The Lost Center and Other Essays in Greek Poetry

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e Lost Center

and Other Essays in Greek Poetry BY ZISSIMOS

LORENZATOS

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THE

LOSF- CENTER

AND OTHER ESSAYS IN GREEK POETRY ZISSIMOS LORENZATOS Translated by KAY CICELLIS

In this collection of essays the contemporary Greek critic Zissimos Lorenzatos explores the local as well as the

international currents that have shaped the modern tradition of Greek poetry in particular and Greek literature and art in general. Making specific reference to the work of the first (Solomos) and one of the latest (Seferis) voices in the modern tradition of Greek poetry, he argues that the richest moments of the

tradition became manifest each time a major or minor figure appeared who gave expression to the Eastern Orthodox heritage of the people and to their language as represented primarily in their folk songs. The five essays concern, respectively, the technical or aesthetic side of the poet’s art; certain philological elements that bear upon a definition of style; the

broader—spiritual

or

metaphysical—

foundations of art, insofar as art is directed toward the eternal; some of the

problems peculiar to a people whose language is more than three thousand years old; and a synthesis of elements represented in the preceding essays. In addition to his many critical works in the field of modern Greek literature,

Zissimos Lorenzatos has published poems and translations. Kay Cicellis, one of Greece’s most distinguished noyelists, has published a number of works of fiction in English, the language in which she normally writes. She is also noted for her translations, most recently the Alexandrian trilogy by Stratis Tsirkas, Drifting Cities (Knopf). Princeton Essays in Literature

Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2023 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation

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The Lost Center and Other Essays in Greek Poetry

PRINCETON

ESSAYS

IN LITERATURE

(For other titles, see pages 195-196)

The Lost Center

and Other Essays in Greek Poetry BY ZISSIMOS TRANS EAE

PRINCETON

LORENZATOS

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θεόρατο.” Καὶ ἐγίνηκε σὰν τὴν προσωπίδα τὴν ὕψινη ὁπου χύνουνε οἱ ζωγράφοι εἰς τὰ πρόσωπα τῶν VEKPOV.” «6

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κεράκια ἤτανε ὅλα λυωµένα ἀνάμεσα στὰ χόρτα.” Άκουσα τὴν ψυχὴ τοῦ ἀνθρώπου νά τραυλίζει. Μιὰ κεφαλὴ ἀκίνητη . . . σὰν ἐκεῖνες ποὺ κάνουνε στὰ χέρια τους καὶ στὰ στήθια τους οἱ πελαγίσιοι μὲ τὸ βελόνι.” Γονατισµένη καὶ ξέπλεκη εἰς τὴν πίκρα τῆς ψυχῆς pov. “cv

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παιδούλα ἀναδεύτηκε στὸ κόκκινο προσκέφαλο σὰν τὸ µισοσκοτωμµένο πουλί.” Καὶ τὴν ἄφησε 6 νοῦς, ἀλλὰ τὰ πάθη δὲν τὴν > ΄ ” ἀφήσανε. ya , A x Τὸ πρόσωπο τῆς παιδούλας σὰν τὴν ἔκλευψη τοῦ 8

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‘8 Translator’s note: Quoting Solomos in translation in this particular passage seemed to me to defeat the author’s intention. I therefore leave the quotations in the original Greek and relegate the translation to the bottom of the page: “Her voice was like a rush mat, whispering under the footsteps of a thief.” “,.. to the very top of her head, where her hair was plaited in a ring, and over it, an enormous

comb.”

SOLOMOS

67

And yet Solomos did not know Greek! Who taught him? Who will tell us the secret of the motor nerve that activates

language? And who can decipher the destiny of such a poet? Some years ago, André Gide unearthed a phrase by Montaigne which was immediately taken up by intellectual circles: “un suffisant lecteur.” The problem of modern poetry had naturally given rise to the problem of the reader of modern poetry. Various opinions were put forward on all sides, but Montaigne’s phrase finally dominated all the discussions, because it was able to summarize the whole question in two felicitous words. Gide’s offer more than covered the demand of the age and showed that no problem is absolutely new, and we must keep ourselves truly alive if we are to read the writers of the past creatively. Solomos uses the terminology of warfare in order to find the secret of the motor nerve that activates language. That was the only way he could understand or attain literary expression. “First submit yourself to the language of the people,” he says, “then if you are adequate, master it.”*° The adjective adequate (ἀρκετὸς) is the exact equivalent in Greek of the expression “suffisant,” here transferred to the creator instead of the reader, in spite of which it should still be read in Montaigne’s sense. “, . and became like the plaster mask which artists mould on the faces of the dead.” “And in a short while I saw before me the little old woman. And the small candles were all melted in the grass.” Ἱ. heard the soul of man stammering.” “A motionless head . . . like those which seamen trace with needles on their arms and chests.” ορ, on my knees, my hair all undone in the bitterness of my soul.” “The old man stammered these last words, and the girl stirred on the red pillow like a bird half-killed.” “And her mind left her, but her sufferings did not leave her.” “The face of the girl like an eclipse of the moon, and of the old man like a spider, and of the old woman like wild midnight.” 49 Dialogos.

SOLOMOS

68

It is high time we learned to distinguish between the struggle for language, for literary expression, and the language controversy which has shaken this country in the past decades. The language war may be waged by scholars and educators in a country where there is a language problem. The struggle for expression through language can be waged only by an artist, and it is a struggle that goes on regardless of whether or when the language problem is solved; it goes on as long as there is art. While the language problem remains, the artist may choose to be on the side of truth, as did Dante and Solomos. This merely concerns the first part of Solomos’ phrase (“the language of the people”) and has no direct bearing on the actual art of writing. Calvos remained aloof from the truth of the demotic idiom, yet he was able to produce unique poems. The same can be said of Cavafy and Papadiamandis, who are among our few really great artists.

But it is the second part of the phrase that carries all the weight. You must master the language, and if you are adequate to that great task, you must change it from an instrument of communication into an instrument of art; change its function,

and perhaps its very nature. The adjective “adequate” is a demarcation line. It defines the distance between ordinary and literary language, between the use of language and the art of language, between telling (λέγειν) and making (ποιεῖν). As I leaf through The Woman of Zakythos, 1 am unable to resist yet another temptation. If this text were ever to appear in an illustrated edition, the artist would do well to look at

the following “captions,” most of which are to be found in the Notes. Apart from the incomparable flavor of the invented Greek-Italian idiom, I find they lend themselves beautifully to illustration. I quote the phrases just as they were written by Solomos, without making any distinction between those that suggest something purely poetic or those that evoke something strange, :°° devilish, even grotesque 50 Translator’s note: Here again I cannot bring myself to quote in translation. I cannot do what Zissimos Lorenzatos so desperately wished

SOLOMOS

69

“Fare che stia sotto un’albero d’olivo ξυπόλητη στὴ δροσιά.” “E πε] mezzo στριφογυρίζει τὸ κέρατο come si fa dei mustacchi.” “Καὶ ὕψωσα τὰ µάτια µου καὶ εἶδα μὲς τὸν καπνὸ (dipingerla) µία γυναίκα.” “Καὶ ἄφησε τὸ κουπί του καὶ μὲ τὸ χέρι ἐσυχνόκοβε

τὸν ἀέρα orizzontalmente. Eides νὰ μαδοῦν τὴν κότα καὶ ὁ ἀέρας va συνεπαίρνει τὰ πούπουλα; Ἔτσι πάει τὸ ἔθνος.” “Il vecchio ἀνακατώθηκε μὲς τὴν κάσα του, ἐγύρισε ἀνήσυχος, σκύφτει, ε trovando τὸ κατουροκάνατο Ύιοµάτο τὸ φόρεσε. “E mi trovai στὰ Τρία Πηγάδια καὶ ἐπῆα στὸν ‘AtΛύπιο, παρηγορηµένος ἀπὸ τὲς μυρωδιὲς τοῦ κάμπου.” God forbid that these fragments should ever be reduced to a single language! to protect Solomos from, as will be seen on the following page. And here again, hiding rather shamefully at the bottom of the page, is the English translation of these Greek-Italian fragments (the Italian words in italics): “Make her stand under an olive tree barefoot in the coolness.” “And in the middle, the horn twirls like α mustache.” “And I lifted my eyes and in the smoke I saw (describe her) a woman.” “And he let go of his oar and slashed the air hortzontally with his hand. Have you seen a hen being plucked and the wind snatching up the feathers? That’s the way the nation goes.” “The old man heaved around in his coffin, turned anxiously, stooped, and finding the chamber-pot full, put it on his head.” “4nd I found myself at the Three Wells and I went to St. Lypios, comforted by the scents of the plain.”

Kifissta, 1945-1946

A DEFINITION OF STYLE BY SOLOMOS

Some years ago, during an evening at a friend’s house in Kifissia, the archeologist Christos Karouzos drew our attention to a deleted passage by Solomos, which later became a footnote in the obituary he wrote for Ugo Foscolo. In our discussion that evening, we used a copy of the obituary belonging to the Masonic Lodge of Zante, as it appears in Linos Politis’ edition of Solomos’ prose pieces and works written in Italian.* Politis includes the footnote in question with the following information: “Crossed out in the original manuscript.” The note comes at the bottom of the page, underneath a definition of style given by Solomos in the obituary, despite the fact that it really belongs to the text proper. We have to read the footnote before going on to the next phrase in the obituary, beginning: “E quel Timeo ...,” which links up with the last, interrupted phrase of the footnote: “Ἡ perché quel Timeo. . . .” The passage was finally omitted from the hurriedly written obituary when Solomos read it in the Catholic Cathedral of St. Mark, Zante, in 1827.

This is the reason why the footnote does not appear in the older editions of the obituary, the most recent of which is Carlo Brighenti’s Elogio di Ugo Foscolo (1934, 2nd ed.). A French translation, Solomos, Eloge de Foscolo et autres textes

(1957), unreliable in a number of passages, was published in the “Collection de |’'Institut Francais d’Athénes” soon after Linos Politis’ edition; the editor follows Politis’ example as regards the footnote, adding that: “Le manuscrit contient des

passages que Solomos a biffé de sa main, probablement pour abréger son discours.” The fact remains that the passage has finally reached us. It * Dionysios Solomos, Πεζὰ καὶ Iradcxad

(2nd Edition, 1968).

A DEFINITION

OF

STYLE

7a

is undoubtedly a Solomic text, in other words, invaluable. Besides, the best works of Solomos have come down to us more or less in the same form: extracts, fragments, deleted

passages. Ever since I came across the footnote in that Kifissia house, long ago, I have brought it to mind many times and used it as a kind of touchstone. It has remained with me almost in the manner of a chronic fever. I would like to present a few comments on the footnote; I dedicate them to Christos Karouzos, who first pointed out the importance of the passage, and offer them as a tribute to

the undying love of the Greeks for Solomos. First, I will, quote the passage from the obituary which concerns us here: “La mente d’Ugo procedeva dal concetto dell’Arte sua, a quelle esterne apparenze del pensamento colle quali suolsi significare, e perd erano con quello naturalmente nate e cresciute; e la mente de’ suoi imitatori, all’opposito, facendo scala di quelle forme, sperava con quelle di salire alle potenze intellettive di un altro, la cui esterna impronta é, nell’arte dello scrivere, detta stile.* E quel Timeo resté deriso

per aver voluto spingersi anch’egli, nella sua storia, agli stessi combattimenti, a quelle stesse battaglie navali, ed alle stesse concioni che il mondo ammirava in Tucidide ed in Filisto, ed,

usurpando la voce a Pindaro, dissero ch’ei non andava neppure a piedi accanto di un cocchio Lidio.”? In the Politis edition, the sign* next to the word “stile” in the above text refers to the footnote which Karouzos pointed 2“Ugo’s mind proceeded from the conception of his art to those outer forms of thought through which we usually express ourselves; thus these forms came into being and developed in a natural conjunction with that conception. In contrast, the mind of his imitators used those external forms as stepping-stones in the hope of reaching, by these alone, the intellectual powers of another artist, the external imprint of which is called, in the art of writing, style. Timaeus was derided for having likewise attempted to promote himself in his own history to those same combats, naval battles, and harangues which the world

had admired

in Thucydides

and Philistus; and people said

of him, usurping Pindar’s words, that he had not even managed follow a Lydian chariot on foot.”

to

A DEFINITION

OF

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72

out to me, and which is accompanied by the remark: “Crossed out in the original manuscript.” Here is the footnote: “Qui si parli soltanto potrassi. Ma afferrare per le parti false

d’imitare l’altrui stile in prosa e per poco questo nelle cose poetiche, per le quali si chiede di mezzo di forti combinazioni il vero, risecando onde resti nell’altrui mente inoppugnabile (lo

ché si chiama pensare), di ridurlo ampliandolo animato di conveniente forme (e questo ¢ immaginare), di avere il cuore obbediente alle impressioni di questi oggetti (il che é sentire), e transfonder poi colla parola tutto questo in altrui, la imitiazione é cosa impossibile. E cid accade anche in prosa quando

non é breve il dettato. Il perché quel Timeo. . . .”° We now have both text and footnote before us; they are the basic elements required for this study. The final elements are not yet ours; we shall attempt to discover them as we go along. First of all, we need some information of the kind usually found in reference-books. Timaeus (c.346 to c.250 B.c.) was a Sicilian historian from the ancient town of Tauromenium (modern Taormina), who spent fifty years in Athens as an exile and attempted to write a history of the West from the Greek point of view, using books as his only source. For this reason Polybius accuses him of being inaccurate “through not having seen the evidence with his own eyes” since “he lived in exile in Athens for fifty years . . . with no experience of active war service or firsthand knowledge of the places con3 “We are talking here only of imitation of another person’s style in prose, and of the limited possibility of such imitation. But in poetry imitation becomes an impossibility, for there it is necessary to seize the truth by means of powerful combinations, stripping away all the false parts, so that the truth becomes impregnable in the other person’s mind (which process is known as thought); it is also necessary to condense the truth, while amplifying it and animating it by means of suitable forms (and this is known as imagination), to make the heart receptive to the impressions made by these things (and this is feeling), and finally to transfuse all this into the other person by means of language. This is also the case in long prose pieces. That is why Timaeus. . . .”

A DEFINITION

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cerned.” Polybius condemns him with all other writers who “set out to do their work in this bookish frame of mind.” As for Philistus, he was another Sicilian historian from Syracuse; he wrote a history of his island. The writings of both these historians have survived in fragments only; they can be found in C. Miller’s Fragmenta Historicorum Graecorum.® If we separate Solomos’ text into two sections, before and

after the insertion of the footnote, ignoring the footnote itself for the moment,

we will see that the second section, con-

cerning Timaeus’ imitation of Thucydides and Philistus, does not seem significant in itself; it merely confirms, by means of an example,

the significant content

of the first section,

concerning Foscolo and his imitators, in the same way that grammatical or syntactical rules are usually followed by examples. A supplementary note should be made here, not to be found in reference-books this time: the second section of the text is a faithful transposition in Italian of a passage in Plutarch’s introduction to his Life of Nicias. With charming humility, Plutarch entreats his readers not to imagine that he is trying to contend with Thucydides’ powerful book on the Sicilian expedition, “where in his inimitable style he surpassed even himself in pathos, clarity and variety.”° Plutarch knew very well that he would suffer from the comparison in the same way as Timaeus of Tauromenium. As we proceed to the necessary paraphrase and the final comments

on

Solomos’

text, I shall not

make

use

of the

second section, as it is of no real use to us. Plutarch’s passage, however, may be of some use as an exposition anticipating my own rendering: “(I beg my readers not to assume) that I am of the same mind as Timaeus, who hoped on the one hand to surpass Thucydides in skill, and on the other hand to prove Philistus in every way tedious and vulgar; meanwhile thrusting himself forward, by means of his history, to those battles, * Polybius, ΧΙΙ, 25.

5 Five volumes, Paris, 1841-1870. 8 Life of Nictas, 1, 5-7.

A DEFINITION

OF

STYLE

BG

naval engagements and harangues so successfully handled by the two historians, yet not even managing to be, by Zeus,

... by a Lydian chariot a foot-soldier slowly plodding ... as Pindar says.” I might add here that in ancient Greek there is the proverbial expression “to run beside the Lydian chariot,” meaning “to be left far behind.” I shall limit myself, therefore, to the first section of the

passage and to the deleted footnote, which deal with matters pertaining to the imitation of style in prose and poetry, and fuse the two together in order to approach as best I can what Solomos had in mind when he wrote the passage. Having presented the Italian text and its translation, I shall now make my own paraphrase, or analytical “epanodos” (recapitulaΠοπ), of the original text. This is a way of stepping back at a suitable distance from the text for the sole purpose of getting a clearer view of it. Needless ‘to say, the Italian text must always remain the gold standard for the bank-notes I am trying to circulate in our intellectual money market. I will now give my paraphrase of the whole unit (first section and footnote), with the remark that my rendering of “concetto dell’ Arte sua” as “his conception of art” has the same genealogy as Solomos’ “meaning, or notion, of art (νόηµα τῆς τέχνης). which is how Politis translates the phrase in Greek, and this again is akin to Dante’s “intenzion dell’ Arte.”® My paraphrase: “Using his conception of art as a startingpoint, Foscolo’s mind proceeded to those external aspects and

forms of thought with which we customarily express ourselves. As a result, these forms of thought came into being and developed in a close and natural conjunction with his conception of art: form and content merged together into an indivisible whole. No chasm, no scrambling in the void. In contrast, Foscolo’s imitators used his external forms as step7 Life of Nicias, 1, 7-15. 8 Plato, Phaedrus, 267 d.

® Paradiso, 1, 28.

A DEFINITION

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75

ping-stones in the hope of reaching, by these alone, the intellectual powers of another artist. The external imprint (esterna impronta) of these intellectual powers is called, in the art of writing, style (stile). We are speaking here of the imitation of style in prose, which may only be achieved in a short piece of writing, but not in a more extensive piece. Now why do we so readily agree that imitation in poetry is an impossibility? Because in poetry (a) we seek to seize the truth (afferrare il vero) by means of powerful, or effective, combinations, strip-

ping away any false parts (or elements) so that the truth may remain impregnable (snoppugnabile) within the minds of others (and this is where thought comes in); (b) we seek to condense the truth and at the same time to amplify it and bring it to life by means of suitable forms (and this is the role of imagination); (c) we ask the heart to be receptive and consenting to the impressions made by the objects that are conveyed through those suitable forms (and this is called feeling); and, finally, (d) we seek to transfuse all these things into the other person (or reader) by means of speech, language (parola). For all these reasons, then, imitation in poetry remains an impossibility.” After this “epanodos” on the Italian text, I shall now attempt a few comments. What is Solomos telling us in the passage? First of all, we must not limit ourselves to Foscolo, but gen-

eralize the particular. Foscolo is only the incidental excuse, the stimulus. We know that Solomos was not interested in the incidental, the exclusive, the particular, but in the general, the unlimited,

the universal.

In the mind

of our

contem-

poraries, poetry (and art in general) is an expression of personality. For Solomos, however, “Poetry is . . . not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality, to use the words of a poet who is only nominally our contemporary.”*° (For this reason, I also believe that truly great poets are “contemporaries” of each other, regardless of the age they live in.) Moreover, Polylas calls Solomos’ work “a spontaneous 10 T. S. Eliot, “The Function of Criticism,” 1923, in Selected Essays,

London, 1969.

A DEFINITION

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76

and continuous attempt to obliterate personality in absolute truth.”** And Solomos, let it be remembered, made this attempt in situations that were crucial, and from which man is still vainly struggling to escape. This is what he teaches us in

phrases like: “Chiudi nella tua anima la Grecia (ο altra cosa) . 2? or his other relevant injunction that we must consider “national whatever is true.”** The central theme, then, begins with Foscolo, but it soon

breaks away from the concrete and ends up in the abstract and the general. The passage formulates thoughts and general rules on the art of writing. What Solomos is saying here is that true style, not the imitation of style, is born and grows naturally in man out of his own thought in conjunction with his intellectual powers (potenze intellettive) and the conception he has formed of his art. The personal conception of art and the intellectual powers of a writer are manifested in external forms, in the written surfaces which bear the unmistakable

imprint of that particular writer’s thought and intellect, not only as a writer, but as a whole man; that imprint is what we call style. “Le style est [homme méme,” said Buffon: style is man himself, and not “Le style, c’est l">homme,” as it is usually

misquoted. Solomos’ definition means that every writer’s external imprint (esterna impronta) is unique and peculiar to himself, like his finger-print; it is the man himself. It is through this external imprint, known as style, that each writer finally reveals himself; style betrays him, and it also betrays

the imitator. For this reason the imitation of style is impossible, 11 Jakovos Polylas (1826-1898) Prolegomena. Author’s note: I continually consult the Corfiot critic because Polylas knew Solomos better than all those who never met the poet in his lifetime or who came after him. In the same way, Plato knew Socrates better than Marsilio Ficino or Wilamowitz (for the same reason that when you visit or live in a certain place, you acquire a more essential and real knowledge of it than any topographical survey or record of local placenames could ever give you). *®*Enclose within your soul Greece (or any other thing).” 13 Quoted by Polylas in his Prolegomena.

A DEFINITION

OF

STYLE

Dei,

except perhaps in a short piece of prose. But it is never possible in poetry or in extensive pieces of prose. Solomos is explicit; he is making an axiomatic statement. This is unusual in him; but he makes an exception for poetry, which was always his deepest concern, his life-work, and tries to explain, in a rather abstract and schematic manner, it is true, the nature of the

articulations through which the living wealth of a poem slowly and organically reaches its final crystallization in the poet’s being, the nature of the irreducible metabolism of poetry. It is because this metabolism

is irreducible and irreversible,

analytically, that imitation is impossible in poetry as opposed to other intellectual functions, of which the limit, at the very most, is a short piece of prose. In the case of short pieces of prose, the articulations slacken, give way for a brief moment (per poco), whereas in poetry the elements are tightly bound together (strette legate). Polylas says in his Prolegomena that in poetry, “the most graceful images mingle effortlessly with the most fearful”; this is the secret of poetry, the thing that touches us so mysteriously. In a marvellous passage from Draft B of The Free Besieged,** Solomos sums up this secret in a characteristic injunction: “Tieni fermo: tra le cose strette legate terribili o meste o altro un tocco semplicissimo e breve ridente (ο vice versa) come l’imagine del piccolo rovo verde negli immensi sabbioni dell’ Africa.”*® In order to be transfused into another person and remain impregnable within that other person, poetic truth needs thought, imagination, feeling, and

language, all subjected to a multiple process of interrelationships and transformations—in other words, the irreducible metabolism of poetry—which finally renders vain and chimerical any attempt at imitation in poetry. We might say that Solomos’ schema presents us with a four-dimensional poetical continuum.

