dim and cannot see,

  Our tired limbs can no longer hold us up.

  This year the flowers are not for us,

  Other springs now crown us with their blossoms;

  The past comes surging back,

  Beloved shades stoop down and beckon us

  Lull the starved heart asleep.

  DOUNYA GOUZELI

  (The loveliest woman in the world)

  The mirror does not lie: what I see is true

  There is no one lovelier anywhere than I.

  Glittering diamonds of eyes,

  Lips verging on corals,

  A double line of pearls for teeth,

  My body is graceful, my legs admired,

  Hands and neck of milk, and hair of spun silk,

  But alas what is the good of it all?

  Inside this loathed enclosed harem

  Who on earth can look upon my beauty?

  Only hostile rivals or horrible eunuchs

  Poisoning me with looks, my blood freezes

  When my terrible husband comes to me.

  My prophet, my Lord forgive me if

  My sad heart cries “If only I were a Christia
n.”

  If I became a Christian I should be free

  Show myself freely to one and all,

  For men to admire and girls to envy.

  All would agree that Nature could not make

  Another like me; passing in my coach

  The streets of Istanbul would fill

  With crowds admiring me.

  A Real Heart Transplant into English

  1973

  THE ARRIVAL OF Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard[1] on the Modern Greek translation scene marks quite a definite and definitive stage of a process; the excellence of their work is really worthy of recognition by the Greek Government. Thanks to them we can now say that we “have” Seferis and Cavafy in English, and in versions not likely to be superseded; one hopes that they will continue this triumphal work and give us a Sikelianos and an Elytis.[2] The volume under review is, as might be expected, thoughtful, respectful to the great poet and felicitous in its choice of phrasing—with perhaps one small reservation about a few Americanisms like “to show up” and “show business,” which the old poet himself might have found too slangy. But then this is an American book for American readers, and this observation may not be worth raising.

  It is instructive to see how the greatness of Cavafy has slowly become accepted. He was first recognised for what he was, a great original, by E.M. Forster during World War I; and some of his poems (translated I think by Valasopoulos) found their way into an essay in Pharos and Pharillon.[3] It was only the very first stage. Since then, translations have succeeded one another like the stages of an etching:[4] now one feels that a final stage has been reached in the work of these two gifted men, Keeley and Sherrard. It is a real heart-transplant into English of the great Alexandrian love-poet and voluptuary. (Perhaps this is the place to signal the excellence of a small monograph on the poet by Peter Bien, published by Columbia University Press in 1964.[5] It is a model of what such essays should be.)

  When first I reached Athens, four decades ago, I was given a selection of Modern Greek poets translated into English by George Katsimbalis and Theodore Stephanides (personages later to figure as characters in books by Henry Miller and my brother Gerald[6]), with a preface by John Drinkwater.[7] It was here that I first came upon the Alexandrian poet; but later, and indeed over many years, I grew more and more familiar with him, since I had him read to me, expounded to me, translated for me and with me by not only the two above mentioned friends but also by Nanos Valaoritis,[8] George Seferis, and others.