Solomos wishes to give us a succinct outline, a

14 Academy of Athens, No. 18. 15 “Fiold fast to this: amongst things fearful or sad or whatever, all tightly bound together, put in a brush stroke, the simplest, briefest touch of laughter (or vice-versa), as for instance the image of a small green bush in the immense sandy stretches of Africa.”

A DEFINITION

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STYLE

78

mathematical formula for the diversified process we have just described, though he knew very well that no formula or statistical, objective “truth” can ever capture the essence, the living being (and hence the inconceivable mystery), of things. In short, Solomos wants to define poetic style, the essential mystery of poetry, by means of a brief descriptive device, in the same way that Einstein wanted to express the quantitative function of the universe in his Unified Field Theory, using only three or four mathematical formulae, for he believed in the unity of the universe or in what the ancient Greeks called ἁρμονία (harmony). To be more precise, Einstein anticipated and hoped, without the help of scientific proof, that the universe is ruled by unity and harmony, for “faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”** In this ultimately metaphysical business which is physics, he held on to certain reservations, which he expressed in this passage: “And certainly we should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful

muscles, but not per-

sonality. It cannot lead, it can only serve .. .”** The mind cannot capture the prey alive. Solomos attempts to describe the living mystery which is poetic style with that critical skill which always attends the creative skill in great artists, thus making him the perfect example for T. S. Eliot’s inviolable rule: “Probably, indeed, the larger part of the labour of an author in composing his work is critical labour; the labour of sifting, combining, constructing, expunging, correcting, testing: this frightful toil is as much critical as creative. I maintain even that the criticism employed by a trained and skilled writer on his own work is the most vital, the highest kind of criticism; and (as I think I have said before) that some creative writers are superior to others solely because their critical faculty is superior. . . . The critical activity finds its highest, its true fulfilment in a kind of union with creation in the labour of the artist.”"* Solomos is ambidextrous. The 16 Hebrews 11:1. 7 Albert Einstein, Out of My Later Years, 1950, p. 260. 18T. 5. Eliot, “The says, 1969.

Function

of Criticism,”

1923, in Selected

Es-

A DEFINITION

OF

STYLE

He)

concise critical summary of the irreducible element in poetry which he is attempting to make shows once more how truly “fearful” can be the “sharp edge of the sword”!® which he holds in his hands, that two-edged tool which is both critical and creative. And so the material encountered in the passage in question comprises both the procedure Solomos followed in writing his works and the critical method which enables us to judge his poetry according to his own criteria. Though he knew from the start that in poetry the mind cannot capture the prey alive, Solomos performed on the immobilized body of poetry a kind of “lesson in anatomy.” What is the thinker-anatomist trying to do, exactly? With the instruments

available to the mind, he attempts to cut, slice

off, separate, some of the basic components of the organism under

examination;

he then tries to demonstrate

that the

study of these parts can constitute a useful approach to the truth. But, ultimately, any possible arrangement, any assemblage or α posteriori combination of the body’s parts and organs, will always lack that simple thing—‘we live, and move’*°—which defines all things, yet cannot be defined by any one thing: life. In the same way, poetry will always be absent from any description of the poetic function. This is why Solomos believed that the imitation of poetry, of poetic style, is an impossibility. Any attempt to dismantle or replace creation ends in the test-tube homunculus of the Faustian experiment: a typical orientation, a brain-child of modern Western curiosity (Faust II, 2, Laboratorium). Solomos analyzes, solves; he never dissolves. He takes the basic presupposition of poetry, which he believes to be the conquest of truth (afferrare il vero), a conquest, however, achieved only by means of powerful combinations (per mezzo di forti combinaziont), combinations

different

for each writer, without

established

laws or preliminary collective procedures such as are used in mathematics. With the adjective “powerful,” Solomos points out the dangerous breaches which may be opened in the citadel of truth by the false elements which initially accompany most 19 From Solomos’ Hymn to Liberty. 20 Acts 17:28.

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poetic combinations or formulae. Only after the false elements (le parti false) have been mercilessly cut away from these combinations can the truth remain impregnable within the minds of others (nell’altrui mente inoppugnabile). 1 need hardly add that this cutting away of false parts is an extremely difficult task, often the most difficult of all; it hurts to cut into

our own flesh. The false part is with us from the beginning, it is ours; but truth is not; it must be seized (afferrare) and conquered with infinite toil. Indeed, we might say that he who cuts away the most “parti false” leaves behind him the truest work. Then once we have condensed truth and confined it to itself, insuring it against all falsehood, we will still

need to spread it abroad and bring it to life in suitable forms (convenienti forme). These forms must correspond totally with our feelings, our emotions; the impressions which their

objective being create in us must find our hearts consenting and receptive: “avere il cuore obbediente alle impressioni di questi oggetti.” Otherwise the forms lose their vital sap, and wither. The great nourishing center in poetry, both as regards the external, crystallized forms and the deeper, secret layers,

is nothing other than the Hesychasts’ καρδία, Pascal’s “le coeur.” Like God, poetry is approached through the heart: “Cest le coeur qui sent Dieu, et non la raison.”?* Once we

complete this third quarter of the whole poetic circle as Solomos designed it (pensare, imaginare, sentire), we finally seek to transfuse it all intact into the mind of the reader by means of language: “e transfonder poi colla parola tutto questo in altrui.” How then can we talk of imitation in poetry?

The conquest of truth, which was for Solomos the basic pursuit of the poet, and the necessary pruning of false elements from those “combinazioni” with which we initially dare to seize truth in order to make it impregnable for others as well as for ourselves, may be said to belong generally to the sphere of thought (pensare). Spreading the truth and bringing it to life in suitable forms belong to the sphere of the imagination 21 Pascal, Pensées, 1v, 278.

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(imaginare). Our heart’s consent and concordance with the impressions made by the various and varying objects projected by these forms, the marriage of the moving interior with the unmoving surface, belong generally to the sphere of feeling (sentire). By means of language, written or spoken, we then need to transfuse into others this complex nebula of thought, imagination, and feeling. We have to give voice to the unvoiced interchanges of poetic matter, carefully balancing and mixing the fourth element, language (Ja parola), with the three others in an unbroken, personal, particular (yet universal) unity. The poet is a particular sui generis individual, but he is also a member of the community, or demos. In other

words, he works (ἐργάζομαι) for the demos (δῆμος), as the Greek word for creator indicates: δημιουργός. The significance of the fourth element, language, for the poet Solomos becomes clear when we consider the fact that he couples it with freedom, a word most sacred to the Greeks of 1821, in

his Dialogos: “I have nothing else in my mind beside freedom and language.” It should be remembered here that the Greeks of the Ionian Islands were quite free of pedantry and scholarly affectations, as opposed to the mainland Greeks of that period. Solomos is a good example of this; his language was untouched and innocent of the “learned tradition” in a way that the language of Vilaras*’ and others was not; it is also useful to remember that the Greeks of Asia Minor were equally privileged in not having any remnants of Bavarian influence”? or of Pseudo-Atticism (the idiom propagated by the modern Atticists) in their intellectual bloodstream. This is something which may help us appraise more clearly the survival in our country of the great Asia Minor tradition, as represented by writers like Seferis and Kondoglou, among others. 22 Ioannis Vilaras (1771-1823), from Jannina, poet and scholar, 23 The first king of Greece was Otho, son of Louis I of Bavaria. He reigned from 1833 to 1862. His court and entourage exerted a strong influence on the intellectual life of the new Greek state.

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Let us now consider a few helpful supplementary points concerning Solomos’ definition of style. When

Solomos

mentions

Foscolo

and

his imitators,

he

speaks of the intellectual powers (potenze intellettive) of the poet, using this term to designate poetic or literary ability, apart from various other manifestations and applications of the mind. Without separating the world of the mind into compartments

based on logical, statistical, yet finally unreal,

divisions (for it is we who create these divisions by our incessant mental redistribution of reality), Solomos puts the mental powers of man in a general category, opposed to what might simply be called manual ability. He then singles out the poetic ability among these mental powers or potentialities, and limits himself to it, without, however, using an explicitly limiting designation. In the art of writing, he tells us, the mind of the imitator is unable to reach, to accede to, another

writer’s intellectual ability and therefore achievement. The intellectual powers which are particular to the mind of each creator (Ja mente) represent both his conception of art (concetto dell’ Arte) and his thought (pensamento), but naturally and truthfully expressed (naturalmente), not falsified by forms or external appearances (forme or esterne apparenze). According to Solomos’ definition, the external imprint (esterna im-

pronta) which this indivisible, total product makes upon us is called style in the art of writing (stile). Looking through Solomos’ Italian vocabulary, one might add that the term “pensamento” which he uses instead of “pensiero,” appears in Greek translation in Alessio da Somavera’s Tesoro della lingua greca-volgare™ in a form much used by Solomos: λογισμὸς (thought, reflection). “With thought, with dream,” one holds in one’s hands the two halves, which

combined within the “secret mystery” in which we “always live,”*> constitute the whole of Solomos’ intellectual world. 24d. Italiana, Paris, 1709. 55 From Solomos’ “The Free Besieged,” Draft C, m, line 2 and following: “Mother, great-hearted in glory and in suffering,/ If always in the secret mystery live your children,/ With thought, with dream,

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We might say that thought and dream compose the two parts of an animal’s knucklebone or tally-stick, which upon being fitted together (συν-βάλλω, put together) form the σύμβολα (tokens) first mentioned in Herodotus.”° They are the two infallible signs by which we recognize Solomos’ message. In the passage I have quoted, “pensamento” and later the infinitive “pensare,” used in relation to poetic matters, seem to respond each time to more and more specialized requirements. In our Greek translation we have thus preferred the term σκέψη, which is commonly used in our language, leaving undisturbed that luminous emotional halo which has formed,

and will continue to be (trans)formed endlessly, around Solomos’ deeply significant word λογισμός. There exist poets and writers with whom one spends a lifetime. There are others with whom one spends only certain periods or decisive phases of one’s life. Finally, there is the

large majority of writers whom one encounters fleetingly once or twice in one’s life; they are mostly the minores. Sometimes one remembers a face which was once familiar, a photograph, the echo of a voice, half-buried in a few lines. With these minor writers we study literature without really learning much about it, and not uncommonly in the end we become

indifferent and confused before their vast and ever proliferating numbers. The second group often helps us to cross a difhcult turning-point, a critical curve in our life; some of the writers in this group are considerable artists. But with the first group, we live out our entire lives; we even die with them— supposing we have first managed to live—slowly learning through their work the terrifying compliance of death. what joy have then the eyes,/ These eyes, to behold you in the desolate wood.” Translated by Philip Sherrard in The Marble Threshing Floor, London, 1956. 26 Herodotus, νι, 86: “. .. This led me to make a decision, namely, to realize one-half of my property and to put the money in your hands, in full confidence that it will be safe there. I ask you, therefore, to take the money and with it these tallies, which you must please keep carefully. Then you can return the money to whoever brings you the corresponding halves.” (Transl. by Aubrey de Selincourt.)

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Of all the Greek poets who have appeared until now, it is only with Solomos that one can spend a whole lifetime. Among prose writers, the same can be said of Papadiamandis. Now that after all these years we have acquired the manuscript works of Solomos,”* we expect the younger generation to bow with humility over the salvaged tangle of his work in order to complete the research, drawing strength and knowledge from his truly inexhaustible source of “inner wealth.” In this attempt, we must not give way in the face of the innumerable difficulties we are bound to encounter;

we must

alter the old saying of the medieval reader when faced with the difficulties of the ancient Greek tongue: Graecum est, non legitur, and establish as our guide in the huge task of deciphering the works of Solomos the following antithetical principle: Solomicum est, legitur. 27 Two volumes: (1) Photocopies (2) Printed transcription. Ed. by Linos Politis, Thessaloniki, 1964. 35 From Solomos’ “To Frangiska Fraser,” line 5.

Kifissia, June-July, τούς

He

Os CoG RN LER

George Seferis’ first collection of poems, Turning-Point, appeared in May, 1931, and was indeed considered a turningpoint in modern Greek poetry, marking the transition from the old age to the new. I do not agree with this estimation. Seferis’ volume did not propel Greek poetry into the modern age. The change was a much more complex and gradual process; it did not occur on a particular date, and it was not caused by a single book of poems. I shall try to show how the change came about. The first thing that needs to be said is that if Serferis’ work had something to do with the turning-point that occurred in Greek poetry—as indeed it has—this is due to another volume of his which circulated later (1935) under the title Mythistorima. In my opinion, Turning-Point was simply a demonstration of Seferis’ apprenticeship in practically all the forms of established versification, from the pantoun to the haiku. We find a similar demonstration in the Book of Exercises (1928-1937). Turning-Point is a sampler of Seferis’ poetic wisdom, in which we see a poet playing, for the last time, with the deeper stimuli that once gave birth to forms destined to end up (in our time) into neatly separated compartments, reliquaries carrying a dead load. That is how I see Turning-Point. It was a bank guarantee on the new currency which was to come into circulation with Mythistorima. A guarantee, a living proof, that Seferis had worked conscientiously and thoroughly, and that with Mythrstorima, in which he began to leave behind all those conventional forms of the past, he was coming not to destroy the law, but to fulfil it.

The fulfilment was not long in becoming manifest. Most young poets nowadays, whether in Greece or abroad,

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do not go through this preliminary stage. They believe the only thing that counts is to destroy the law, and to possess génie—that eighteenth-century invention; everything else will follow as a matter of course. No one worries about guarantees; we are all used to inflation and do not understand that the easy credit obtained by an inflated banknote is a sickness that devours body and soul. I would like to use Seferis as an illustration of the importance of conscientiousness, thoroughness, and honesty in a poet’s approach to his work. Let me use a simple comparison. With Turning-Point, Seferis showed that he had already mastered the entire process of preparing the poetic canvas. He went back to the very beginning: first he got to know all about the mountains,

the sky, the snow

and the rain; the

fields, and the grass growing in those fields; the shepherds taking out the sheep to pasture; the customs that rule shepherds’ lives, the habits of body and mind. Then the sheep: their different origins and breeds; the whole business of shearing, gathering, and washing the wool, carding, spinning, winding it into skeins, threading the yarn and stringing it on the loom, right up to the final stage, weaving. And this again accompanied by the weavers’ fatigue, and the songs of the loom that come to relieve this fatigue. Seferis tried out all these stages; he got to know them at first hand; and with his loom he made good cloth. But the role of Mythistorima was different. In writing it, Seferis was the first poet to provide an answer to the crisis of Greek poetry, of the poetic parlar, as Dante would have put it; a crisis already signalled a decade earlier by Karyotakis’ in his Elegies and Satires (1927).

What kind of crisis in the poetic parlar of Greece was foreshadowed in Elegies and Satires? It was a general crisis, but ΓΕ will limit my remarks to the more obvious ways in which metrics deteriorated during the period in question. * Kostas Karyotakis, poet (b. 1896), who committed suicide in 1928.

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When established forms and patterns that have always served men faithfully and survived intact through the centuries (I have in mind not only verse-forms and their multiple permutations, but also the inner structure, the interrelations,

within each poem, within each line of a poem), suddenly suffer damage of a kind that shakes them to their very foundations, we may be sure the cause is of a general nature, lying beyond these forms and patterns themselves, perhaps even beyond art in its totality. Something of this nature has happened in our time. We have to realize that the cause of the storm is not to be found in the ship of art itself; it is because we have not suf-

ficiently realized this fact that we still believe the arts can be saved by various revolutionary measures within each particular artistic field concerned. To put it plainly, artistic revolutions cannot save the arts. This should not, however, stop us from

attempting to estimate the extent of the storm by a careful study of the roll and pitch of our ship. When speaking of forms and methods that have served poetry over the ages, I mean, of course, the poetry of Europe. It is from Europe that we in Greece have received our models, whether we like it or not. Since the War of Inde-

pendence (1821), we have been copying Europe in a considerable number of fields, including the arts. We have been continuously producing identical, miniature imitations of European models. What happens in Europe also happens here. There are certain adaptations and modifications, of course, which our art critics insist on qualifying as “Greekness,” or more elaborately as “the renewal of the living Greek tradition within contemporary art.” Because of our close dependence on Europe, then, a knowl-

edge of Voltaire and the Siecle des Lumiéres can help us identify in Greece those lumiéres which so distressed Makriyiannis.? Neo-classicism in European architecture, with its profusion of borrowed or adventitious styles (Leo von Klenze), clearly prefigures the work of Kleanthis and Kaftanzoglou. 2ISee ρα του,

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And vice-versa, naturally: a knowledge of Greek painting from Gyzis or Nikiforos Lytras to the more outstanding artists of our time will certainly lead to an awareness of what was going on in modern painting in Munich or Paris during the same period. If what I am saying about poetry is to be correctly understood, we must first set a number of signposts along our course. They may not bring us knowledge of the country we are about to visit (only our eyes can do that), but they may at least help us find our general bearings. I shall attempt to define these signposts as briefly and succinctly as possible. At the root of Greek metrics lies the shift from a system based on vowel quantity to the stress system. This shift first occurred in the Greek language around Α.Ρ. 200, but actually

appeared in written form (namely, in the form of the fifteensyllable line) in Α.Ρ. goo, though it must certainly have been used long before that date, perhaps as far back as the early Byzantine era. The Byzantines, however, were rather late in

adopting stress in their verse. The use of stress-based verse, together with the fifteen-syllable form that was its main embodiment, only became generalized at the time of the fall of Constantinople. From then on, the prevalence of the stress system and the fifteen-syllable line became a distinctive feature of metrics during the entire period of Islamic rule in Greece; the form reached its full flowering in Cretan and popular verse until the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, at which time the Greeks began to come under the European sphere of influence. From 1821 onward, perhaps even a little earlier (signposts, after all, are conventional devices), European poetics completely dominated modern Greek verse. In the early stages of this Europeanization, there was a constant inflow of new metres via the Phanariots (who mainly used French models) and the poets of the Ionian Islands (who used Italian models). A brief digression here: the Ionian Islands, with Solomos as their central poetic figure, were a striking exception to the

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general cultural climate of Greece. Most enlightened Greeks in those days received an almost exclusively French or AngloGerman education; not so the Ionians. This is an important point. Solomos harks back to Dante, to a tradition diametrically opposed to that of the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Erklarungszeit, and the classicizing ideal of the French Revolution. It is through Dante, in other words through the metaphysical tradition of medieval Western Christendom, that Solomos comes home to the metaphysical tradition of Eastern Christendom. This does not alter the fact that modern Greek poetry as a whole has modelled itself until now on European poetry. The language problem in this country*® should not mislead us into thinking that poetry written in purist Greek and poetry written in demotic Greek followed two different trends, the former appearing as an anachronistic idiom to be laughed at and the latter as a boldly modern idiom to be taken very seriously. The distinction is superficial; in reality we are speaking of a single kind of poetry, based on a common poetics: European poetics. The linguistic formulation alone differs; in some poems, in fact, the distinction between purist Greek and demotic Greek becomes barely discernible. Gryparis’ collection of poems Scarabs and Terracottas (1918), which was considered at the time a “renewal of the living Greek tradition,” mainly on account of its rich linguistic texture, can now be seen to have been no such thing; it was simply an artificial construction, which should perhaps have been classified, in retrospect, as belonging to the Parnassian School, in other words to a cultural context far removed from anything pertaining to the Greek tradition: somewhere between Théophile Gautier’s Emaux et Camées (the very title Scarabs and Terracottas echoes Gautier’s title) and José-Maria de Heredia. In its present form, then, whether purist or demotic—even emphatic, picturesque, 2 Ja palikare demotic—the Greek language is certainly not sufficient in itself to bring forth a truly Greek poem, a poem belonging to the “living Greek tradi8 See the essay on language in this volume, p. 147.

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tion,” just as a painting cannot reflect the spiritual tradition of Greece, cannot become Greek, merely as the result of the painter’s nationality. Greco, for instance, was born in Crete,

but this does not bring him any closer to the spiritual tradition that shaped the painting of the enslaved Greeks of that period, no matter what the modern Greeks may claim. And it was only through foreign sources that we eventually became aware of Greco’s name and existence. As Isocrates said in the fourth century 8.c., “the name of the Greeks no longer denotes race, but a way of thinking.”* Tradition is by no means a matter of nationality. This explains why we often find several different ethnic groups embracing the same tradition; Byzantium is a case in point. Anyway, the terms “nation” and “nationalism” have not always had the meaning we now give them. They are a relatively recent Western contribution to modern civilization, or rather a kind

of contagious disorder which appeared on the scene in the wake of the French Revolution. To go back to my argument: both the Old School of Athens, roughly spanning the period from 1821 to the publication of Psycharis’ My Voyage in 1888,° and the New School of Athens, headed by Kostis Palamas, which was active from 1888 to 1927 (the latter being the publication date of Karyotakis’ Elegies and Satires), employed the same poetics. During these two successive periods, no poet in Greece bothered to consider whether there was any cause for concern. Everything seemed normal—we might call this period the pax Romana of Greek literature—and on all sides poets were busy harvesting “the great wheat-stalk of poetry,” in a spirit of “divine serenity,” much in the manner of Sikelianos’ Atzesivano.® At that precise point, around 1927, the crisis in poetry broke out; and what is more—let us be honest in the face of death— *Isocrates, Panegyricus, 51.

°*Jean Psycharis (1854-1929), Greek linguist, leader of the demotic movement. ® Angelos Sikelianos, “The Suicide of Atzesivano.” (Atzesivano was a pupil of Buddha.)

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it was marked, sealed by a death: Karyotakis’ suicide. It really looked as if the game was over.

Until the publication of Elegies and Satires, most Greek poets simply continued to write poetry as before, blissfully carefree, never suspecting that something might have happened to bring into question, or perhaps undermine, the very foundations of poetry—poetry as function, of course, rather than essence. Until then, poetry had appeared to stand inaccessible and invulnerable upon its pedestal; more than that— immortal. No one guessed that after the obvious bankruptcy of the Old School of Athens, which was attributed to the use

of the purist idiom, poetry had merely taken a short-term reprieve with the foundation of the New School of Athens. Up to 1927, the bankruptcy of poetry had remained successfully concealed by the misleading use of the demotic idiom, for demotic Greek had meanwhile become associated in the minds of many Greeks with other wider issues; it had come to mean much more than simply a new way of speaking. If I were to mention those wider issues and their origins, or if I were to bring in all the “complexes” which arose in the Greek psyche out of this demotic-purist controversy, I would have to stray very far from my subject. So I shall limit myself to saying this: in a certain sense, during that period, during the reign of romantic classicism in Europe, we signed our own death warrant. We signed it the moment we agreed to take part in the European debate about whether or not we Greeks were the true descendants of the ancient Greeks. As if we did not exist in our own right! We felt we had to bow before Fallmerayer and his colleagues,” grovel and scrape and bend over backwards (it is a wonder we did not break our backs in the process) in order to offer Europe ludicrous “scientific” proofs and testimonials of our origins, rather like someone humbly producing a birth-certificate, little realizing that what 7 Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer (1790-1861), German traveller and Byzantinist, who propounded the theory that the Greeks were descended from the Slavs and Albanians.

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we were in fact doing was drawing up a death-certificate instead. In this way, those among us who turned the debate into the focal point of our cultural life proved that we were no more than mandarins, dried-up scholars who were totally unaware of the spiritual tradition we had inherited from our fathers over a period of almost two thousand years. This was the time when Europe, and Greece tagging along behind it, were still listening open-mouthed to the great historian Edward Gibbon, the man who preached that the Orthodox tradition of the East—our tradition, our very being—which made possible many of the greatest spiritual achievements of the West, as we shall see later, “represents man as a criminal and God as a tyrant.” This goes to show how little he understood tradition. He defined it, arrogantly, as “this DIVINE PHILOSOPHY, which surpassed, without the aid of science or reason, the laborious virtues of the Grecian schools.”®

There is no doubt that, throughout the period of the puristdemotic controversy, the Greeks had hopelessly confused the two notions of language and poetry, believing that the pursuit of the one would result in the capture of the other. Only one man was able to discern what had really happened: a Greek not born or bred in Greece, but in Alexandria. Perhaps because of the isolation in which he lived, or the distance that

separated him from the Greek scene, Cavafy was able to see that the lethargy that had overtaken poetry written in purist Greek fifty years ago was now attacking poetry written in demotic as well. Poetry had given all it had to give with the New School of Athens, represented by Palamas and the minor demotic poets; after that, it fell silent and went off to sleep

for good. It was the sleep, the lethargy, that spread all over European poetic form in general. It would not be long before the crisis became apparent everywhere, in all the important cultural centers of Europe. Cavafy was aware that, until about 1914, his own poetry was dangerously close to mediocrity or downright failure,® with a 8 Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, w, 37. ’ Compare Cavafy’s “rejected” poems in the periodical Nea Grammata, January-February, 1936.

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few obvious exceptions. He found his true self around that time; he was then in his late forties. But he began to become known abroad at a much later date, certainly not before 1924. What I want to stress here is that Cavafy had not been subjected to the intoxication of the new demotic idiom, or to the whole heady ferment of the linguistic controversy. From where he stood, he could not even perceive the phenomenon of Solomos properly. By “properly” I do not mean as Palamas and the New School of Athens saw Solomos, hidden behind

the smoke-screen of Psycharis’ My Voyage; I mean with the immediacy which we find in Sikelianos’ approach to Solomos. (This poet from the island of Leucas should be seen as a special case in relation to the language question, rather similar to that earlier poet, also an islander, Andreas

Calvos

from

Zante.) The inebriation of language, of fighting for a language, had not touched Cavafy. In his ears there was the constant, ugly screech of his purist idiom, with all its hideous phoniness; and so he was led to focus his attention on

the crucial question, which was not really language in the narrow sense. He could clearly see that in Greece there was the same poetic impasse, in spite of the fact that poets there were now using a language supported by a sounder theoretical basis. The real question, he saw, was poetry itself, the means

and purpose of poetry: Ths BpovyKov ἡ µητρόπολις, ἣν πάλαι εἶχε κτίσει δοὺξ Φλαμανδός τις ἰσχυρὸς καὶ ἀφειδῶς προικίσει."

The ugly purist screech, so audible in the two preceding lines, protected his discernment. It caused him to react, to seek his own answer to the impasse. He was the first to do so prior to Elegies and Satires, when the crisis of poetry burst into the open. Cavafy went ahead with a pian that would set him free, he thought, and would set poetry free as well. Regardless of the degree of importance which we may ascribe to 10 “The cathedral of Bruges, built in ancient times/by some powerful Flemish duke, and lavishly endowed” (Periodical PAysts, Alexandria, February 21, 1893).

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the phrase, he found his answer in what he called “the boundaries of my art”:

In the loose living of my early years the impulses of my poetry were shaped, the boundaries of my art were plotted.” Let us now go back to the question of the deterioration of metrics, as it became manifest when poetry—the way people wrote poems in Greece—broke up into two separate trends. On the one hand, there was the poetics in use from 1821, or even earlier, right up to the appearance of Elegies and Satires; and, on the other hand, we have the first emergence of the

poetical crisis, and the first post-Cavafian answer to it: Seferis’ Mythistorima. A new period begins then; we may call it a turning-point, in the sense that poetry began turning in various directions in search of a solution to the impasse. This does not mean, however, that Seferis’ Turning-Point had any direct or

decisive bearing on the general problems that concerned poetry. The poems I quote below (unlike the three lines by Cavafy quoted above, I have had to quote them in Greek in order to make my point, since we are here concerned with metrics) are the best way I know to guide us through the transition from the early period of inertia and insouciance to Cavafy’s reaction, and then on to Karyotakis,

who

marks

the final

phase: the dissolution and breakdown of metrics: Μενεξεδένιο αἷμα γοργοστάζ ἡ ᾿Αθήνα Κάθε ποὺ τὴ χτυποῦν τοῦ δειλινοῦ τὰ βέλη": ΟΓ.

From “Understanding,” p. 82, Collected Poems, trans. by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, Princeton University Press, 1975. All subsequent translations of Cavafy’s poetry are from this volume. ue Violet blood Athens swiftly drips Each time she is struck by the darts of afternoon. Palamas, ᾿Ασάλευτη Ζωή

(The Life Immutable), first appeared in 1904.

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Χαϊδεύει τὸν Κορυδαλλὸ δειλὴ χλωράδα ὀνείρου Τοῦ θείου τοῦ βράχου τοῦ γελᾶ ἡ Πεντέλη, κι ὁ Ὑμηττὸς Ἀκούει γυρτὸς τὸ ἐρωτικὸ τραγούδι τοῦ Φαλήρου." and now Cayafy:

A στὴν Συρία µονάχα νὰ βρεθεῖ | τσι μικρὸς ἀπ᾿ τὴν πατρίδα ἔφυγε Ποὺ ἀμυδρῶς θυμούνταν τὴν µορφή της. a mes στὴν σκέψι του τὴν μελετοῦσε πάντα σαν κάτι ἱερὸ ποὺ προσκυγώντας τὸ πλησιάζεις, σὰν ὁπτασία τόπου ὡραίου, σὰν ὅραμα

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Ν

A

4

x

/

ἑλληνικῶν πόλεων καὶ AYLEVwY.—"* ς

Lal

and to end up, Karyotakis: Tia νὰ pas δεχθεῖ κάποια λαίδη τρυφερὰ

ἔδιωξε τοὺς ὑπηρέτες της OANMEpa.*® We can clearly see how the prolonged and persistent pressure against the inner walls of metrics led Karyotakis to Elegies and Satires and compelled him, not long afterward (1928), to use a kind of prose in the form of a thirteen-syllable line, like the lines just quoted. Here we have the extreme point of disike

ue

a

A timid dream-greenness caresses Korydhallos, Pendeli smiles at the divine rock, and Hymettus Stoops to listen to the love-song of Phaleron. Palamas, The Life Immutable. Only to be in Syria! He was so young when he left his country he hardly remembered what it looked like. But in his mind he’d always thought of it as something sacred that you approach reverently, as a beautiful place unveiled, a vision of Greek cities and Greek ports. Cavafy, “Of Dimitrios Sotir (162-150 B.c.). Trans. by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, Princeton University Press, 1975. In order to receive us tenderly, a certain lady drove out her servants for the day. Karyotakis, The Complete Works

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are no

solution in normal metrics. In other words, metrics

longer necessary, or can no longer hold out within the established forms and patterns of poetry. As opposed to the smooth movement of stressed verse, or even the irregular, dissonant,

asymmetrical movement of Cavafy’s verse, Karyotakis’ distych clearly suffers from a kind of St. Vitus’ dance, or ataxte locomotrice. This jerky movement transfers us from the physiology to the pathology of this type of poetics. It is not a question of

wrong stress or even sprung rhythm; what we have here is a deep disturbance of the entire metric organism between these two periods: Ἐγώ, κύμβαλον adadalov®®

Karyotakis is the channel, the narrow passage: he both separates and brings together. His predicament coincides precisely with the central point of tension, the point where the strands of the rope begin to snap one by one, and the rope gives way. There is an interval of about eight years from this point to

Seferis’ answer in Mythistorima: Αὐτὲς ot πέτρες ποὺ βουλιάζουν µέσα στὰ χρόνια ὣς ποῦ θὰ μὲ παρασύρουν; Τὴ θάλασσα, τὴ θάλασσα, ποιὸς θὰ µπορέσει νὰ τὴν EN

~

ς

/

/

ΔΝ

x

/

/

να

ΔΝ

ον

\

a

la

a

\

Ν

ἐξαντλήσει; οτ.

Γιατὶ γνωρίσαμε τόσο πολὺ τούτη τὴ μοῖρα µας Στριφογυρίζοντας µέσα σὲ σπασµένες πέτρες, τρεῖς ἢ ἕξι χιλιάδες χρόνια Ψάχνοντας σὲ οἰκοδομὲς γκρεμισµένες ποὺ θὰ ἦταν tows τὸ δικὸ µας σπίτι ne

“I, a clanging cymbal” Karyotakis, The Complete Works ‘7 These stones sinking into time, how far will they drag me with them? / The sea, the sea, who will be able to drain it dry? (20)

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Ἡροσπαθώντας νὰ θυμηθοῦμε χρονολογίες καὶ ἡρωϊκὲς πράξεις θὰ µπορέσουµμε;"» or:

Βουλιάζοντας µέσα σὲ βάλτους καὶ µέσα στὴ λίμνη τοῦ Μαραθώνα, Oa µπορέσουµε νὰ πεθάνουμε κανονικά» /

\

/

A

/

At this very point (1935), we depart from the old poetics; we can no longer proceed as before. A new era begins. Although this may be a digression, I would like to note that Seferis’ poem The Cistern (1932), his farthest-reaching work from the spiritual point of view (which is finally what concerns me most), is one of the few modern Greek texts in which the means of expression are completely subordinated to that which they express. What is expressed is predominant throughout the text; it carries you along, undistracted by any interference, by any noise such as the means of expression sometimes produce. You read the poem—and the language is hardly audible. It has surrendered. In the end, you find you have received the poem’s message without anyone having given it to you. This kind of thing happens for the first time in Greece after all the loud clamoring of the purist and demotic poets. It is no small achievement. Generally speaking, Seferis’ poetry reaches its highest point (culminating in The Cistern) during this early period, when Seferis was working—like Valéry—within the rules of the old poetics. He did not substantially surpass this high point in his 18 Having known this fate of ours so well wandering around broken stones, three or six thousand years searching in collapsed buildings that might have been our homes trying to remember dates and heroic deeds: will we be able?” (22) a Sinking in marshes and in the lake of Marathon, will we be able to die properly? (22)

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second period, after he encountered T. S. Eliot’s work and what is known as free verse. The crisis of the old poetics, of the poetic parlar in general, had begun some time before it actually came to the surface; it first made its appearance in Western Europe. Though I have no wish—or ability—to go into the matter at length in this essay, I will have to say something about that great invisible circle which has always circumscribed us here in Greece: I mean European poetry, or, generally speaking, the function of art in Europe. From the early date of 1822, when Stendhal attacked conventional verse as it was used in the theater,” up to 1924, when T. E. Hulme resolved, or ventured to hope, that: “We

shall not get any new efflorescence of verse until we get a new technique,

a new

convention,

to turn

ourselves

loose in,”

modern poetry was already heading toward a decisive ordeal. I must make it immediately clear that this was no temporary difficulty, or the usual phenomenon of the wave of a rising generation opposing or antagonizing the wave of the receding generation. I would like to mention a number of examples taken from writers who demanded a total revision of the contemporary conception of art which had taken shape in Europe since the Renaissance; they also demanded a deep readjustment, a confrontation with earlier periods when the conception of art was diametrically opposed to ours and its purpose defined in totally different terms. I am not quoting the names of poets like Lautréamont, Rimbaud, and Artaud simply because they are still fashionable in the great European capitals or because they have retained a dominant position in intellectual circles, but because the drastic revision which these

men sought by moving away not merely aesthetic, as many to believe and as was the case and Picasso, for instance). In

from the traditional path was of their current followers like with modern painters (Matisse painting, all that happened was

0 Stendhal, Racine et Shakespeare. 3 Τ. E. Hulme, Speculations.

ὌμΕρ

ΠΟΣΤ

a simple transposition

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of aesthetic

99

focus:

from

Raphael’s

putti, three-dimensional art, and late classical statuary to Minoan frescoes, Cycladic figurines, archaic Kouroi, and Fay-

um portraits. A shift of this kind in poetry would have been unimportant. What I have in mind is a revision of a metaphysical nature. As we shall see further on, Claudel knew very well what he was talking about when he coined the phrase “un mystique 4 l'état sauvage” to describe Rimbaud. This phrase beautifully fits all three poets mentioned above. “La poésie doit avoir pour but la vérité pratique.” (Lautréamont, d. 1887) “Posséder la vérité dans une ame et un corps.” (Rimbaud, d. 1891)

“C’est que la vraie poésie, qu’on le veuille ou non, est métaphysique et c’est méme, dirai-je, sa portée métaphysique, son degré d’efficacité métaphysique qui en fait tout le véritable prix.” (Artaud, d. 1948)

That early hint by Stendhal caused some alarm in Europe. Then from a certain point onward, it became obvious that what Mallarmé called “l’antique vers” was coming to an end and a new era was beginning which caused Gide, in his introduction (1947) to the Anthologie de la poésie frangatse (1949), to express his fear for the future and to betray his total lack of understanding of what was happening in the world of poetry. I quote from part 3 of his introduction: “L’ancien systéme poétique de naguére, si savamment établi (surtout dans la littérature frangaise) pour permettre a la mémoire de retenir les traits ot s’inscrit |’émotion, la beauté; ce nombre régulier, ce retour des rimes et leur alternance, ces temps forts marquant les césures, toutes ces régles enfin, si profondément en nous inculquées qu’elles nous paraissent fatales, naturelles et indispensables; tout cela n’a plus raison

d’étre. . . . Quelques réussis quils soient paraissent factices et délivrer du passé... .

admirables efforts de restauration, si (je songe particuli¢rement a Valéry) archaisants, 4 ceux qui prétendent se Cette anthologie ne représenterait donc

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plus que le désuet bréviaire d’une génération qui s’en va. Puisse-t-elle du moins apporter témoignage, tant bien que mal, de |’état of nous nous trouvions avant le retour au chaos.” Our present phase, then, is called “retour au chaos,” a return

to chaos. This meaning of the word “chaos” (a primeval disorder, a turmoil in which all things are thrown together in confusion) is quite recent. The true meaning of “chaos” is “the abyss that gaped at the beginning of the world.”” It was not the opposite of Kosmos (the world, Order). Chaos has no opposite, in the same sense that the earth, the sea, the ocean

have no opposites. The antithesis Chaos-Kosmos is a fallacy, and an invention of the modern age. The true opposite of Kosmos in Greek is akosmia (disorder).”° In the sense, then, of a return to the abyss that lies at the beginning of the world, we can agree that “retour au chaos” describes the general situation of the arts in Europe at the time Gide wrote his introduction. But we cannot agree with Gide in his mistaken assumption that the old poetics represented Kosmos, while the present poetic phase represents Chaos. What has really happened is that European poetics in our age appears to be coming to an end, and its broken members, its fragments, are about to be reabsorbed into the abyss that yawns at the beginning of the world, there to discover the great womb necessary to all art, the root from which they have immeasurably strayed; for only then can they be reborn and restored to the light of life. Now if we wish to reduce this great issue to a few central points, we will see that the crisis in the poetics, and poetry, of Europe presents the following characteristic features: (1) rupture of the regular line (l’antique vers); (2) revival of lyricism by the French surrealists (free association) or by the poets who used self-generated imagery, such as Lorca and Dylan Thomas, and Elytis in Greece; (3) frequent rupture of syntax, leading to (4) a frequent rupture of logic and cus22 Hesiod, Theogony, 116. 38 Plato, Gorgias, 508a.

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tomary thought-processes and thought-sequences, the ultimate purpose being (5) a subjection to a “poetic” language as opposed to ordinary language; (6) grafting prose elements onto poetry (Cavafy in Greek poetry), but at the same time (7) frequent emancipation of the poem from the Aristotelian prose model used in poetry until now, emancipation from what an English critic called “normal prose sequences” or “a frame-

work of narrative”**; (8) replacement of these terms (“sequence,” “framework”) by other models, phantasmagorical, oracular, apocalyptic, panoramic, as in Rimbaud, Yeats, St. John Perse, or by impressions from life or from books, arranged in such a way as to speak for themselves (The Waste Land, Ezra Pound); (ο) frequent appearance of human characters in lyric poetry, reminiscent of their use in the theatre and in fiction (Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, T. 5. Eliot, Cavafy). Numbers 7 and 8 supplement and illustrate numbers 3, 4 and 5. Looking at numbers

2, 3, 4, 5, 7, and 8, one realizes that

Western (modern) man is in search of some vision, some lost center, beyond or outside the iron shackles of rationalism,

to which he has willingly chained himself ever since the Renaissance:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold as W. B. Yeats prophesies, or reveals, in The Second Coming.

It is this center, the loss of which marks the entire period from the Renaissance to our days, that modern man keeps seeking, in a thousand different ways—except the one possible way lying right there in front of him, unseen, unnoticed, the one thing that “is needful,”?* for such is the foolishness that has stricken the “salt of the earth.”*® And men who are no longer the salt of the earth and “good for nothing”’’ have 24Tionel Elvin, Introduction to the Study of Literature, vol. 1, Poetry, 1949. 25 Luke 10:42. 26 Matt. 5:13. 27 Matt. 5:13.

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“cast out”2® men from life and caused them to be “trodden underfoot.””” At first, Western man tried to get out of the impasse by a headlong, indiscriminate attack on his own creation, rational-

ism, though it was thanks to his ingenious technical application of rationalism that he had achieved so much, in the historical sense, over the last four or five centuries. As a means to liberation, or salvation, Western man now preached that art must take various bypasses, as it were, away from the beaten track, and thus outflank raison, Vernunft, reason.*° These by-

passes were alternately thought to be passion and sentiment, the senses and sensory perceptions, imagination and dream, insanity and incoherence, psychology (the zenith and the nadir of consciousness), and finally intuition, a sw: generis

solution not unlike the instincts, or the daemons. These bypasses (I have certainly not included all of them in this enumeration) have been incorporated into theories, obsessive dogmas, accoutred with prefixes, such as ir-(rational), sur-

(real), sub-(conscious), un-(conscious) and so on, but always within the limits of the natural; modern man has always taken care to pull down securely over his head the trap-door of the supernatural, in other words the spirit; for there lies the center, the lost vision. One of the results of this attempt to recapture the lost center can be seen in Western man’s recent interest in studies that tend to restrict the old absolute supremacy of the rational element, the human intellect, and also to restrict the classical

element within a purely historical context (it has become a habit always to lump classicism and rationalism together). ZS Mattias: 29 Matt. 5:13. °° Whether endorsed (Valéry) or denied (T. 5. Eliot), raison is often portrayed by modern poets as an insect entrenched in the drought of the modern world: “L’insecte net gratte la sécheresse” (Le Cimetiére Marin, x11), or under the shadeless tree of modern civilization, in the guise of a cricket—of doubt—grinding away without cease: “And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief” (The Waste Land, 1, 23).

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Thus we have this great boom in anthropology, the fascination with the primitive and the ancestral, the systematic study of Eastern languages, the bias in favor of the pre-Socratics and the archaic period of Greece, the ever-growing interest in Byzantium. These multiple trends and changes in modern values— Umwertung aller Werte (Nietzsche)—are reflected, of course, in the various aesthetic trends of our age. Needless to say, however, this apparent revolt, leading Western man toward extra-rationalist and anti-rationalist orientations, is rationally willed and logically pursued: “raisonné déréglement,” as Rimbaud wrote in a letter dated May 15th, 1871. As I have pointed out, the revolt always pertains to the natural, never to the supernatural or metaphysical; with very few exceptions, it does not grow out of some great metaphysical tradition. I shall use two images to illustrate what I mean. In the beginning, man sees logic as his prison, his cell. He wants to break out of it. He starts banging on the walls of the cell; first on the wall of logic, then on the second, third, and fourth

wall in turn, which represent the various bypasses I mentioned above. He soon finds out that none of the walls can lead him out into the open, into the light of day. He also sees that logic, which he had considered his prison, is only one of the prison walls; each fresh assault on the other walls (the bypasses, the newly conceived solutions I enumerated earlier, such as sentiment, imagination, dream, madness, passion, or intuition) leaves him exhausted, reduces him to a lifeless heap on the floor of his cell, a limp body enclosing nothingness, nzhil(ismus), unsatisfied emptiness, the void which is about to beset all five continents following in the wake of Western civilization. None of the bypasses has proved capable of leading man to the door of his prison: “the great golden portal of Omnipotence,” as Solomos wrote in “On the Death of Emilia

Rodostamo.” And now the second image. Man occupies a sphere, a globe. As he walks across its curved surface, never pausing, never coming to the end of it (obviously), he has the illusion of

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limitless freedom. Sphericity has no limits. In actual fact, he might just as well be crouching in the Platonic cave or in the hold of a ship, for all the difference it would make. He still cannot reach the “golden portal,” Janua Coeli, the world of the

spirit; here again, he is unable to see the one way, the “one thing that is needful”:** the way indicated by all the great metaphysical traditions. The way to the spirit must pass through these traditions, and these alone. Innumerable attempts may be made on the surface of the sphere, but the spirit cannot be captured through any of the bypasses devised by man. Even Sikelianos was not able to understand this, though he was the only Greek poet to sense that the problem of art in our time was not aesthetic, but metaphysical. Leaving aside the spiritual, metaphysical tradition of his ancestors, he tried in vain to reach the spirit, “the golden portal,” through the Delphic Festivals or through his own Titanism, influenced mainly by the syncretism that dominated the centuries which Franz Cumont investigated in his work. When the vessel of European poetics was finally shattered (in Greece this happened in 1927), displaying most of the symptoms of deterioration I enumerated earlier, when the crisis became glaringly manifest on all sides, a number of solutions were proposed. The best among the writers in the European metropolis or in the poetic dominions of Europe (such as Greece was after 1821) all went their way, seeking their own hypothetical answer to the problem. I must emphasize here that it is a problem that does not exist only in the minds of intellectuals or in their books. Unlike so many pseudo-problems, this one seems to be quite real, for once: it is ὕπαρ, οὐκ ὄναρ (“this is no dream, but a true vision”), as

Homer says.*? Now whether or not all these attempts in the arts and their consequences can finally coalesce into a solution, whether the problem can lend itself to individual solutions or even to

solutions deriving from revolutions 31 Luke 10:42. 32 Odyssey, XIX, 5473 XX, 90.

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within each separate art, is another question. In my view, I repeat that the problem can only be solved on behalf of all of us, for and by society as a whole. Yet even now, there is one thing we can be sure of; something has happened in Europe and in all the countries that have been following the intellectual model of European civilization, from the Renaissance to our days; something has happened that goes far beyond art or the arts. Among the numerous individual answers to the impasse of European poetics, there is T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), a date that is a landmark for the Greek nation as well as for European literature. It was translated into Greek by Seferis. Another answer was given by Seferis himself in Mythistorima. Regardless of its worth—as in the case of Cavafy—it did help to bring the cause of poetry one step forward, whether in the direction of the great yawning abyss at the beginning of the world, that distended silence, or towards what may be the true solution—who can tell? But the fact that poets are still trying to find an answer to the general crisis of art through art itself, the fact that they continue to produce art without first proceeding to a total, radical re-examination of the modern conception of art, can mean any number of things: first and foremost, that they consider the present crisis as a temporary, empirical, or rectifiable (individually rectifiable) difficulty. However, when I say that the problem can only be solved on behalf of society as a whole, I do not mean that we should do away with art, or that in the meantime we should just sit waiting for the solution, with our arms folded. Each one of

us must try to solve the problem on his own, until that time when the solution can become generalized and reach the whole of society. What I am trying to say is that it is necessary for each one of us to start going through a total, radical change, the true metamorphosis or “change of mind’”—

perd-voca—which is “needful,” which has always been “needful,” before we can proceed to help others in a really effective and creative manner. We must first change the way art func-

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tions; from the aesthetic function we have today, we must

move on to a metaphysical function, which is the way art always functioned before the Renaissance. It may seem the wrong way about, but in order to “save” art, we must first “lose” it;°*> we must “lose” art as it is presently conceived in theory and function. In our present phase, it may be that Seferis believes that poetry (ο altra arte) has been redeemed or may eventually be redeemed by a progressive process originating within “the boundaries of art,” to use Cavafy’s words, and that in this

way he will rediscover the lost purpose of poetry. That is his own

business and, if he likes, he can tell us about it some

day. For the moment, I am simply trying to understand him, not to anticipate him.

There still remain a few points I wish to make. One of these is that when we speak about poetics or poetic modes in Greece, we are speaking mainly about European poetics, for that is the poetics we have been using ever since we came under the European sphere of influence. Europe has always been the model

we have followed

in all our arts, and therefore the

crisis of Europe, the metropolitan problem, as we may call it, is a thing we share in common, since we are one of the cultural dominions of Europe. Perhaps, however, the outbreak of the crisis will momentarily reveal, like a flash of lightning in the night, a parting of the ways between us and Europe; in the general confusion, it may lead by a roundabout course to our own true way. But, for the time being, the point of intersection, the crossroad stricken by the thunderbolt, is common

to us both. When the vessel of European poetics broke, the contents— not the essence of poetry, but its function—spilled out and scattered to the four winds. This is what I mean, this damage that goes much deeper than superficial cracks on the outer contours of the vessel, when I say that poetry is in a state of crisis. ae Luke 0:24.

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In Africa there exist magic rods or healing masks which sometimes lose their miraculous powers; when this happens, they are hung up high on the wall of the hut, out of reach, and no one touches them any more. When they cease to be potent, they cease to be used. Something of the sort may be happening to poetry and the other arts. A diffuse, unprecedented sense of unease, a multitude of doubts and reconsiderations, and,

above all, the situation prevailing not only in the daily practice of art, but in the way that art functions as a whole in the modern world—all these symptoms seem to point in the direction of the African rod or mask that has fallen into disuse. When I say that poetry has been scattered to the four winds, I do not mean that man has lost the capacity to experience poetic emotion; I mean that even in the best of cases, we will not get very far if we continue to use untried methods and empirical revolutions which approach poetry as a self-existent value, encased in a finely wrought mausoleum. We vaguely

sense that this cannot be the true purpose of art, that in other periods (and in other parts of the world) the concept of art was

totally different:

it was

a “canonical”

concept,

i.e.,

based on a canon, as opposed to modern art, which by its very nature cannot possibly be “canonical.” This is certainly not due to any lack of good craftsmanship or effective media (language, etc.) in our age. What is lacking is the center, the lost vision, without which

nothing can be accomplished: “all things were made by him, and without him was not any thing made that was made,”** says the Gospel. This is the manna, the precious substance from which art proceeds, and there it must return, back to its lost center, its heavenly origins, for since ancient times, man

has been considered “a plant not of an earthly but of a heavenly growth.”*° In this respect, we are not free, as one of the few people who have really understood our predicament once put 34 John 1:3. 35 Plato, Timaeus, goa. (Translated by B. Jowett.)

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it: “Nous ne sommes pas libres. Et le ciel peut encore nous tomber sur la téte.”*° Unfortunately, too much art (for its own sake) and also the art-détaché and poésie-charme of our age have caused us to lose the miraculous faculty of taking people’s words seriously, the words by Artaud which I have just quoted, for instance. And that is the worst possible perversion: to see words only as words; to heed only the words and not the message. And so now it is only by chance that we may receive the message and find salvation. That is our doom. We are not to expect any baptismal regeneration of the arts within the present established limits of the evolution, promotion, and cultivation of what we like to call personal taste, artistic talent, sensibility. If poetry and the other arts are ever to sprout forth again, or even to recapture their former status, they will have to disown totally the irregular course they have embarked upon since the Renaissance, away from the lost center, the heavenly roots that once brought forth the great cathedrals of the Middle Ages, to speak only of the Western world; art will have to change its face, shaped and misshaped through the last five centuries of European culture; the face described by Seferis: we’ve decorated our art so much that its features have been

eaten away by gold.’ Finally, the arts will have to lose what they now have in order to find that which they have not; in other words, they must lose their soul in order to find it, or, to put it differently for those who fear the Gospel and prefer a more “modern” idiom:

In order to possess what you do not possess, You must go by the way of dispossession.®® In our age, hardly anyone believes the poet when he speaks. °° Antonin Artaud, Le thedtre et son double, νι, 1938. 87 “An Old Man on the River Bank.” 38 T. 5. Eliot, East Coker, 111, 40-41.

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Most people heed “a voce pit ch’al ver.”*® They listen, but do not hear; the message does not register; it has been lost, done away with. Thus poetry has ceased to be truth, and truth poetry. “Truth and beauty buried be . . .”*° We will have to go a long way upstream through the centuries, away from the fragmented, disjointed state in which

the two concepts now exist in our minds, in order to finally reach Dante, whom

I have just quoted; there we will find

them bound together once again: art or truth—arte ο ragion.™! If poetry (ο altra arte) is to grow fruitful and strong once more, it must somehow renounce itself in its present function, and plunge into the abyss that gapes at the beginning of the world; the various tentative answers that have been put forward to solve the crisis of poetry may be seen as a period of gestation, of fermentation, prior to a possible birth. In the abyss, poetry will find again the source and the roots from which it has strayed; only thus can it be brought back to the living light. Art must turn into the serious undertaking it used to be. Art must be baptized in the waters of faith. I now want to come to Seferis’ humble concern for our language. I would like to ask some of the young people writing today to listen to a confession of his which I will quote below; I would like them to use it always as a term of reference and to ask themselves whether it is at all applicable to

their own life and work. Seferis once attempted to translate into Greek certain passages from T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. These poems clearly belong, for the most part, to the tradition of abstract European philosophical thought, or Western scholasticism, evils from which our own spiritual tradition was more or less protected as long as we lived under Islamic rule and had not yet been “discovered” by the scholars of Europe. The problems that eventually led Seferis to abandon the attempt, as he humbly 39 Dante, Purgatorio, XXVI, 121. 40 Shakespeare, “The Phoenix and the Turtle.” 41 Dante, Purgatorio, ΧΧΝΙ, 123.

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admits, were “such that I was forced to do excessive violence

to our language, at least as I personally feel it and know it. When I reached this point, Solomos’ ghost would not let me go any farther.”*” I mention this passage for the sake of all those who believe that it was a misfortune that we did not take part in the Renaissance or acquire at that time a philosophical idiom, and that this is the reason why we lag behind and must constantly run panting after the Europeans in an effort to catch up with them—as if the stature of the spirit could be measured in terms of a philosophical vocabulary or an aptitude for logic and abstract thought (which have proved useful, after all, mainly in science and technology). We seem unable to understand that the present crisis in Europe, in the entire civilized world, is above

all a spiritual, or metaphysical,

crisis; the

most important problem for the world today is to recapture the metaphysical contact it has lost. If it is necessary for the Western world to take a great leap and cut across the four or five past centuries of its history in order to come upon some nucleus of a fragmented spiritual tradition, in contrast we have very little way to go in order to find our inheritance awaiting us intact: the ever-living spiritual tradition of the East. Another thing we do not understand is that we are “doing violence” to our spiritual tradition when we insist on forcing upon it things that refuse to fit into it; tradition is a living, natural organism that tends to reject any foreign body that is grafted to it. Whether consciously or unconsciously, this tendency was at

work in Seferis on the linguistic plane. And it was because he immediately sensed the resistance and reacted by humbling himself before our language—which

is the vehicle of tradi-

tion—that he received, as a token of grace, the visitation of

Solomos prompting him to renounce the unnatural attempt. In our days, nothing is able to make us renounce our willful 1.6. Seferis, Introduction to a translation of The Waste Land, Athens, 1949, p. 13.

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ways. And, what is worse, none of us believe in ghosts and visitations any more.

We have seen that Seferis gave his own answer to the crisis of poetics and poetry in Greece; in this he was aided by comparable solutions proposed by poets in Europe and elsewhere. Most of the answers put forward by these artists—and I am convinced that Seferis’ answer, and Cavafy’s before him, were of the same kind—seem to stem from the belief that the impasse in the arts was a transitory, or merely technical, mat-

ter. So they tried to apply new methods to poetry; but it was still the same poetry, the same art as before, as we knew it, or, to be more precise, as the post-Renaissance world has known

it in Europe. Poets appear to believe that the crisis chiefly concerns poetics, not the function of poetry. They never for a moment put into question poetry itself. What they have done, then, is to revise or bring up to date the methods of poetics, which they quite rightly considered stale and old, while leaving poetry itself intact. It never occurred to them that poetry itself may have grown stale and old; they remained convinced that poetry is always the same, and that it has not changed since Homer’s time or even earlier. (I must repeat here that I am discussing the function of poetry, not its essence.)

However,

their conviction

rests on the as-

sumption that since Homer’s time, or earlier, man has always

envisaged poetry in the same manner as we do. Our present approach to a poem or a work of art has been taken for granted as something permanent, or even eternal. I need hardly say that this is very far from the truth. There finally appeared a number of artists and thinkers who identified the crisis of poetics in Europe with the crisis of poetry— indeed, with the Poet himself, insofar as he is the depositary of truth. The answer these men gave to the problem pointed, tentatively at first, then with growing certitude, toward the recognition that the impasse was no transitory matter and that it was no use continuing to produce poetry or any other art as before, even though modern methods and revolutionary

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changes had been introduced (all originating strictly within the sphere of art). For reasons which I cannot possibly go into here, it was revealed to these men that the present crisis in the arts is neither qualitative nor aesthetic, but metaphysical. In the last analysis, the solution to the problem involves the metaphysical or spiritual tradition of society as a whole; it is a matter of recapturing the lost vision, the archetypal image revealed not by man but by God. It is certainly no longer a matter of producing finely wrought, well-planned masterpieces in the manner of Mallarmé (not so long ago, after all), who stayed up all night at his desk under the solitary light of his lamp, striving toward the ideal target he had set himself: Le Livre. La clarté déserte de ma lampe Sur le vide papier que la blancheur défend.**

This conception of the poetic (or artistic) masterpiece that is an end in itself was thus eventually shaken to its very foundations and its supremacy blighted to the core. Man doth not live by masterpieces alone. It is not a question of good craftsmanship, of perfectly shaped works. The demands of workmanship remain the same;

that is not where the crisis

lies. There have alwvays been fine, well-made works, works that are technical tours de force, just as there have always been second-class, ephemeral, mediocre works. This is not what we are talking about; we are not concerned with Ja voce, to quote Dante again (Aow it is done), but with d ver (what it is about). Our problem is not how to achieve perfection in art; that is another story. The problem today lies elsewhere: “,.. comme si toute expression n’était pas enfin a bout, et n’était pas arrivée au point ow il faut que les choses crévent pour repartir et recommencer. On doit en finir avec cette idée des chefs-d’oeuvre réservés a une soi-disant élite, et que la foule

ne comprend ρα»... This is the question that W. B. Yeats puts to the poet who abandons Mallarmé’s lamp and seeks to go beyond it: 43 Mallarmé, “Brise Marine.” 4* Artaud, Le thedtre et son double, νι.

DEE

ELOSt *CEN TER

ats}

Why should you leave the lamp Burning alone?*®

Then he deliberately gives the poet the old familiar recipe for a masterpiece:

A style is found by sedentary toil And by the imitation of great masters.‘®

But the apostate answers back that now we no longer seek a book (Le Livre), but the lost vision, the archetypal image: Because I seek an image, not a book*"

in order to recapture someday that hidden beginning—principle, principium, origin, in both senses of the word—or to use Artaud’s words: “pour repartir et recommencer.” It is obvious we do not understand the real meaning of the crisis as long as we continue to believe that the solution is to be found by devising new ways and means of producing poetry (art in general). It does not mean a thing if the new answer we give to the impasse turns out to be good poetry. There has always been good poetry in Europe. That is why some poets have defined their position by a seeming paradox: “Above all, I am not concerned with Poetry.”** Better still, we might formulate the dilemma by borrowing these lines from a distant tradition; they were written by a Buddhist monk and are quoted here in translation:

You say my poems are poetry? They are not. Yet if you understand they are not Then you see the poetry of them!** I have already hinted at the lost center or vision. For the 45 46 47 48 with

Yeats, “Ego Dominus Tuus.” [ρίᾳ. 1214. Wilfred Owen. (Preface to The Poems of Wilfred Owen, edited a memoir by Edmund Blunden, Chatto and Windus, London,

1955, Ρ. 40.)

49 Rydkan (1758-1831)

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moment, this is as far as I can go. But there still remain a few remarks to be made concerning Greece in particular.

If we make a brief survey of the course followed in Greece since 1821, it might be useful to consider: (1) whether we should still continue to follow in the footsteps of Europe; (2) whether this crisis may help us envisage the possibility that we once possessed a spiritual way of our own; (3) if so, what kind of way was it that we have apparently lost; (4) did we really have to lose our way, since there have always been voices among us to remind us where the true path could be found? (5) should we perhaps investigate the possibility that our tradition essentially diverges and branches away from European tradition? (6) whether it is possible (I am convinced it is) to find our way again. We should give more thought to these questions than we seem to do at present. We need to change our course. This is the task that lies before us. We must open our eyes and find our true spiritual tradition, if we have one, so that the arts in

this country (and everything else as well) may at last acquire a central point of reference, an axis, without which nothing can be done. All we will ever achieve is to disperse whatever comes our way: “He that gathereth not with me, scattereth,”®° to use the words of our forefathers. The tree, the center, must be regenerated if its branches are to blossom. And this regeneration is necessary to us, not to the tree. The tree needs no regeneration; there it always stands—“the tree of life’—* though we may not always see it, though we sometimes lose it through our own wilfulness. Men have been endowed with free will. We may behold the tree, or we may lose it: that is our freedom. This difficult testament was entrusted to us long ago by Plato. The tree is not to blame if in times of violence we find it withered. The withering is our fault: “αἰτία ἑλομένου * θεὸς ἀναίτιος. (“The blame is his who chooses. God is blameless.”)*? BU ukeeireasy 51 Genesis 2:9. *? Plato, The Republic, 617e. (Translated by Paul Shorey.)

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We must also realize that this examination of the problem in its direct application to Greece need not mean in the least that we must keep ourselves isolated and must shut away anything foreign. No one has ever seriously maintained that isolation is desirable; apart from any other consideration, in our

day it is quite impracticable. But even a child can understand the simple fact that in the course of their great journey through the ages, the Greeks have always come into contact with distant lands and mixed with many peoples and ways of life—“cities and minds”—** from all four corners of the earth; yet this does not mean that our tradition, “the same yesterday and today,”** can ever be the aggregate of all our encounters with the outside world. Nor can these encounters constitute our own spiritual or intellectual mark, particular to

us alone. Woe to us if that were so. Surely tradition should be something far deeper than all these external and geographical contingencies. And that is not all: it is only after we have apprehended and grown secure in the knowledge of this depth which is tradition that we will be able to understand the bonds which truly unite us to other people beneath the transitory associations, the skin-deep intercontinental exchanges of our time. Even as early as 1821, there were some people in Greece who were aware of the simple fact that it is not sufficient to conform or keep up with the last word in European thought and art in order to reach a high standard of achievement. But such people usually remain obscure. The educated, the learned, always leave behind them writings, masses of papers that are systematically examined, classified, filed, indexed, and studied;

as the years go by, these piles of paper proliferate in libraries, studies, and colleges where the final processing of “truth” takes place. But the other people, the obscure ones I have just mentioned, leave nothing behind them, or so little that it is easily mislaid if not lost altogether (I am thinking of the “buried tin box” in which Makriyiannis®® writings were 53 Homer, The Odyssey, 1, 3. 54 Hebrews 13:8. δ6 Toannis Makriyiannis (1797-1864).

A general who

| fought in the

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found); in any case, these scant testimonies are unable to change the official, established point of view to any significant degree. It is only natural that scholars should exaggerate the importance of documents that happen to come their way or appear in published form, and to underestimate or ignore those that have not come to light. In their view, historical nonexistence is equivalent to total non-existence. The whole of history is based on this arbitrary mutilation. The official point of view always predominates; yet the other, unofficial voice somehow manages to break through in the end, to make itself heard secretly. Those who study or write history do not seem to be aware that most historical assumptions are conventional; they insist on presenting them as “essential.” On the other hand, the written or unwritten

testimonies

of the unknown, obscure people bearing witness to historical events (assuming these ever come to light) are not really docu-

ments, texts, but rather living experience, deeper than any fact or event. They are life itself, a life that has come a long way and will go a long way, as Makriyiannis’ biographer says about his subject: “The fount of life that flowed through his pen came from a great distance—from the deep-rooted foundations of the race and nation to which he belonged.”** All those who inhabit the world of tradition are simple people, and that is why they have an immediate grasp of simple facts like the one I have just mentioned. Just because we are familiar with certain areas of thought or art, whether on a European or world-wide scale, our accomplishments in those areas are not necessarily proportionate to our acquired knowledge. Here is an example: would anything essential have been added to the artistic knowledge of the Greeks who painted the altar at the Monastery of Lavra on Mount Athos (circa 1530), if they had been familiar with the work of Michelangelo or da Vinci? Would their conception of art, and the way they 1821 war of Independence. He wrote his Memoirs in a vivid and personal demotic idiom, unusual in those days.

56 Vlachoyiannis, Biography of Makriyiannis.

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functioned as artists, have been improved at all? People like Makriyiannis instinctively knew these simple truths. “After I went along myself with my Tetrarchy,” Makriyiannis wrote, “I took a look at all the places where there had been fighting and I made a note of them; I also noted down all the ones I had heard about. Then when I came to Athens,

I got a painter from the West to paint pictures of these battles for me. I could not speak his language. He did two or three pictures; they were not much good. I paid him and he went away.”°?

Makriyiannis knew very well that seen within the context of his own tradition, the illustrations made by the foreign artist “were not much good,” though it is true that he got hold of a foreigner, not a Greek, to do the job in the first place, almost as a matter of course. But what else could he have been expected to do, since in those days foreigners were supposed to be the “enlightened” ones, to possess all the knowhow, especially in the arts? This is what we were told, again and again, by all those brightly feathered birds of learning, all those Greek expatriates that flocked home from Europe. In the case of the battle-paintings, and in many other things as well, Makriyiannis mistrusted the “enlightened” ones and refused to follow the European way unless it was absolutely necessary. When you travel light, when the luggage you carry on your shoulders is slight and hollow, then it is easy to flit around here and there; it is easy to follow where the wind of fashion blows. But Makriyiannis carried a great weight on his shoulders, a great fortress of tradition, not intellectual but spiritual, and it came “from a great distance, from the deeprooted foundations. .. .” When he made his decisions, he al-

ways felt he must discern both “good and evil”®* (the pictures “were not much good”). Whenever his own tradition was in question, he stood his ground, unshakeable as a rock. Those

who came after him floundered in generalizations. They believed that what was going on in Europe—for instance, the 57 Makriyiannis, Memoirs. 58 Hebrews 5:14.

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scholarly concern for ancient texts and papyri, the progress in science, the development of heart surgery, etc.—could also be applied to metaphysics and art; and so they blindly followed. It should be admitted from the start that we were indeed faced with a difficult problem. We could not go on lagging behind forever. Yet when the crisis in poetry and the other arts broke out, the Greeks soon found out that conformity and familiarity with what was going on in Europe and the rest of the world could not be of equal benefit in all spheres. Particularly as far as the arts are concerned, it is time we began “to discern both good and evil,” as tradition enjoins us to do and as Makriyiannis always did: using non-aesthetic criteria. That is what we must do if we do not want to remain forever “such as have need of milk, and not of strong meat.”*° The Europeans themselves have started going through the weaning process. Normally, with a spiritual tradition as old and continuous as ours, we should be the last to remain as

“habes.ie" Ever since Holderlin’s warning in 1843: Nah ist Und schwer zu fassen der Gott*

culminating in the hopeful conclusion: Wo aber Gefahr ist, wachst Das Rettende auch*®

which is simply another way of putting what the Apostle said: “The Lord is near,”** and also: “But where sin abounded,

grace did much more abound”**—ever since this truly poetic warning was made, the more advanced spirits in Europe have been trying to wean art from the liquid food of children and 59 Hebrews 5:12. 8° Hebrews 5:13. 81 Near is God/And hard to seize,” Hdélderin, “Patmos.” 5 “But where there is danger, there also watches/The saving element.” [did. 83 Philippians 4:6. δὲ Romans 5:20.

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put it on to the solid diet of adults, of “perfect”®> men, to make it give up the milk of facility and mindless comfort, which is no sustenance for a grown man, and feed once again

on the hard crust of metaphysical necessity—the spirit that nourishes and satisfies both body and soul. For all these reasons, it is high time we in Greece cease to use the old formula in poetry and the arts, in the vain hope it will help us find various (empirical) outlets to the present deadlock. Our persistence only goes to prove that we have not understood a thing about the nature of the crisis. Some critics do not even see it as a crisis, but as “a renewal of the living Greek tradition within contemporary art,” to use once again the phrase I quoted at the beginning of this essay. But this is not the way to bring about a renewal of the

living Greek tradition. The proof lies in the fact that once the arts in Greece began to follow the European model they grew immeasurably remote from our spiritual tradition. A living tradition, as we have seen, can emerge only “from the deeprooted foundations.” We are not getting anywhere by just flitting across contemporary

art, like Hussein on his magic

carpet; we are not doing serious work, but simply indulging in acrobatics. We grow more and more unsubstantial and irrevelant, and our acrobatics, no matter how adroit or even

masterly, can never establish a viable situation for any kind of art. As we have seen, modern art is in a bad way. Like the bones Ezekiel saw “in the midst of the valley,”*° we are becoming increasingly aware that the true spirit, the πνεῦμα of life, is draining away from art, and all that is left is sinews, flesh, skin: “And when I beheld, lo, the sinews and the flesh came up upon them, and the skin covered them above; but there

was no breath in them.’®” It is clear, then, that there must be another way. 66] Corinthians 14:21; Ephesians 4:13. 66 Ezekiel 37:1. 87 Ezekiel 37:8.

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Ever since we tried so hard to show Europe and Fallmerayer that we

are direct descendants

of the ancient

Greeks,

we

pounced upon our popular or “demotic” texts (something similar happened in the other arts as well) and gave the signal for a practically total desecration of the spiritual heritage we had been entrusted with. There began a frantic rush, which continues to this day, to match one text against another, to

compile and compare, to sort out documents and use them as raw material for the various papers and studies we like to publish, always following foreign models and the latest theories on art, always striving after that famous aesthetic goal. But language, like life, hits back. And the result is all too clear. We and our children bear the brunt. We go on and on with our theories about the demotic and the purist language, and we are blind to the one thing that matters: our phony way of life has made our language phony, for it is not language that imposes truth on life, but life that imposes it on language. Human speech cannot be saved by legislative decree. We shall have to live truly again if we want to speak truly again. In our greedy haste to use everything we can lay our hands on for raw material, following the European example of poetic individualismus and the accompanying theory (and practice) that proclaims there is nothing higher in the world than art for its own sake: Puisque tout ici-bas ne survient que pour étre Un prétexte a tes chants®®

we snatch up everything, insatiably, even the holy texts of our religious tradition, like collectors gathering precious stones. “Babes” indeed, like the companions of Odysseus; we are still at it, after all these years, always putting forward the shortlived criterion, or canon,

the futile aesthetic evaluation—I

like/I do not like—that runs round itself in a vicious circle. The obvious conclusion is that there is no point in using these grafting methods, in re-baptizing our arts in the various trends and accomplishments of European art, just for the sake 88 Jean Moréas, Les Stances, 1v, 8.

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of proving we are still alive artistically, still swimming along with the tide. In art, being alive is not to be confused with being fashionable, being in the know. If that were the case, our body and soul (and Europe’s body and soul before us) would have found fulfillment long ago (“posséder la vérité dans une ame et un corps,” to repeat Rimbaud’s phrase) and our works would have been sufficient proof of it. Since modern art has lost its metaphysical center, its true life, there is no point in going to art in order to regain it; we must go to the center itself to find a true way of life, and then we can begin worrying about finding the way to art. What has been lost, what is missing, is so enormously important that all the other things, such as art, etc., taken in isolation, are puny and ludi-

crous in comparison. We need to come alive first; we need to stop being dead-within-life. Let art for its own sake go to hell, all of it, if it cannot fulfill its purpose. It is futile to go on worshipping a dead idol out of sheer inertia or habit. It is only when the general crisis broke out in full view that people began to pay some attention to the arts and civilizations that revolved around a metaphysical center, like Byzantium and Asia. Yet even then the tune these people played did not really change. Byzantine studies flourished, of course, and so did anthropology; but all they did was add new virgin regions to their intellectual territories, fresh ground for aesthetic or decorative exploitation, always obeying that old habit of passively admiring works of art simply as monotonous, skin-deep, aesthetic stimulants, devoid of any spiritual or metaphysical impact. If art does not find its lost purpose again, we have no hope of ever creating again, of ever “making works for the people,” which is the meaning implicit in the Greek term “demiourgos.”°® Restricted to the dimensions of the isolated individual, shifting from one kind of abstraction to another, art will become more and more dispersed and fragmented, if it does not melt away in the void without having even been commu69 See the article “A Definition of Style by Solomos,” p. 81, in this volume.

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nicated. That is why there is no real creativity in our time in the sense of erga (works) for the demos (the people). Most artistic works today, even the best, even in that which is most essential in them, are not really works of art; they have none

of the completeness of the art produced by Asia, Egypt, Greece, and Byzantium; they are isolated answers to the dilemma of art. This has already been admitted by some of the best artists struggling to achieve the impossible: to extricate art from the present deadlock. Unfortunately, they try to achieve this working within the boundaries of art, using ways and means that are exclusively artistic—and that is why I insist on the phrase “achieve the impossible.” These “few inspired ones”’° have proclaimed as much in lines like the following: Whether we have chosen chisel, pen or brush, We are but critics, or but half create.”

One need only take one of the most effective poems of our age to see this clearly: T. 5. Eliot's The Waste Land. What else is this “art” of ours, essentially, but a desperate attempt to give poetic form, by means of fragments (“These fragments I have shored . . .”), to a critical vision, a sweeping diagnosis of the deep spiritual crisis of an entire civilization? What else is The Waste Land really about? Or could it be that writing about the crisis, writing per se, the fact that

a man

has ex-

pressed the crisis in writing, is in itself a form of deliverance, which is what the latest theories on art affirm? I have deliberately stressed the phrase “an entire civilization,” because I would like to forestall any assumption that this poem is about the crisis, or death-throes, of only one particular form of society, capitalism, and only one particular social class, the bourgeoisie. We must include in what we call the general crisis of civilization, whether taken as an idea or a living practice, as a way of life experienced in Peking, Moscow, London, or New York, all the trends of modern philosophy 7° Orphica, Fr.5. Τὰ W. B. Yeats, “Ego Dominus Tuus.”

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(including sociology), all the trends, generally speaking, of “philosophy . . . after the tradition of men,”” or, to put it otherwise, philosophy in the sense of an instrument of the human mind (mens) that is independent from any interference of the not-purely-human” or divine spirit (spiritus), as it appears in biblical tradition—an independence arrogantly proclaimed throughout the world ever since the Renaissance. This philosophy, then, includes all trends ranging from absolute idealism to the dialectical materialism of Marx and Engels.** In a thoughtful study entitled T. S. Eliot et la fin de la poésie bourgeoise,”® D. 5. Mirsky remarked that Eliot’s poem epitomizes “tout un aspect de la mort d’une civilisation”; but,

strangely enough, by the term “civilisation,” he meant exclusively “la civilisation bourgeoise mourante.” Yet when we speak of modern civilization, we must include in it not only capitalism and any other anthropocentric philosophical system, but also Marxism, which is an authentic offspring and 72 Colossians 2:8. 73 “Der Triumph des Rein-Menschlichen, le triomphe de l’humain en sa pureté: ainsi Goethe définissait un jour le sens de tous ses écrits” (Charles du Bos, Approximations, v, 1932). 74 Author’s note: It is difficult to render terms like “bourgeoisie,” ‘“Sdealism,” “materialism,” in Greek. We are forced to use the foreign word disguised as Greek. It is significant that the moment we try to make use of the modern philosophical vocabulary, we come upon what Seferis described in the introduction to his translation of Eliot’s Four Quartets as “doing excessive violence to our language”; we are automatically transferred outside the immemorial zone of possibility in which our living speech is activated. The reason is that none of these things has any connection with our spiritual tradition. Our language reacts sharply and sends out warning signals whenever we “do violence to it” in our effort to come to grips with this kind of “philosophy and vain deceit” (Colossians 2:8). Conversely, our language grows trustful and works miracles whenever we lead it to its natural, traditional destination. We might learn much about our spiritual

“primary self” (see Sikelianos, “Hymn of the Great Homecoming”) if we paid more attention to the frequent warnings and the innate wisdom of our tongue. 75 Periodical Echanges, Paris, December 1931.

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intellectual product of what we have called “philosophy .. . after the tradition of men”; the same is true of all the relevant

trends boiling in the same intellectual melting-pot. Paradoxically, D. S. Mirsky, by a sort of outflanking operation, but

working from within the humanist context, throwing Marxism into the boiling-pot, as if communist model of society belonged to some tion, or as if Marxism did not fully endorse the

refrains from the socialist or other civilizaprincipal claim

of modern civilization since the Renaissance, which is the ab-

solute independence of man from the not-purely-human, the divine element. Thus we have the fulfillment of those words in the Bible about man “who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God or that is worshipped; so that he as God sitteth in the temple of God, shewing himself that he is God.”’® For the difference between Marxism and capitalism (in this case, a differentia specifica) is that which concerns the economic foundation of society: the means of production and the distribution of goods. The question then, is not simply the fall or death of a particular society (capitalist society), which may be truly changing shape, a fact few people will deny, or of a particular social class (the bourgeoisie); both this society and this class have been abolished in a number of countries, yet the problem we are examining continues to exist there. What we have, then, is the crisis of a whole world, in which communism and socialism

both have a share. When I say that modern civilization has lost the immemorial metaphysical center of life or is about to lose it, this goes for both the capitalist and the socialist/communist societies. This is the central problem of our age, though it may be masked and covered up, and we may not all be aware of it, in our constant absorption with the misleading pandemonium of the external world that surrounds us and the spectacular advance of technology on all fronts. The same problem exists in the sphere of art, in Europe and elsewhere: wherever man has abandoned tradition. The situation of art in socialist and 76 Thessalonians 11: 2, 4.

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societies is no better than in capitalist society,

though the intellectual aspect of the problem has been relatively clarified. Unlike the West, a decisive step forward has been made, at least, as a result of the exclusion both of the

aesthetic approach to art and the belief in the supposed autonomy of art. Our civilization has replaced the metaphysical center, the “rule of heaven,” with man: man as the supreme law, unrelated to anything, unsupported by metaphysics. “He who is lifted up with pride . . . is left deserted of (ος. As an epitaph to this civilization or to T. 5. Eliot’s The Waste Land, we might use the divine utterances of tradition: “Cursed be the man that trusteth in man, and maketh

flesh his arm, and whose heart departeth from the Lord. “For he shall be like the heath in the desert, and shall

not see when good cometh; but shall inhabit the parched places in the wilderness, in a salt land and not inhabited. “Blessed is the man that trusteth in the Lord, and whose

hope the Lord is. “For he shall be as a tree planted by the waters, and that spreadeth out her roots by the river, and shall not see when heat cometh, but her leaf shall be green; and shall not be careful in the year of drought, neither shall cease from yielding fruit.””°

In all other respects, D. S. Mirsky’s essay is among the best

of its kind; what is more, it appeared at a time (1931) when very few people understood the future significance and repercussions of T. 5. Eliot’s poem on the poetic usage prevalent in Europe since Dante: “l’arte del dire parole per rima.”*° There were not many who comprehended at the time the diagnosis contained in The Waste Land, appearing as it did barely four years after the sombre, teutonic prelude of Oswald Spengler’s 77 78 τὸ 80

Aeschylus, Choephorot, 960. Plato, Laws, 716b. Jeremiah 17: 5-8. Dante, La Vita Nuova, 3.

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Der Untergang des Abendlandes (1918). In the midst of the abundant bibliography on The Waste Land and on T. S. Eliot in general, D. S. Mirsky’s study stands alone of its kind. Now let us return to Seferis. My acquaintance with Seferis may be divided into two periods. I read his writings before the year 1939 or 1940, both in book form and in various publications, chiefly in the literary periodical Nea Grammata. 1 suppose I was just one among many young men who admired the track, the silver mark of the snail, left by certain pages of his: two, three, four pages at the most—there was no need for more. One such piece, I remember, was called “Perplexities upon reading Calvos.” I had never read anything so concise and effective about literature in Greek before. This man left a mark behind him,

like the snail—how else can I put it?—whereas reading other writers, I found it quite impossible to tell what regions they had crossed, or if indeed they had crossed the same regions as he had at all. They wrote about the same subjects as Seferis, yet it seemed as if the earth opened and swallowed them up as they went along. They simply disappeared into thin air. I had not yet met the man. He was much older than I. This age difference was not without consequences. For years I felt uneasy and subdued in his presence. But all the time I greedily made the most of the possibilities which his poetic attempts were sketching upon the horizon before us. There was good enough reason for this. I had sought enlightenment near many

other masters,

foreign or native, but each time

that I put aside the motley reading-matter of youth and tried to make my own voice cut through to the very bone of formulation, I always came upon Seferis! Seferis, who had gone ahead of me along the ways I was tentatively exploring. All the knots that could not be undone he had managed to cut loose in the most wonderful way, never prompted by impatience, and nearly always with perfect timing. He had posted himself at all the narrow passes and kept watch over the kind of writing that truly matters, saving it from all the pitfalls. From the point of view of language (not the language

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controversy which I mentioned earlier, but the actual use of language), Seferis’ role in checking the excesses of the Palamas or Cavafy idioms in those years was most important. I found in Seferis’ writing, in concise and thoroughly assimilated form, all modern knowledge and practice concerning literature in Europe, as well as in the various cultural dominions of Europe. Thanks to his example, I began to put some order into my own scattered fragments of knowledge, a knowledge

that had been facile, immature,

uncertain,

and

untested. In this respect, my debt to Seferis can never be paid back;

I would

like to acknowledge

this debt here, in all

seriousness, on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of his first volume of poetry. As I studied the attempts Seferis was making in his own work, I began to distinguish what kind of resistance might arise from certain experiments in modern art when applied, or questionably transplanted, to foreign soil such as ours. As it must appear obvious from what has gone before, I do not believe that the way to a new immersion of art in the fount of life, as far as Greece is concerned, is to be found in the

twin trends with which Greek art (and life) still insists on experimenting; we might call these two trends, for the sake of generalization, the modernization of Hellenism, or the hellenization of Modernism. These are the general lines along which we proceed, laboring under the illusion that the monotonous back-and-forth motion of this intellectual piston-rod has some connection with our spiritual tradition. This was roughly the situation, marked by various fluctuations, during both periods of my acquaintance with Seferis; the first, as I have already said, before 1939-1940, and the second beginning in 1947, when we actually met and became lifelong friends.

Suddenly Seferis left non é che Out of the

in 1939, a darkness fell upon the world: war. Greece. The rest of us stayed behind “in parte ove luca,”** pondering upon that hideous darkness. deep caesarian operation that was the war, there

81 Dante, Inferno, IV, 151.

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leapt forth once again all the carnivorous beasts that were thronging together in readiness within the human menagerie. Once again, we looked upon man in all his glory, “unbound” (luomenos), man an sich, man in his metaphysical solitude, as defined by post-Renaissance philosophy, without hope of redemption or appeal from any quarter, sole ruler “clinging to the throne’”®? of God, “shewing himself that he is God.” There had been war and destruction before—mankind has never been without these evils—but they had always appeared as mere excesses or transgressions against some higher spiritual doctrine, rather than as a doctrine to itself. (There are a few exceptions: the so-called Holy War of Islam, jihad, for instance, which was a miniature version of al-jihad al-akbar, the great war waged within us against the passions or spiritual ignorance, Plato’s amathia.) It is only in times of utter spiritual decadence, such as the Hellenistic era and our own, that we find this deification of man, which means mocking and dragging God’s creation to the lowest possible level. As if this were not enough, modern philosophy went on to supplement and improve this initial fallacy with the ultimate one, “worse than the first”:’* belief in the Superman (Uebermensch). From then on, the way was open, everything became permissible:

He falls from depth to depth till there was no other.* Seferis suffered. I cannot tell how far “the chasm opened by the earthquake”*® encroached upon his general beliefs, or what kind of “flowers filled the chasm”** as soon as the dust settled. Whether they were flowers of the spirit or painful reappraisals on the ultimate purpose of art, I do not know.

What I do know is that there was more to this man than the poetic and literary accomplishments by which he was known to the public. On September qth, 1948, he sent me something 82 Makriyiannis,

Memozrs.

83 Matt. 27: 64. 84 Solomos, The Free Besieged. 85 Solomos, 1bid. 86 Solomos, 1bid.

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he had written; he called it “Journal of a Poem” and it was

dated May-December 1946.*7 At one point he remarked in it, in a rather abrupt tone: “Any field whatsoever around here would make me a thousand times more human than the Athenian jungle. Intense need (yesterday and today) to give up the Ministry and all that prattling; no longer just to gain time to write literature, but to mature and die like a human being.”** And then another relevant passage earlier on, which seemed to underline the lack of any metaphysical roots in the

modern world: “The atmosphere of Athens. . . . When this gets to you, you become suspended like a jellyfish drifting in the sea. Rotten foundations.”*® There was a very human aspect to Seferis. We shall see presently how deep it was. This aspect has become more important to me than his poetry, now that literature seems to be no longer sufficient, as it was fifty years ago (Mallarmé) to justify life, and art for its own sake can no longer exempt the artist from all other concerns, as it used to do.

There exists, then, a Seferis who rejects the closed vision. And here is my second theme: that aspect of Seferis that continues to interest me, beyond literature. I would like to remark, however, that the original fallacy which started with the Renaissance has so impregnated those of us who are educated, including Seferis, that we often do not know whether we are really speaking in our own voice. The following passage from Seferis’ “Journal of a Poem” is a good example: “Attic tragedy is the highest poetic image of this hemmed-in world, tottering on the brink of the dark abyss, constantly striving to live and breathe upon this narrow golden strip of land in between, with little hope of being saved from total shipwreck. This creates its humaneness.”°° 87 This was finally incorporated in George Seferis, A Poet’s Journal, Days of 1945-1951. The English translation here is by Athan Anagnostopoulos, Harvard University Press, 1974, with slight alterations by TENG 88 4 Poet's Journal, p. 58. So (bid. ρ.5τ. 90 4 Poet's Journal, p. 31.

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I am afraid that this “humaneness” does not hark back to Attic tragedy, but rather to the anthropocentrism which the Renaissance projected upon Greece when it began to “reveal” and “interpret” her to the rest of the world. It is a process which covers the entire period from the dawn of humanismus to the famous modern dignité humaine which some Western writers keep telling us about. Seferis’ “narrow golden strip” hardly differs from Goethe’s “liebliche Grenze” (“Innerhalb der lieblichen Grenzen der schonen Welt’”),** in the sense of an interpretation of the spiritual, metaphysical tradition of the entire ancient world. The same humanistic refrain runs unbroken through Western culture from Petrarch and Budé to Werner Jaeger. As I was saying, it looks as if we Greeks are sometimes

unable to tell whether what we have to say can ultimately escape the great shadow cast upon us since 1821: the subtle,

pervasive disfiguration, the docta adulteratio of the Renaissance. Until 1821, we had no problem in dealing with our ancient heritage. With the help of “time and toil” (Solomos), through centuries of perseverance, wisdom, and sanity, we had managed to cross over from the Hellenic to the Christian form of our tradition; our pending accounts with the marble edifices and statues of ancient Greece had already been settled before Justinian closed down the Athenian Schools (a.p. 529) and the last of the Neo-Platonists fled to Persia. One tradition had made way for another, living through its own death, dying into the life of the other, as Heraclitus says: “living their death, and dying their life.”®? We never lacked a tradition;

and we have known nothing like the Inquisition, the Renaissance, the Reformation. Unlike the Europeans, our tradition has never gone through a crisis in the face of physical foes or a spiritual enemy, such as philosophical doubt. We have never had to display an ancestral nostalgia or to go through pangs of labor in order to produce various cogitations on our ancient δα “Within the lovely borders of the fair world.” Faust II. 92 Heraclitus, Fr. 62.

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statues; we never felt the need to question our living tradition. Quite simply, we knew the ancient Greeks had their own spiritual tradition, their own sacred universe, in the same way

as we have. “Statues are holy things,” says Makriyiannis.® Whatever was meant to remain alive from the Hellenic tradition was channeled

intact into the Christian tradition, and

there it still lives to this day “in another form.”®* That which we call Greece, that which was spiritually viable and therefore survived Greek antiquity, is not to be found, as some people believe, in Schleiermacher, Shelley, or Keats (Ode on a Grecian

Urn), but in the sanctuary of the Christian spirit, as it was passed on to our Orthodox forebears by the Fathers of the Eastern Church and all those who safeguarded through the ruthless centuries the same metaphysics, the same holy geography, sometimes even building their shrines with the same stones, on the same sites where the silenced temples of the ancient Greeks had once stood (“and the talking water was extinguished”).°° It was only after 1821, or perhaps a little earlier, that there appeared here cases of pathological nostalgia for the glory of ancient Greece, problems centering on ruins and statues, controversies and dialogues in which the main

characters were “the ancient monuments

and the contem-

porary sorrow,”*® and even spectacular attempts at raising the dead. And it was Europe that set us hunting in that direction; left to ourselves, we had managed to solve our problems of

identity quite successfully over the nearly two thousand years of our history. Now for the first time after 1821, the modern Greeks are doing their best to place our tradition in a new, adulterated, ambivalent historical context.

It really looks as if no power on earth can erase the monstrously perverted image of Greece that was indelibly printed upon the distorting mirrors which Renaissance humanism held 93 Makriyiannis, Memoirs, B, 63.

94 Mark 16: 12. 95 A reference to the “last oracle” delivered by the Pythia at Delphi to Julian the Apostate. 96 Seferis, “The King of Asine.”

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up to our unfortunate country (an operation as complacent as it was arbitrary), following the example of Hellenistic Alexandria, the first instigator of the deformation. As I have said, the cruelty and insensibility fostered in men by the war caused Seferis great suffering. Yet he never raised his fist, never gave way to anger, however justifiably, or to cold reason, but persisted in following the ways of the heart, about which Gregory Palamas has said: “So then . . . the understanding of the heart lies above all the faculties of the mind.”** And Pascal has told us how strangely these ways of the heart are governed by “raisons, que la raison ne connait point.”?* As any man can or at least must do who has not quite lost his metaphysical contact, or hope for metaphysical contact, Seferis engages his heart in exhausting the whole gamut of natural or cosmic love: Empedocles’ love—p/ilotes—within the natural world. His poem The Cistern expresses just this. Yet within this world all things natural, and nature itself, must one day come to an end, decline, and fall. Seferis ex-

hausts this love to its ultimate limits (this alone is no small achievement) until all that is left is the spirit quivering with a fathomless yearning toward some lost paradise. Those who have taken the final, decisive step will understand; this is the point where words cease and one enters the zone of metaphysical praxis; from that point onward, one must either turn back or carry on to the state where love begins—love in its metaphysical, apocalyptic sense (agape); love that is forbearing and gives meaning and justification to that other love, the impatient, intolerant love of the world; love “that never faileth,”*? even when all things fail, “but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away. ... But the greatest of these is charity (agape).”1°° Mi ridds π 9 AOS

98 Pascal, Pensées, 1v, 277. °°T Corinthians 13:8. 1991 Corinthians 13:8 and 13,

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Seferis always kept his ever-watchful eyes, the eyes of his soul, upon this love: but the water has hardened like a mirror: expectation open-eyed when all the sails sink

at the edge of the sea that nourishes it.1

And even though he may not have taken, and perhaps will never take, the decisive step that is needed, the plunge, the submersion in the highest joy, “the Drowning,” the baptism in metaphysical fulfillment, this deeply human element in him sets him apart: man is soft, a sheaf of grass;

Man is soft and thirsty like grass*® he affirms, with slow biblical echoes. This compassion, this

capacity to feel for others, helped Seferis to remain metaphysically receptive in the face of the crisis of art. It is the most important thing of all; for in the enclosed, damned world in which we live—partly live—today, in this “saison en enfer,” it is only through this narrow cleft that the heavens may one day find room to come through to us. The signposts have visibly shifted during the last fifty years. A perfect poem can no longer contain the entire meaning or purpose of life; the poet can no longer live by poetry alone, as Mallarmé did; and poets know this, or at least sense it. If life is to have meaning and purpose, if life is to be at all livable, one must find a way to replace what has been lost, or what is no longer sufficient—in other words, what has ceased to be the summum bonum in life. This is the whole question of the crisis in the arts, simplified and reduced to its essential parts. For Mallarmé, the summum

bonum

was not yet lost, or at

101 George Seferis, The Cistern. 102 Meister Eckhart, Vol. 1, p. 368, ed. J. M. Watkins, London, 1947.

103 George Seferis, The Last Stop.

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least so he thought. The fact that he believed he had not yet lost it was precisely what afforded him the necessary latitude to finish (in the sense of: to make perfect) his poems in such a way that he would be left with no residue, no vacuum upon their completion, but with the certainty that his poems were the realization of the ultimate meaning and purpose of his life. A great many poets—the majority, I would say, including writers by no means ungifted—continue to work with the same dedication, but, unlike Mallarmé, they are left with an ineluctable vacuum;-I mean, the vacuum continues to exist

even after they have mastered the desired result of poetic or literary perfection. We still manage to produce poems that are perfect in their own way, just as we did fifty years ago; the difference is that poems now leave in men an unused residue, which is the vacuum. Those who persist in producing this kind of poetry— and they are the majority—even though they are aware of the vacuum, seem to be unable to do anything else at the moment. It is either too late or too early for them. But Seferis does not quite belong to this category of poets. The vacuum, which can be measured with perfect precision,

originates from man’s gradual realization that the various “partial” values which he has worshipped since the Renaissance as supreme and autonomous (art was one of them) were no such thing after all. While the cult lasted, of course, man did not feel the vacuum (as in the case of Mallarmé). With the passing of time, however, the vacuum grew in direct ratio to the distance that separated these “partial” values from the supreme “wholeness,” the summum bonum, each time one of these values underwent a crisis. “But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.”'** There comes a time when turning the fragmentary, the “in part,” into the absolute is no longer possible, and man,

“careful and troubled about many things,’?°> will turn once 104T Corinthians 13:10.

ο Luke TOA

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more to “the one thing that is needful.”*°° The greater the distance separating the various devaluated partial values from the “wholeness,” the greater grows the vacuum

within; and

when the distance decreases, the vacuum grows correspondingly smaller. The distance may not always be visible; the vacuum may not be felt for some time; but that will last only as long as we mistake the “in part” for the “supreme” good (as once happened in the past with the arts); danger is never far away, or, even if it is far away, it is there all the same, and

our complacency is delusory, or at the most extremely vulnerable. Then there comes the time when the “partial” good, the substitute good, cracks and rocks and weakens, and we have the same story all over again; the distance grows larger and larger, and the vacuum grows with it. The only ones who are never deceived and never threatened with the vacuum are those who worship the summum bonum unwaveringly, and who place the “partial” bonum, whether it is science or art or whatever, in the service and praise of the “wholeness,” in the same way that the “heavens declare the glory of God.”*” This is the way followed by all traditional societies, in all the multiple forms of their thought and art; it is only thus they achieved all that it is possible for man to achieve in his human imperfection and weakness: “to be likened unto God so far as that is possible to man.”?°* Seferis never ceased to see through the opening in the human heart. Now that it is no longer possible for man to live by poetry alone, now that literature is no longer one of the highest values in our world, Seferis has indicated

at times that he

does not quite belong to those poets who apparently cannot do anything else for the time being except go on producing literature in vitro (as opposed to in vivo), fixed in a continuous, vain effort, because it is either too late for them (to change) or too early for them (to understand). 106] uke 10:42. 107 Psalms 19:1. 108 Plato, The Republic, 613b. Translated by Paul Shorey.

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Nowadays one might well apply to the man who is wholly dedicated to making poems in this intricate labyrinth of the new Jerusalem (that “ungoverned city”)*®® the medieval saying purus mathematicus, purus asinus. In that respect, Seferis is certainly no purus poeta. He does not rely on literature alone, but struggles, gropes, fumbles, like any human being. And whenever he is caught in this human struggle, he draws from the depths of his heart something that may lead to horizons far wider than the mere roundness of a poetic phrase or the felicity of a poetic moment, something that may lead instead to a whole framework through which there is some passage, some opening, that allows one to go forth toward those places where are to be found the “deep-rooted foundations of the race and nation” and the “voice of our country,”*° there to locate and discover, eventually, the “fount of life itself,’ the fount that flowed like a boundless

treasure from Makriyiannis’ pen. The most ordinary things, even an old piece of wood, can sometimes show the way to those who have lost their bearings: But the wooden φ

ϱ

SSS

eC

ο

leo

well-wheel—the ON

η

η

ο le) ὁ

ο

“alakatin”— τα

ος

9

You saw how it moaned. And that cry, brought forth from the wood’s ancient nerves, why did you call it the voice of our country?** Here is a comparison. A truly original poetic image, captured alive in the poet’s noose, can touch us to the core; it can strike the very center of life in us, crucially. This is what I meant when I used the phrase “poetic moment” a moment ago: Ε] campo de olivos se abre y se cierra como un abanico.*?” 109 George Seferis, “Stratis Thalassinos on the Dead Sea.” 119 George Seferis, “Details on Cyprus.” 111 ]21ᾳ. 115 Τε plain/ with the olive trees/ opens and shuts/ like a fan.” Federico Garcia Lorca, Poema del Cante Jondo-Paisaje.

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This is what Lorca sees. He also sees this:

Ε] mar baila por la playa un poema de balcones.** and a knife suddenly transformed into: pez sin escamas ni rio.***

The poetic image haunts you with its magic; it continues to pervade you even after it has hit the target. In the end, alpha links up with omega, the noose is secured—and that is that. This is as far as it goes: there can be no more surprises. On certain occasions, Seferis succeeds in drawing from the “wealth within” (Solomos) not just a poetic image, but a voice. That voice contains and conceals the unexpected. A poetic image can turn a natural impression into something seven times more intense, something almost magical; but a voice can do more: it can reveal the unseen. The image reveals the world; the voice reveals God, makes him audible.

It is quite clear that Seferis sometimes seems to chafe against poetry, or at least poetry as it is understood today. And instead of pulling a poetic image out of the water, he seems to cast his net—the net that is the opening of the heart—in some other dimension. We were talking about love, agape. In that piece of writing Seferis sent me, dated September gth, 1948, he started thus:

“The black and angelic Attic day.” “As I’m writing now, I make desperate gestures in the void and express nothing. And yet I’m crazy about these things, in this light... . And I see the light of the sun— as the ancients used to say. I could analyze this phrase and

advance toward the most mystic love.”*** 113 “The sea dances on the beach/ a poem of balconies.” Federico Garcia Lorca, San Miguel, Granada. 114 «η {sh without scales or river.” Federico Garcia Lorca, Bodas de Sangre, Final. 115 George Seferis, 4 Poet's Journal, pp. 28-29.

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In Homer, to see “the light of the sun”’*® means to be alive. In this natural light, which is fused with life—which zs life— you have to go through the darkness to find the metaphysical light, the true life, not the temporary life that is engulfed by blackness. Sikelianos says something similar: “You saw the sun only—/ And you say you have seen light?”**? And: “Enfin, 6 bonheur, 6 raison, j’écartais du ciel |’azur, qui est du

noir, et je vécus.”"!® Otherwise, if we are to take Ajax’s appeal literally (“In the light do thou e’en slay ας’), without reference to some spiritual or inner light, then we shall find nothing in Homer but naturalistic observations, such as contemporary travellers or writers about Greece are in the habit of making: “the Aegean light,” “the Greek sky,” etc. We must beware of this dangerous downhill path, for it can easily lead us to that general anthropomorphism which Europe has always sought (and found) in ancient Greece. It can lead us to an unjustifiable addiction, totally alien to our tradition, a morbid, half-

baked mysticism, a kind of mystical worship of the visible world, a kind of sentimental quietism (in the manner of Madame Guyon), or it might even cause us to endow the natural world with various philosophical or poetical projections, always on an individualized model, in the belief that we thus become one with God and obey his commandment. Let us follow Seferis in his anguished search “in the light,”*?° not knowing where it might lead him:

“There is a drama of blood much deeper, much ganic (body and soul), which may become apparent ever perceives that behind the gray and gold weft of summer there exists a terrible black; that we are all playthings of this blackness.”?”2

more orto whothe Attic of us the

116 Homer, The Iliad, xvi, 61. 117 Sikelianos, Lyrical Life, Vol. 6, p. 136, Icaros, Athens, 1969. 1418 Arthur Rimbaud, Une Saison en Enfer, Délires II.

“49 Homer, The Iliad, xvu, 647. 120 George Seferis, Thrush, 1n, line 75. 1214 Poet’s Journal, p. 31.

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“This end is not the feeling of death; it is the knowledge of the abyss.”2”

“The feeling that if the slightest crack opened up in this enclosed vision, all things could spill out beyond the four points of the horizon, leaving you naked and alone, begging alms, muttering imprecise words, without this amazing preciseness you had seen.”?* “Ἱ also leave with certain ‘ideas’ about the light. It is the most important thing I’ve ‘discovered’ since the ship that brought me home entered Greek waters (Hydra, October 1944). The King of Asine expresses some of this, Thrush something of it also. But I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to express this basic thing, as I feel it, this foundation of life. I know I must live with the light. I know nothing further; I don’t know whether I'll succeed. The only thing I understood here is that no problem can be solved

by marking

time;

you

must

forge

ahead

or

break.”?** My brother, I pray that you may find it, this basic thing, this foundation of life, “the ultimate of aspirations” (τῶν ἐφετῶν τὸ ἀκρότατον), to quote from a Hesychast text. In this deceptive world, it is no small thing to know you have to live with the light. Never mind if you know nothing further than that; never mind, even, whether you succeed or not. One learns as one goes along. Be-

sides, we cannot hide from the light even if we try: “Come, take light from the light that never sets,”*” or, as Heraclitus enigmatically defined it: “That which never sets, how can one escape its notice?”’’® Then, finally, we hear the primal voice of tradition telling us: ποσα £231 010. 124 [bid., 125 From

Says SB: ρ. 52. p. 64. the Greek Orthodox Easter liturgy.

126 Heraclitus, Fr. 16.

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“In him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.”**”

It is enough that you have understood that no problem can be solved by marking time. Now is the time to forge ahead or break.

Before I go on, I would like to put right a kind of oversight I have found in Seferis’ writings; it has been troubling me for many years, for it is one of the few points on which Seferis and I disagree. In his translation of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Seferis

included a kind of second introduction entitled “Letter to a Foreign Friend” in which he says, among other things: “There’s no getting away from it—we are a people who have great Fathers of the Church, but no mystics.” This passage seems to me not so much the confession of a man who has acquired firsthand knowledge of the living spiritual tradition of Greece (the only one we have), but the involuntary repetition (reminiscent of what he said about Attic tragedy earlier) of the familiar self-projection of European rationalismus on ancient Greece, thanks to which our spiritual tradition has been consistently deformed and ignored by the still flourishing humanism of the Renaissance. I believe that Seferis’ statement betrays the same kind of delusion, in reverse, as that which possessed a large number of European poets just before the war, when they laid their frantic hands on a rare, angelic bird plucked from the metaphysical firmament of Western tradition: I mean the sudden hysterical cult of St. John of the Cross, the humble reformer of the frailes descalzos** The Carmelite Saint was turned into a literary idol. I wish I did not have to make this comparison, and I still like to believe that Seferis’ words were a lapsus calami which he would not repeat today. This is why I take liberty of making some sort of reparation on behalf of Seferis at this late stage. 127 John 1:4-5.

128 “the barefoot friars.”

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The claim I am about to make is not a matter for boasting, but a serious responsibility: we Greeks (or in a wider sense, the Greek-speaking people of the East) and the Syrians, more than any other Middle Eastern people (the Egyptians, for instance), have been the main vehicle of the great tradition of Christian mysticism. Historically, geographically, and in every respect, we have been enlightened by this tradition; we have made it a living experience; we have taught it and been taught by it; we have spoken it and written it; we have received it and passed it on to other Christian peoples. Particularly as regards Europe and the modern world, the mere omission of the corpus of Pseudo-Dionysius the Aeropagite (translated into Latin in the ninth century by Johannes Scotus Eriugena) would be sufficient to render inexplicable a great many aspects of European culture. The mystics of the West could not have just dropped out of the blue on the European horizon; not even Eckhart, who outweighs all the other Western mystics put together, could have possibly existed had it not been for the diffusion and transfusion of our own mystical tradition from the sketes and cells of the East to the mist-shrouded monasteries of Ireland, to say nothing of the great Slavic tradition of the startsi at a later period. As for the Syrians, apart from the fact that they wandered with the Greeks “in deserts, and in mountains, and in dens

and caves of the earth,”’*® the two branches of their mystic tradition—the eastern branch culminating in Isaac the Syrian, and the western branch based on The Book of Hierotheus— prepared the ground and provided the spiritual leadership, with the help of the Greeks, of what we might call the ramification of the mystic tradition that originated in Persia with al-Ghazali and the Sufis of Islam. And what is one to say about the mystic Fathers, beginning with the desert and the Sinai peninsula? What about Evagrius (d. 339), Diadochus of Photike, John Climacus, Hesychius of Jerusalem? Then there is Pseudo-Dionysius the Aeropagite, and Maximus the Confessor (d. 662), who occupy the most 129 Hebrews

II :38-39.

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important positions in the written tradition of Eastern Christianity until the seventh century. Then come the Hesychasts— their name is legion—such as Symeon the New Theologian, Niketas Stethatos, Nicephorus the Solitary, Gregory of Sinai, Gregory Palamas, Callistus Xanthopoulos, Nicholas Kabasilas,

Nicodemus the Athonite (d. 1809), and many others, anonymous, unknown, who continue the great mystic tradition in silence to this very day. 22 The Greeks: “a people . . . without mystics. . . . This has always been the humanistic fallacy of Europe, precisely this; and in this form it has been handed down to most of our educators. And with this “fake loan,” which was “given to us, descendants of the ancient Greeks,”**° we Greek intellec-

tuals have lightheartedly accommodated ourselves in the modern age. This parenthesis may at least help to throw some light, in retrospect, on what I said at the beginning of this essay concerning the neglected, or misinterpreted, fact that our Eastern Orthodox tradition gave the West all that is deepest and most substantial in its own spiritual tradition. When I say “our” tradition, I do not mean that we Greeks gave others some precious possession of which we were the sole depositories, or that the Othodox tradition was our own exclusive privilege, a kind of national or racial heritage, but simply that we belong to that tradition, insofar as we allow ourselves to become “the holy people of Christ,” as Photius wrote from his place of exile;*** in other words, only as long as we cherish it and follow it are we entitled to call this tradition “ours”; never in

the national or racial sense. Here I close my parenthesis, and return to Seferis, to a meet-

ing with him that has taken on a certain importance in my memory. It was in October 1960. On that morning, Seferis and I decided to go out to Kokkinara, on the outskirts of Athens. We started from Kifissia, walked across the hills, and ended 130 Markriyiannis Memotrs. 131 Photius, Epistles, 126.

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up at the church of St. George. Seferis knew the place well. He had mentioned it in a poem dated August 5th, 1928:

... the coolness that comes down to Kifissia ... the two cypresses above your familiar church with the paintings of the damned being tortured in fire and brimstone.**? We tried to find the key to the church. Seferis wanted to see if the fresco with the damned still existed. But there was no one around. We sat down on a circular stone seat that faced a ravine where plane-trees grew. New roads were being built in the district, and the loose soil from the works had clogged the ravine at one point. There seemed to be no room left for the trees. One could feel the pressure growing on all sides. A new residential project spread self-importantly to the north; its roads shot out left and right to meet other roads, and these other roads merged with still more roads, to the end of the horizon, to our farthest borders, and from there to the curved

surface of our whole planet, in a kind of contagious, inexorable embrace that grows ever more complex and complete, rather like great forest fires racing across the land. God has ordained that “all nations of men .. . dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined

the times before

appointed, and the bounds of their habitation.”*** Cement and asphalt had joined hands here in abolishing the “bounds,” and spread out horizontally or climbed vertically “on all the surface of the earth.” This is the fate of every surface, whether it be the surface of the earth or of the sea: to change continually. No one has ever thought of complaining or stopping this natural tendency of life. Change is the fundamental law of surfaces: small, imperceptible changes, on a human scale, and major, cosmic changes affecting the crust of the earth. Since ancient times, when a vast olive-grove occupied practically the whole of the Attic plain, the winds of change have blown many times across the land, and they will continue to blow 132 “T etter of Mathios Paskalis.”

133 Acts 17:26.

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in the future. But during the last fifty years, the face of the earth has changed through the agency of man far more than during the last two or three millennia of our history. And we must face the prospect of ever greater and more systematical changes in times to come. In using this model of the ravine at Kokkinara and the new, upstart residential district, I am not

trying to preach stagnation, or to add unfounded, unrealistic arguments to the general state of confusion in which we live. I only want to draw attention to the strange one-sidedness of our way of life, of our whole conception of the external design of life, if there is such a thing. The awareness of the two dimensions—inner and outer—will help us place the ravine and the residential district in the right perspective and perceive the abnormal and disquieting nature of that one-sidedness. It is abnormal and disquieting because one of the two elements may obliterate the other—in the case of Kokkinara, the outer dimension may overshadow the inner in men’s eyes, and then the world will lose its balance, its immutable axis of reference;

for there exists a spiritual axis of the earth as well as a natural one. When the outer (transitory) element ends up by concealing the inner (permanent) element, where will it find the support it needs? How will it stand, all on its own? The world is not an empty husk, but also the grain within the husk. The husk is only part of the fruit. When the “bounds” become confused and the dominions of the transitory and the permanent intermingle, it is always the transitory that bears the brunt. It is always the husk, the world, that pays the price; to

quote Plato once again: “The blame is his who chooses. God is blameless.”*** It must not be thought that the permanent, the axis, is death, standing in opposition to the transitory, which is change, life, as the passionate apologists of the fleeting moment (Augenblick) may think: “Verweile doch! du bist so schén!” (Goe-

the.) Death belongs to change, to life; they go hand in hand; they complete the cycle according to natural laws. Life and 184 Plato, The Republic, 6τ7ε.

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death stand opposed to the axis, until both finally come to

maturity and merge with it; we might call this state the life of life-and-death. The inner dimension concerns the permanent; the outer concerns the transitory. The inner dimension concerns tradition or metaphysics, if you wish, that never change; the outer dimension concerns change. Change exists, it is the world; the spirit, the eternal, exists, and it is the non-world. The law of

the world is to change, to race along; the law of the eternal, lex aeterna, is to be the axis around which the world revolves and progresses. No matter how much you progress or develop,

you cannot outrun the eternal, you cannot leave it behind. It is you who will be left behind. It has been said that man does not create truth; he can only discover it, and also lose it. Change—the outer dimension—does not necessarily stop you

from realizing the eternal; nor does the eternal—the inner dimension—stop you from realizing change. There is always place and time for both. And there exist God-sent revelations or human beings or places on this earth which make this axis manifest, or incarnate it; and men must venerate these places,

or beings, or visions, and protect them and hand them down from one generation to another, unchanged, if they truly wish to revolve around a spiritual axis like their forebears, rather than float around in space like a meteorite and perhaps end up eventually outside the revolving center, in a headlong fall into “outer darkness.”*** That morning in Kokkinara, faced with the flattening uniformity that advanced threateningly toward us from the new residential district, Seferis’ main concern was our language, for

he saw it as the poet’s last hope of salvation in the great shipwreck that was to come. As a diplomat, Seferis had done a great deal of travelling; he was in a position to know how sensitive languages can be to the standardization of our modern technological world. Seferis’ ears had suffered acutely in the great capitals of the world—especially in London, where 135 Matt. 8:12.

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he was repeatedly posted—as he listened every day to those monotonous, uniform words and phrases issuing ready-made from people’s lips, tailored for every occasion; words and phrases that were cramped, compressed, levelled out, ruthlessly put through the wringer of convention and convenience, infinitely sad in their stereotyped similarity. Homer’s ἔπεα πτερόεντα, with their wings clipped. Seferis knew from Homer that language is immensely flexible—orperry δὲ γλὠῶσσ᾽ ἐστὶ Bporav—*** and has a wide field of activity, ranging from the inner to the outer dimension: ἐπέων δὲ πολὺς νομὸς ἔνθα καὶ évOa.**" And he feared the outer dimension had taken over completely. Anxiety clouded his face. He was very serious as he said: “I fear we may be the last people on earth speaking the Greek tongue.” He said this with a kind of finality, as if sealing something, irreversibly, with his signature. We went down the slope in silence, and then we parted. I did not see him again that year. Seferis was always just arriving or just about to leave; he was never here for long. He wished me strength and fortitude, and I said: “God be with you.” We did not need to say any more. Sometimes words, even the wisest words, are unnecessary: “though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity. . . .”25° Seferis had “charity,” agape—love—which is “the greatest of these.” He mentions it in one of his most spiritual poems: Great and immaculate love, serenity!**® Kifissta, March-June 1961 136 “Glib is the tongue of mortals,” I/iad, xx, 248.

187“, ΟΕ speech the range is wide on this side and on that,” idid., XX, 249. 138TCorinthians 13:1. 139 The Cistern.

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All countries have their own

distinctive standards.

But, in

spite of this, one may draw certain parallels, and occasionally these parallels have some foundation. It seems to me that a parallel with some foundation can be drawn between the two ancient classical languages, Greek and Latin. I am not referring to these languages as they were in antiquity—that would have no connection with the purpose of this essay—but to the fate they have known with the passage of time in the respective areas where they used to be spoken and written or where they have ceased to be spoken and written: the Greek language, with its continuous development, in modern Greece, and the Latin language, with its final demise, in medieval Italy. The Dialogos of Solomos, which concerns modern Greek literature, and the De Vulgari Eloquentia of Dante, which concerns the European or Western tradition, are two ρατα]]ε] texts that are directly related to the two parallel languages and to the path these languages took successively in Dante’s time in Italy and in Solomos’ time in Greece. Both texts have come down to us in a fragmentary state: that of Dante

because

it was

never

finished,

and that of

Solomos because the complete work has never been found (though there is no reason why the missing part should not be found one day). We know that Solomos finished the Dialogos, because in July or August of 1825 he asked a friend of his, L. Stranis, whether

he would

like the work

to be

dedicated to him: “Desidero di sapere se ti fo cosa grata a dedicarti 1] Dialogo.” Dante’s text, il trattatello, as it has always been called by the Italians, was written in Latin in order to attack Latin and to plead the cause of the national language of the Italians, which at that time was called i volgare, the

vulgar language, from the Latin lingua vulgaris. The text of

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Solomos was written in the national language of Greece in order to demonstrate, with Solomos’ own writing as the model, that the written language of every nation not only must be, but

can be, what it must be: the written expression of the spoken, or mother, tongue, and nothing else.

The De Vulgari Eloquentia was published two centuries after Dante’s death, first anonymously in the Italian translation of Trissino (Vicenza, 1529), and later in the Latin original (Paris, 1577) edited by a certain Corbinelli, a Florentine exile. In the beginning the translation was not considered genuine, as was

also the case with Solomos’

Dialogos, and

approximately half a century elapsed before the Dantean original was published. Solomos himself read the translation of Trissino, as we know from an early notebook which has been photocopied and typographically reproduced in the monumental two-volume edition of Solomos’ Manuscripts published in Thessaloniki in 1964 (Αὐτόγραφα Ἔργα, ed. L. Politis). As we draw our parallel between Dante and Solomos, it is essential at the outset to remember that the one belonged to the faith of the Western Church and the other to that of the Eastern Church. Both are poets with religious or metaphysical roots. Unless we take this into account, we shall misunder-

stand both of them. At the very time when the contemporaries of Solomos were “shedding their blood beneath the Cross,” he was fighting to serve the living spoken language with the help of the Word from Heaven, exactly as Dante notes at the beginning of his essay: “Verbo aspirante de coelis, locutioni vulgarium gentium prodesse tentabimus.” Prodesse means to aid the language. Dante did in fact aid the national language of the Italian people: the language of the common man, vulgarium gentium. And that same friend of Solomos mentioned previously, L. Stranis, wrote with foresight from Zante on January 15, 1822, that the poet was devoting all his energy to the formation of the modern Greek language: "... E pone ogni sua cura nel formare la Lingua Greca moderna” (Rime Improvisate, 1822). Dante had said in his Convivio that he

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would speak more fully about the common language in a book that, with the help of God, he was preparing: “Di questo si parlera altrove pit compiutamente in un libro ch’io intendo di fare, Dio concedente, di Volgare Eloquenza” Gis) slave similar manner Solomos covertly declares in the Dialogos that “a book will shortly be published, written in the language of the people of Greece... . They told me that the author is a young man [Solomos wrote the Dialogos when he was about 25 years old] who is always fighting for the common language.”

Let us start with the De Vulgari Eloquentia. There exists, according to Dante, both the “vulgaris locutio” and the “grammatica locutio,” as the Romans called them. That “secundariam

locutionem,” the secondary language, the Greeks also have: “Graeci habent.” We may add here that in Byzantium the twelfth-century poems attributed to Theodoros Prodromos call the archaic written language of the Byzantines “ta grammatika”—Dante’s grammatica—a language learned with “great difficulty”: “Καὶ ἔμαθον τὰ γραμματικὰ μετὰ πολλοῦ τοῦ κόπου..

There

is, then, the language, this Jocutio, that we

learn without difficulty: “sine omni regula”; and that which we learn with great effort only: “per spatium temporis et studii assiduitatem,” or as stated in the words of Prodromos:

“μετὰ πολλοῦ τοῦ κόπου.

We learn without effort as we

imitate our nurse, “nutricem immitantes,” and this is our first

true language: “nostra vera prima locutio.” This national speech of every country, or the living tongue, is not only not

vulgar, but it is more noble than the other (“nobilior est vulgaris”) for two fundamental reasons: because man uses it first, “tum quia prima fuit humano generi usitata,” and because everyone speaks it, “tum quia totus orbis ipsa perfruitur.” One language is natural or true for us, “naturalis est

nobis,” the other artificial or unnatural, “potius artificialis.” And for Dante, Latin is such an artificial or unnatural lan-

guage. It was a daring thing to say at that time, when all serious works were written in Latin, which was the language

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not only of the great literary tradition and of Virgil (whom Dante addresses as “great river of speech,” “di parlar si largo fiume” [Inf. 1. 80]), but also of the Church. A daring thing to say also because that century of the exiled Dante, as most centuries of mankind, was a savage century, “secol selvaggio” (Purg. 16. 135). Later, after the death of the poet of the Divine Comedy, it was still not certain for many years in Italy whether it would be lawful and proper to write serious works in the common language. And Petrarch thought that his fame would depend far more on his Latin works (virtually unread today) than on his Canzionere, written in Italian.

A common language grows out of dialects and is itself a complementary dialect needed for common understanding, a logical or mathematical product of the dialects standing alongside the other dialects, the crowning proof of the linguistic and spiritual unity of every people. Dante hunts throughout the woods and pastures of Italy (“saltus et pascua Italiae”) to seize that panther (“pantheram”) which, as he tells us, one can smell everywhere but which is nowhere to be found: “redolentem ubique et necubi apparentem.” Further on he seeks to find, in an Aristotelian or more logical manner (“rationabilius”), some standard or type (“signum”) against which to gauge the common speech, as we gauge numbers against the unit, colors against white, deeds against virtue, and, lastly, all the characteristics constituting the “Italianness”

of the Italians that cannot be found in particular in any city but which are common to all: “nullius civitatis Italiae propria sunt et in omnibus communia sunt.” One of these characteristics Dante considers to be the living language through which all communicate beyond or outside the local coloring of their particular language and whose scent is to be found in all regions without being found in any particular region, “illud . . . vulgare . . . quod in qualibet redolet civitate, nec cubat in ulla,” in other words, the voice present

in every town without seeming to belong to any particular town: “quod omnis . . . civitatis est et nullius esse videtur” (1. 16). This same “vulgare” occurs commonly in all parts of

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the nation without being particular to any one region: “omnibus . . . commune nec proprium ulli” (1. 18). The Italian translation of Trissino, which, as we have noted, was known to Solomos, reads, “commune a tutti, 6 proprio di niuno.” Here

we have the origin of Solomos’ well-known maxim, “il commune e proprio,” “the common and the essential” (τὸ κοινὸ καὶ τὸ κύριο), according to the established translation of Polylas. This maxim may have been understood at a later time in a general or abstract sense, thus assuming unforeseeable philosophical proportions, but originally Solomos thought of it not abstractly or philosophically, but in direct relation to the language, “radicato ed immedesimato colla lingua”—“rooted in and identified with the language,” again as Polylas translates it. In both the De Vulgari Eloquentia and in the “Thoughts” of Solomos’ Ἠλεύθεροι Todvopxnpévor (The Free Besieged), the phrase about the common and the particular refers first of all to the language: this is its point of departure. And only by starting with the language can one subsequently apply it elsewhere. It is on this basis that Solomos names that which belongs to all (“commune”) and that which belongs to the individual (“proprio”), that which is common to everyone and particular to everyone. I cite the whole sentence from the established text of the first publisher: “Ἡ tuono fondamentale del poema sia dal principio alla fine il commune e proprio radicato et immedesimato colla lingua.” (“Let the fundamental rhythm of the poem be from start to finish the common and the essential, rooted in and identified with the language.”) Dante was the founder of the language of Italian literature as Solomos was the founder of the language of modern Greek literature. But we may observe an important difference between the two countries. Whereas in Italy the unification of the language (primarily through Dante) occurred some five hundred years earlier than the political unification, in Greece the political and linguistic unification (through Solomos) took place simultaneously; it is another matter if in Greece a different solution was arbitrarily imposed (a matter that we shall consider below). In this respect Greece differs from other

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countries where the political preceded the linguistic unification, as in England and France, and from countries where the political disunity continued for centuries after the linguistic unification, as in Germany, the language having been established by Luther (1483-1546) with his model translation of the Bible, three hundred years before the political unification. Of course those who establish a tradition do not emerge “out of nothing.” In Dante’s Italy, as in the Greece of Solomos, we find models and grammars, and there were men and women who did listen to or speak the language identified with the vision of each people and with the history of its soul. The first grammarian of the Italian “volgare,” Guido Faba of Bologna, paved the way in theoretical terms for Dante’s De Vulgari Eloquentia. The notion that the Italian language began with Dante by no means signifies that the Latin language ended with him. As we know, Latin was still used for centuries (and not only in Italy) by the state, and in education, science, law, and di-

plomacy. In fact, Latin was not abolished in France as a legal language until 1539, when it was finally superseded by French. In Hungary the various draft laws were debated in Latin as late as 1840, and in Poland even later. This is another matter. What is indisputable, however, is that over Greece and Italy

hung directly—not indirectly as in other lands—the shadow of the two classical languages, and that in Italy the so-called “questione della lingua” and the language problem in Greece are specifically related to the pressure exercised successively by the two great classical traditions. So Dante discovered all the various dialects in his country, but next to the dialects he searched for the common language of the whole of Italy: “Et sicut omnia hic est invenire, sic et illud quod totius Italiae est” (1. 19). One should take up this language and elevate it with mastery and force: “magistratu et potestate.” And this is to be done by those who are most capable. Then the language elevates its own

creators, or it

raises them up with honor and glory: “Et vulgare de quo loquimur, et sublimatum est magistratu et potestate, et suos

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honore sublimat et gloria.” Among so many crude words (“rudibus vocabulis”) one needs to untangle confusing constructions (“perplexis constructionibus”), defective pronunciations (“defectivis prolationibus”), rustic accents (“rusticanis accentibus”), and thus to make the common language a distinguished medium (“egregium’”), clear (“extricatum”), complete (“perfectum”), and highly polished or urbane (“et urbanum”) (1. 17). Once one has struggled to make this common language a suitable and ready medium for every need, then the great poets appear, the model ones, “magni poetae,

hoc est regulares”—either in poetry or in prose—those who write (“poetati sunt”) maintaining the rules of the craft (“arte regulari”) and not like others who write casually (“casu”), more by chance than by craft (“casu magis quam arte’) (2. 4). These finally elevate languages and ennoble poetic forms, opening the latch on the workshop of art (“artis ergasterilum reseremus”). Now the Dialogos of Solomos. That Solomos shared the idea that one must first submit to his national language in order to dominate it later is made clear in the Dialogos, where the words Bacon applied to the philosopher and nature—“naturae non imperatur nisi parendo”—are applied to the writer and language: “first submit to the language of the people, and then if you are able, master it.” Language can be likened, one might say, to a horse or a ship; it carries you, but you hold the reins or the rudder. Here are the Dantean rules of Solomos: “. . . the writer sometimes follows the people in his phrasing, and sometimes not; the form of the words employed by the people is not changed by the writer; to be ennobled each word needs but the skill of the writer.” It is also made clear in the letter, written in Italian, which Solomos sent to G. Tertsetis from Zante on June 1,

1833; here Solomos speaks of using the language of the demotic songs as a “starting point” only, not of stopping there: “Whoever makes use of the Klephtic language ought to use it in its essence, not merely formally—do you understand what I’m

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saying?” (“Chi si usa della lingua clefta lo facesse virtualmente, non formalmente, m’intendi?”) “And as for poetry .. . it is certainly good to tread in those tracks, but not to stop there: one must raise oneself up perpendicularly” (“E quanto al poetare .. . ὃ bene si, piantarsi su quelle orme, ma non ὲ bene fermarvisi: conviene alzarsi perpendicolarmente”). The poetry of the Klephts, an unaffected manifestation (“ingenua manifestazione”) of a certain vision or way of life, “does not have the same meaning when we speak it: the nation seeks from us the treasure of our individual intelligence clad in a national dress.” (“Non ha I’istesso interesse in bocca nostra: la nazione vuole da noi il tesoro della nostra intelligenza individuale vestito nazionalmente.”) The national dress is, of course, the national language. I mention the letter of Solomos to G. Tertsetis here because it is, after the Dialogos, the second most important text concerning language that we possess by Solomos. Written about ten years later, it refers at one point, if I am not mistaken, to the then unpublished Dialogos, which the friends of Solomos would have known. (Among these is the recipient of the letter, who saved the important Dialogos itself for us.) The point I have

in mind

is the following.

In his Dialogos,

Solomos,

taking advantage of the controversy about the written language and the use of Latin in France, Germany,

and Italy,

emphasizes that “the most learned men of those nations wanted to write a language which had at one time lived on the lips of men [that is to say, Latin], but our own learned men want us to write a language that is neither spoken now, nor has ever been spoken in any other period, nor shall ever be spoken in the future.” He was here speaking of the “katharevousa,’ which, in keeping with the Dantean terminology that we saw earlier, might better have been called “Seurepevovoa”—“secundaria locutio.” It is to this katharevousa— whose power of being a serious obstacle to the progressive formation of a written language (i.e., the written expression of the oral language) he had underestimated when young— that Solomos refers in his letter to Tertsetis; and he accuses

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himself of lacking discernment: “With how little discernment did I set myself to ridicule this language of Babel before our own had made any progress.” (“Della poca prudenza con cui mi posi a deridere quella lingua Babelica, prima che questa nostra facesse progressi.”) Progress in the written language in Greece since those days has been retarded dangerously, and only with indefatigable discipline in our writing can we now perhaps not replace, but at least somehow reduce, the time lost. “But my soul aches,” Solomos declares again and again—four times—in the handwritten fragments of his Dialogos as he sees that there are people living in his own age “who try to deprive” the fighters of 1821 “of their language.” Solomos’ pain is always with us: “my soul aches.” In the Dialogos we also encounter the Dantean concepts concerning the common language and the dialects, along with the systematic search for the panther of the common language (“pantheram quam sequimur”), the language in which we Greeks “understand one another” whether we come “from Mani,” or “from Gastouni ... Mt. Olympos ... Chios... Philippoupolis . . . Missolonghi . . . Constantinople.” And just as we have our customs and manners (in the words of Dante, “simplicissima signa et morum et habituum”), to serve

as “weights and measures” for our actions as Greeks (what Dante, speaking of the Italians, calls “quibus latine actiones ponderantur et mensurantur”), so we possess a Greek language in which we “understand one another” as Greeks. Both we find not in any one city of Greece (or of Italy), but in all cities in common (‘“Haec nullius civitatis Italiae propria sunt,” concludes Dante, “et in omnibus communia sunt”) (1. 16). These and other parallels that can be drawn between the Dialogos and the De Vulgari Eloquentia do not reveal a shallow influence or imitation. The influence of Dante on the works of Solomos penetrates so deeply that it is not necessary for us to look for external evidence. It is a self-evident truth. With these remarks we but continue our original comparison between the fates of the two ancient languages, Latin and

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Greek, in Dante’s Italy and Solomos’ Greece. And on the basis of the two related texts we shall attempt a survey—mainly of Solomos’ Dialogos and of Greece’s controversial language problem. It is in countries such as Greece, with long-established precedents, that the most insignificant question requires an investigation often covering unlimited periods of time. Greece is a country with a heritage that stretches very far back in history. Perhaps that is the counterpoise for having become a small country. But in any case we would have to spread out our maps of the last two thousand years in order to comprehend completely the significance that the Dialogos of Solomos holds for us, a significance related to Dante’s message in his De Vulgari Eloquentia.

Three times in the past two thousand years, with various lesser movements in between, the learned tradition (that is, the tradition that maintains that the language we write must not be the written expression of the spoken language, but some other language) has attempted to dominate the written word, promising people that the observing of its canon would mark the beginning of the creation of great works. In these two thousand years it seems there has not been enough time for people to realize that the promise was a lie or that the canon was not valid. Not a single great work has been created, nor has “the glory of our ancestors” been resurrected, with the dual case and the optative mood. We have wasted untold energy in order to distort our nature and to smother our soul and our speech with the makeup of rhetoric. Since the period of antiquity the learned tradition has never allowed the written language to develop unhampered, to grow naturally; and every time the natural language began to emerge from obscurity, dressed in all the colors of life, the learned tradition

pushed it back or hid it away in its permanently neglected corner. For two thousand years we have watched the story of beautiful Cinderella and her stepmother being played with the Greek language. I am not among those who suffer the misfortune of observing everything with “objective” eyes. God has protected me from being condemned to such a sentence.

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But I do not want to let emotion carry me away and to become angry. I believe that only God’s anger is just; man’s is not. Man’s voice is justified only when it has a human warmth and when “it seeketh not its own.” The voices of Solomos and Dante have proved to be such voices. The first time that the learned tradition unsheathed itself was with the Atticism of the first century B.c., which was inaugurated in Rome through the initiative of Dionysius of Halicarnassus (“von dem bornierten [narrowminded] Rhetor Dionysios von Halikarnass,” as Krumbacher calls him),* whose influence was sustained through the first four centuries of the Christian era and beyond. Subsequently, from Α.Ρ. 330 on, when Constantinople became the capital of the Roman Empire and Christianity the state religion, the Church—which throughout the initial period of the martyrs and apologists had used the simple language (one could even say that the New Testament is the most ancient text in the modern language)—was forced to accept the learned Greek idiom, and during the fourth century Α.Ρ., the Fathers of the Church also “atticized” their language. Basil the Great, in writing to Libanius concerning the sacred texts, says that they have “vodv μὲν ἀληθῆ, λέξιν δὲ aay” (“a true mind but an uneducated idiom”; Migne 32. 1084). In the Western Church there was no need for a linguistic change within the same language. There the Church had passed directly from Greek—which it used up to the middle of the third century a.p—to an entirely different language. From then on Latin was the spoken medium. Atticism, on the other hand, had immeasurably obstructive consequences, not for the spoken aspect of the living language—no one can stop life—but for the written aspect: it prevented the written development of the living speech of the period, that which has been called κοινὴ and which we see written on the papyri and in the Gospels. Atticism crippled the written workmanship or craft of this language. The second time the learned tradition asserted itself was 1 Das Problem 20.

der neugriechischen Schriftsprache, Munich,

1902, p.

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during what has been called the “humanistic renaissance” of the Komnenoi and Paleologoi, from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries. This simultaneously checked two trends: (a) the attempt made by a few from the sixth to the tenth century to write—or at least to approach when writing—the common spoken language, which was no longer ‘the Hellenistic or Alexandrian κοινή, but the language of the medieval period, that which was spoken in the Byzantine Empire (among those who made the attempt were Malalas in the sixth century, Leontios in the seventh century, Theophanes in the eighth century, and Constantine Porphyrogennitos in the tenth century); and (b) the similar attempt made by a few during the humanistic renaissance, e.g., the twelfth-century poems of Prodromos, the Acritan epics and the thirteenth-century Χρονικὸν τοῦ Μορέως (Chronicle of Morea). As we learn from the Vita

Nuova, Dante himself was aware

of the fact that in Byzantium, “in Grecia,” people were continuing the practice of writing not the common or simple but the learned language (“non volgari ma litterati poeti”), which was just the opposite of the situation in Provence (“lingua d’ Oco”) and in Italy (“lingua di S?”), where for nearly one hundred and fifty years—that is, from about 1150—love poetry had been written in the simple language (“dicitori d’Amore in lingua volgare,” xxv). Parallel with these two movements of the learned tradition are three attempts to write in the spoken language: the New Testament, the Byzantine prose writings of the sixth to the tenth or eleventh centuries, and the many simply written texts that begin to appear after the twelfth century. Three times Cinderella had to bow her head and retreat to her corner, with neither of the traditions finally prevailing. Between those two periodical movements—the one involving the written expression of our voice and the other involving the silencing of it—our spiritual life or our spiritual death have every so often been thrown into the balance: a strange fate.

The third time that the learned tradition showed itself was in the nineteenth century, at the very moment when we were beginning to form our common written language. This was no

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longer either the κοινὴ or the medieval language, but modern Greek, which we conventionally mark off from the medieval language with the fall of Constantinople in 1453, but which had already been almost fully formed in the poems of Prodromos and the Chronicle of Morea in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The grammar of this language has remained that which was spoken by the people from at least the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, possibly from much earlier, with only a few changes. I said above “the moment when we were beginning to form our written language,” but I said so bearing in mind its brilliant manifestations in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, especially in Crete, and again in the Ionian Islands in the early nineteenth century. This was the critical time of Solomos. Alongside the living speech, shaped during the centuries by following its natural development, was the phenomenon of the written language, which continued to use the pre-Christian grammar, obstinately clung to the rules of Atticism, and had become, we might say, even more archaic

in the late centuries, for instance during the humanistic renaissance of the Komnenoi and Paleologoi that I mentioned earlier. Anna Komnena (eleventh century), Psellos (also eleventh century), and Michael Akominatos (twelfth century), together with countless others, were to be used as linguistic models by most of the learned men of the period of enslavement under the Turks. When Adamantios Koraes (1748-1833) saw this situation, he understood the obvious defectiveness of Atticism, and he

was the first to realize the importance that the study of the modern Greek language could assume. But for Koraes this importance was philological or linguistic; as well as helping the philologist to understand or annotate the ancient language, the study of modern Greek could be used for “correcting” the common language. One might say that the philological and linguistic glory of Koraes was the parallel he drew between the ancient and the modern languages. In working out this parallel he used the example of Eustathios of Thessaloniki (twelfth century), though we do not know whether Eustathios

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regarded this parallel as truly useful or whether he drew it out of curiosity because, as Koraes says, “he did it rarely, and he

received little help from it in elucidating the Poet [meaning Homer], and almost none in correcting the common language, whose barbarism increased more and more.” Koraes goes on to say: “By correcting the language I mean not only transforming various barbarisms in diction and syntax, but also preserving many other words which those who have not studied the language carefully are trying to ban as barbarisms.”” The limited credit that Koraes earns from having defamed Atticism or “the fallacy of the Hellenizers” during his time must be offset by his complete inability to understand what was hidden behind the various attempts by people, in both the East and the West, to put their natural voice down

on

paper, justifiably setting aside the two silenced classical languages, whether in poetry or prose. Koraes disdained or neglected the importance of the various models that were the basis of Dante’s linguistic effort, as well as the comparable effort by Solomos. With reference to the West, he mentions

“the barbarous writings published there during the tenth century and later, in both prose and verse.” And with reference to the East he writes: “. . . Various barbarous writings saw the light; they are worthy of being buried in the earth forever.” One of his sentences about the Erotokritos, in another letter to his friend A. Vassiliou (Feb. 2, 1805), will remain a classic, condemning this wise man forever: “I confess that it is not a seemly occupation for a person to read the Erotokritos and other such freakish offspring of poor tormented Greece.” This masterpiece of modern Greek expression, which embodies the spiritual rhythm of the whole world of seventeenthcentury Crete in its fifteen-syllable verse, was called “freakish” by Koraes. He often mouthed the disreputable epithet “vulgar,” or “vulgaris,” of the learned

tradition, when

talking

about the common language or its products, and in an undated Letter

to A. Vassiliou—Prologue

1804, 2 vols. (Ἡλιοδώρου Αἰθιοπικά).

to Heliodorus’

Aethiopica, Paris,

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letter to D. Proios, he laughingly called Vincenzos Kornaros, that great poetic force who wrote the Erotokritos, “the Homer of crude literature up to the present time.” In view of this attitude by a Greek whose good faith cannot be questioned, one does not know what to say about the strangeness of human nature and about the ill fate of Greece when one considers Fauriel’s courageous introduction to the

“Klephtic printed songs,” which was written at that same time and which Solomos refers to in the Dialogos.> In this introduction (p. 124) Fauriel praises our national language when, in giving advice to Greek writers, he prophesies that “modern Greek will soon be a language which, without resembling ancient Greek more than it now resembles it, will have no reason to envy it.” We have many such examples of appreciation by Koraes’ contemporaries, both Greek and foreign. It is not the fault of the times but of the man: Koraes was not a thinker. He tried submissively to transfer Western enlightenment to Greece during his century by adapting it to local conditions or— worse still—by adapting local conditions to Western enlightenment, with the same

submissiveness

of those who tried to

transfer the philosophical and politico-economic system of Marx and Engels to Greece in the twentieth century. The analogy brings into conjunction two foreign movements responsible for a fundamental disturbance—one might say psychosis—in Greece, because they are both movements irreconcilable with Greek life. But this is not the occasion to make generalizations. The only thing of interest to us here is Koraes’ particular failing. A pupil of Voltaire and an admirer of Gibbon, Koraes had no respect for Byzantium, nor did he understand in depth the spiritual values of the Orthodox Church and of Byzantine civilization. His prejudice against monasticism is well known; he never lost an opportunity to express his anger against it or to slander monks.* The spiritual culture that was preserved 80, Fauriel, Chants populaires de la Gréce moderne, Vol. 1, Paris, 1824; Vol. 11, Paris, 1825.

4 After reading in the French newspaper Moniteur

(Feb. 25, 1803)

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in the enslaved nation and on which the nation must depend in order to progress, Koraes did not see, nor did he suspect its existence. Everything lay there, submerged “in the miserable centuries of barbarism,” asleep “in the deep slumber of ignorance.” He expected the rebirth of the nation to come from the classics, and he mobilized all his wisdom

and his

tireless industry for the editing of ancient writers, so that the barbarized Greeks might hold once again the golden thread of the classical, hellenistic, and Roman periods that was severed

for over a thousand years by an impenetrable darkness: Byzantium. Koraes had in mind either the fate “of the common language, whose barbarism increased more and more,” or “the fourth, fifth, and following centuries, during which the vulgarity of the Greek race grew.” This golden thread, which various renaissance movements in Greek letters upheld or continued

during the thousand

dark years, had been redis-

covered in the West by the Renaissance, and this was what they, the Greeks, had to get hold of again in the East, even belatedly, in order to achieve their own eventual renaissance and become naturalized as an “enlightened nation” of Europe. Koraes systematized Western enlightenment (with its classical ideals) for his fellow countrymen, and became its nucleus about the twenty-four dialogues of Plato that D. E. Clarke “brought back” (a rapportés) from Patmos, Koraes noted: “... And yet these two sources of learning [Patmos and Athos] have denuded all of Greece of its precious manuscripts and have betrayed to a foreign nation, maybe for a little silver, our ancestral inheritance” (Ἰσοκράτους Λόγοι καὶ Ἐπιστολαί [Speeches and Letters of Isocrates|, Athens, 1807). Actually, in r80r D. E. Clarke seized Plato’s Codex by force from the hands of the monks, with the help of mercenaries and with the acquiescence of the Turks (see I. Sakellion, Πατμιακὴ Βιβλιοθήκη [Patmian Library], 1890, p.1, fn. 5; the Codex is now called Clarcianus 39 and is held in Oxford). 5. Kougeas makes the following observation on this subject: “Some admirers of this precious monument, instead of expressing their gratitude towards the monks of Patmos for having preserved it intact during whole centuries, paradoxically spoke about them with scorn and contempt. Equally unjust was Koraes’ fury against the monks of Patmos”

(Ὁ Καισαρείας ᾿Αρέθας καὶ τὸ ἔργον αὐτοῦ

[άγείλας of Caesarea and His Work}, 1913, p. 99, fn. 4).

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for them. The whole learned tradition found a patriarch in his person—whether or not he wanted it—and cried out in one voice the awkward words: Habemus papam, “We have a Pope!” We must not fool ourselves on this point. If the learned tradition is a “hodgepodge” like the “Σύροι, Γραικοί, “Appévot, Mndor” of Cavafy’s Mesopotamian Osroene, so too is Koraes—that is to say, he belongs to the hodgepodge of the learned tradition. This hodgepodge could take on various shades, from Koraes’ middle way to the archaizing mandarins of Atticism—Kommetas,

Doukas,

enthusiasm

of some

philhellenic American

Kodrikas—or

strange

even

people

to the

like the

Dr. A. Rose, who assured us that “the Greek of

today is essentially old Attic Greek,” in a lecture before the German Medical Society of New York on February 3, 1896.° But all these shades, which conflict or clash with each other to no end, belong to the learned tradition, and all evade that

single proper rule which decrees that the written language must be the written expression of the spoken or mother tongue. From that point of view, it seems almost a minor detail today that Koraes was against the “extreme purists” or even the “half-hellenizing or the half-barbarizing” (Μιξελληνίζοντας ἢ Μιξοβαρβάρους). Though he categorically denounced the “bad and perverse habit, still prevailing, of scorning the modern language,” did he ever present a linguistically firmer alternative or did he work with the “common language” as a base, as he taught in contradiction to his own practice? And yet this same man realized, and set down in writing, that “we have a great need to write in the language we understand”; and he also realized, and set down in writing, that in the West “they truly started freeing themselves from barbarism when their few learned men first began writing in their common language.” A mystery. We could say about Koraes what

he says about the modern Greek public, or the “vulgar ones,” using Aristophanes’ words about the Athenian public in the Knights (42): “a difficult and deaf old man,” meaning he 5 Achilles Rose, Christian Greece and Living Greek, New York, 1898, chaps it, ps 9.

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himself was a difficult old man, and deaf. There is no reason,

I think, to ignore any longer the fact that Koraes’ “correction of the common

dialect,” seen in perspective, is a belated off-

spring of Atticism, perhaps not immediately recognizable.® On the language question, as on the question of religion, Koraes preferred to advocate a “lukewarm” compromise (with

the pejorative meaning of Revelation 3:16), a compromise lame in theory and faltering in practice, without taking into consideration that these are the only areas where there is no room for compromise. In the end, for most people he muddied the waters both in language and religion with his contradictory views, or his retrogressions, in a maze

of encyclopedic

loquacity where the eager student searches in vain to find an exit. If every man’s undeniable linguistic theory is in his writing, then the theory of the famous emender of Strabo is to be found in the way he writes. In the well-known letter to Alexander Vassiliou which contains Koraes’ digressions on language (from which all the quotations so far have been 6 It is worth recalling that G. Mistriotis (1840-1916), while admitting that his generation still practiced, or had a feeling for, the common language, nevertheless maintained that the generation following his, “our children’—the “enlightened ones’—“ask for an explanation every time we introduce common words. Therefore the language of the Klephts and those fighting the Turks does not yet enchant the ears nor move the hearts of the new educated and civilized generation. The common language of today 1s not that which was created by the enslaved Greeks in their huts in order to express their natural needs, but the language that was shaped by the liberated nation through its best minds, under the national leadership of Koraes” (Ἔκθεσις τῶν πεπραγµένων

ὑπὸ

τῆς κεντρικῆς

ἐπιτροπῆς

ἐπὶ τῆς ἑκατονταετηρίδος

τοῦ

Σολωμοῦ

[Report of the Acts of the Central Committee on the Occasion of Solomos’ Centenary], Zante, 1903, p. 58). It is apparent from the very beginning that the learned class or the “educated and civilized generation” that became the self-ordained leaders of the country—some of these self-ordained even before setting foot in Greece—wanted to deprive the enslaved nation not only of its language (they shaped their own “common” language “under the national leadership of Koraes”) but also of its freedom (they constituted “the liberated nation”). As things have turned out, they did not prove to be so naive in their calculations.

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taken), after the short greeting, we encounter the following ominous beginning in the first sentence: Τέτιος 6 τῆς ἐν Γαλλίᾳ ᾿Αβρίγκης ᾿Ἐπίσκοπος . . . for: “Huet, Bishop of Avranches.” Here is the familiar ugly screech, the distorted form,

that Koraes

invokes

in reference

to those

who

fill

their writings with these pedantic purisms that “twist the tongue and shatter the ears of the listeners.” The one thing brings the other: as we have said, the lame theory brought on a faltering practice, namely Koraes’ own

writing, and also

that of the heirs to that sort of writing, just as the theory of Solomos is his writing, and at the same time the touchstone for the heirs to his writing. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. Solomos attacked Koraes in his Dialogos without distinguishing him from the character of the Pedant. He saw that

the faults of the learned tradition had lasted two years and that it is almost impossible for someone given himself unrepentantly to this tradition for a time to retract. The harm had already been done by

thousand who has period of then, and,

with the centuries, whole icebergs of works written in the secondary language (Dante’s secundaria locutio) had accumulated, so that no one could eradicate them with one stroke

of the pen or could bury them from one day to the next. That inheritance remained, with its good and its bad elements, its

dry wood and its sprouting shoots, indeed growing worse during Solomos’ time, with its many scribblers, collators, translators, and messengers or torch-bearers—a real typographical inflation—who at that time flew in from the ends of the world to “enlighten” our enslaved nation. The overwhelming majority of these true patriots (many gave their very lives for the struggle) denigrated the language of the nation they wanted to “enlighten” or never used it, and so left the country “wronged in its mastery of the language given it by nature,” according to Solomos. Koraes characteristically notes at one point (again in the same text): “And then, for what ignoramuses do we write? Of course not for the vulgar populace that does not even have cognizance of our presence in this world.” I think

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the feeling here was mutual: did Koraes in fact have any more “cognizance” of the presence of the “vulgar populace” in this world?

This was the great mistake of the learned tradition. Vulgar populace or not, the people who speak the same language are speaking a national language. And the written language is nothing else—as we have said many times—but the written expression of the living or spoken language, which is meant to serve more quickly and more efficiently certain needs that the spoken language cannot cover. With the living language as a basis, one can and must cultivate the written language, and no one can find fault with the content of that language, whether it be difficult or incomprehensible, as long as one follows in writing the form of that spoken language. This very form also constitutes the basic form of that language spoken by the populace, vulgar or not: the language of all of us. One is free with regard to the content of the language; one is not free with regard to its form. Freedom is in the spirit, not the letter. The letter of a language must be common. This facilitates the circulation of knowledge or culture, and raises the general level, according to the law of communicating vessels. The letter of one’s language must be the letter of all, of the vulgar populace and of those not belonging to the vulgar populace, and within that letter one can be original or achieve greatness with the content of one’s writing, and one can become as difficult as one wants without ceasing to belong to everyone, or at least without ceasing theoretically to be within reach of everyone. Whoever wants to understand is free to do so. The letter of the language has been followed. One is responsible for the form, not the content. The error, then, the failure of understanding, does not reside in the writer but in his audience, vulgar or not vulgar. Otherwise, if one writes in a language other than that of one’s nurse— Dante said nutricem imitans—one is responsible for any failure of understanding, whether this concerns form or content.

There was no need, then, for the “vulgar populace” to have “cognizance” of Koraes’ presence in this world. It was Koraes

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who should have had “cognizance” of the presence of the “vulgar populace.” From the form of his writing it seems he did not. To the question of the Pedant in the Dialogos, “Do you know Greek?” the Poet answers with the question, “Do you know the Greeks?” Illiterate Makriyiannis will say that “Man makes the lights (wisdom), the lights do not make man.”

Greek

for the Pedant

is ancient

Greek, “which

has

stopped being spoken,” according to Koraes. “The forms of Greek words,” which means ancient Greek words, belong on one side; on the other side belong “our own,” which it seems

are not Greek. Solomos puts things back in their proper place, making the distinction between Greek (ancient) and the Greeks (modern), between the ancient Greek language that has stopped “being spoken” and modern man who has not stopped speaking. This man needs to write the language he speaks. That is what he means by “Do you know the Greeks?” The Dialogos is full of references to the verb “enlighten,” as in “enlighten the country,” and to “lights’—the same “lights” that enraged Makriyiannis—and the references are all directed against the foolish attempt of the Pedant, that is to say, of the learned tradition, to educate the country at that time according to the models of Western enlightenment and its classical ideals: “We have seen the benefit you gave to the Greek Revolution with your lights.” Solomos categorically rejects Koraes’ compromise of “correcting of the language” and cries out: “the forms of words, when they are in common use, are not subject to change by any one under the pretext of correction.” Solomos accepts Koraes’ pronouncements regarding embellishing “as much as possible the language we were nursed on with our milk,” “beautifying the language” and “beautifying their speech,” but, as a true artificer of the language, Solomos separates these pronouncements from the unacceptable “correcting” of the common language; he naturally supports them in the Dialogos with the indispensable reservation that “the basis on which we must beautify our language must be today’s language.” We cannot know whether Solomos read the letter to A. Vassiliou. But one thing we can know is that the Dialogos closely

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follows Koraes’ terminology about language. As an all-time symbol and sample of artificially “correcting” a living language, Solomos takes the first verse of the Divine Comedy, “Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita,” and “latinizes” (his term) Dante’s Italian to, “In medio cammini nostrae vitae.” Of this offense, Solomos says: “Here is the verse corrected and the country enlightened!” We must elucidate one point with regard to the Dialogos. Because Koraes did not write “Hellinisti” (ancient Greek) or because he ridiculed those “purely Hellenizing” writers, it does not mean that he was not responsible, with his contradictory position, for the third and last assault of the learned tradition, and for the establishment of the secundaria of Dante, the

secondary written language of the nineteenth century, katharevousa. Nor does it mean that he is excused for not having written the language that Solomos and Makriyiannis wrote. I also consider Koraes’ metaphor for the national language purposeless and misleading—‘“the orphaned and unhappy daughter of another more perfect language.” Orphanhood and unhappiness belong to human beings, not to languages. Sometimes a human being may even bring on his own misery; languages can do nothing of the sort. The Greek language did not decline, did not become barbarized, did not have anything happen to it, but on the contrary was a unique and maybe unrepeatable phenomenon. “Besides, it is something unique in the world: this panorama of a language spoken and written for three thousand years, which, though passing through different phases from time to time, has nevertheless remained to this very day one and the same, precise and clear throughout all these centuries,” rightly says G. Hadzidakis in a short survey of the Greek language that introduces the modern Greek translation of Liddell and Scott’s Dictionary (Μέγα Λεξικὸν τῆς Ἑλληνικῆς Γλώσσης, Athens, 1910, 2 vols.). Moreover, today’s language is not a “daughter,” nor was the ancient one “another” language, as Koraes believed. The language is one, a mortally immortal language—that is the miracle—the modern coming out of the

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old, that which was spoken by people for thousands of years, from generation to generation, that which was constantly changed and shaped by being spoken without interruption, without ever dying, until in its present phase it became one with our mother language, itself a starting point for who knows what new creations or what future changes. The story of language, like the story of life, never ends, especially that

of an ancient language like ours. The story will follow its destiny as long as there are mouths to tell it and young children to hear it. What hindered the living language from becoming the written language of the country was viewed by Solomos as an impediment to “the ways in which knowledge flows,” that is, an impediment

to the country’s education;

and he

struggled generously to bring reason to those who contributed to the continuation or even perpetuity of this grave iniquity. He was afraid that the anomaly would become a chronic disease and that any hope of organically surpassing this linguistic anastomosis would be lessened and would eventually disappear, as long as the faulty system continued to exist. A transfer of the live word to written symbols is indispensable to every country with a certain civilization; the written language is used for the quick and effective communication between those speaking the same language who want to reach an understanding for a thousand individual, collective, political, educational, theoretical, or practical purposes. The center sends

messages to the periphery, the periphery to the center, and a good circulation keeps alive the whole organism of a society, both in the body proper and in its members. In the case of institutions like the administration, the army, education, and

the press, the written language in which these will express their spirit or reveal their intent is important, as well as in what written language the whole people will be forced to express its own sovereign will or its group reactions. In Greece at no time have we been able to find the only natural solution to the question of the written language, the solution of Solomos or Dante. I mean we have not been able to

SOLOMOS’

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do so as a whole, as a Greek society. Several years after the Dialogos—maybe in 1842—Solomos wrote to Tertsetis (in a letter that was never found in the Italian original, but only in a Greek translation) :“Twenty-one years ago today Greece broke her chains. This day of the Annunciation is a day for joy and for tears. Joy for the future, tears for past slavery. And what about today? Corruption is so general and has such deep roots that it is distracting. Only when the causes of corruption have been eliminated for good will we be able to have a moral renaissance. Then our future will be great, when everything will be based on morality, when justice will triumph, when letters will be cultivated not for vain show but for the good of the people who need education and a culture that isn’t pedantic” (“Panathinaia,” Vol. 18, 1909, p. 260). Wise and bitter thoughts when one thinks that from that time on things have remained static, at the crossroads of Solomos’ observation. Solomos tried his good nature best to bring the opposite section to reason. He recognized that everyone’s final aim was the good of the country. Though he speaks harshly in the Dialogos about the learned tradition, he declares that he has “a quick lip but not a bad heart,” and he begs forgiveness, addressing his opponent as “beloved brother.” To the Pedant he says explicitly: “Both you and I are fighting for the truth, but consider seriously whether by looking for truth in that way, you may not be deceived by embracing a phantom image of it. Come to your senses; think what harm is done by the language you write. .. . It is no shame for a man to recognize his mistake, in fact every honest man will praise you, and I will give you the kiss of peace.” He compares the learned tradition to the Turkish dynast of that time; he sees freedom “beginning to step on Turkish heads,” and the language “soon about to step on the heads of the pedants . without ever turning back should a pedant croak or a Turk bark; because for me the two are the same.” The insinuation against the learned tradition is deadly and unforgettable, as will be seen below. During the period of Solomos’ youthful opti-

SOLOMOS’

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mism—he wrote the Dialogos, as we have said, at about the age of 25—he thought the problem would be solved automatically with the end of slavery in Greece, and he threatened the opposite faction as follows: “I’m giving you the news that your reign over Greece has ended with the reign of the Turks. It has ended, and maybe you will curse the day of the Revolution.” We saw in Solomos’ letter to Tertsetis (June 1, 1833)— if my supposition is correct—that he soon realized his haste, and admitted the lack of prudence (poco prudenza) that the Dialogos showed on this point. The comparison with the Turk is not just a figure of speech in Solomos’ view. He who puts obstacles in “the ways by which knowledge flows” is truly a traitor to his country, since the progress of the country depends on the language. In Solomos’ eyes, one must be a Turk, or else a pedant, in order to impede, for example, the brilliant beginnings of the written language in Crete in the seventeenth century, beginnings that stopped with the enslavement of the island by the Turks in 1669 and that brought a wave of Cretan refugees to the Ionian Islands (among them the ancestors of the poet).’ For Solomos the learned tradition, by its social prestige, brought on the same impediment to the natural development of the nation’s voice. In that period, whoever aimed at any distinction in the - fields of art or science never wrote in the common language; and it would be appropriate to say about them what Dante says in De Vulgari Eloquentia about the Sardinians of his time, namely, that “they do not seem to have a common language of their own, and they imitate Latin like monkeys imitate men” (“Soli sine proprio vulgari esse videntur, grammaticam tamquam simie homines imitantes”). As a parallel to what was happening in Greece, Fauriel notes that “in Italy those who had any pretensions to the honors and respect 7 There was a Solomos in Chania in 1372. Domenico Centranico took on the name Salomone in Venice in 1027, and from there we can go as far back as the Barbolani, who migrated to the city of St. Mark from Salerno in 715 (see Romilly Jenkins, Dionystos Solomos, Cambridge, 1940, pp. 2-3)-

SOLOMOS’

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acquired through science and talent had to write in Latin. They seriously believed themselves to be the heirs of Virgil and Horace and disdained the poets who wrote in the common language.”® This craze reached the point in both East and West where some indigenous texts like the Chanson de Roland or the Erotokritos were translated into Latin or archaistic Greek. Even Solomos’ Hymn (1823), which became the national anthem after the expulsion of King Otho (1862), ran into the danger of being replaced by another “of a nobler and higher language.” It is characteristic, in relation to what we are saying, that a circle of learned men around Janus Laskaris induced Pope Leo X to open a Greek Gymnasium in Rome during the sixteenth century for the purpose of preserving Greek and having it taught in Italy by Greeks. This circle was afraid, no more and no less, that Greek would one day disappear completely from Greece. This means that they saw the Greek language as lost exactly where it was alive and in the process of being shaped—that is, among the enslaved Greeks —and they saw it as substantial there where it actually remained static and uninvolved in life. These are some of the things that can happen when one carries—as in Greece or Italy —the burden of two great languages and two great literatures. In any case, the identification of the Pedant with the Turk was not forgotten. Almost half a century after the first publication of Solomos’ Dialogos, George Hadzidakis (1848-1941) conceived the idea of questioning the authenticity of the text,° and ever since, the learned tradition has followed

this con-

trived fallacy (i.e., “Is the Dialogos authentic?”), even when Solomos’ handwritten excerpts of MS No. 12 were found in the Masonic Lodge of Zante. Hadzidakis was aiming at establishing two things: (1) that possibly the Dialogos was not authentic, and (2) that Solomos’ attack was not directed ® Dante et les origines de la langue et de la littérature italiennes, Paris, 1854, Vol. 1, p. 3. ὃ᾽Απάντησι»

εἰς τὰ τοῦ K. Κρουμβάχερ

Athens, 1905, p. 67ο.

(Answer to Κ. Krumbacher),

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against Koraes. To Solomos’ “If some Pedant croaks,” Hadzidakis comments: “But he meant then those recommending the use of the pure ancient language, not men like Koraes, Oikonomos, and others.”?°

Koraes laid the foundations, as we have said, for the study of the modern language and its texts (medieval and modern) not in order to study the national language itself, with its “beastly coarseness,” but rather in order to help the study of the ancient language, the “knowledge” of which he felt so necessary for hastening “the progress of the Greek renaissance” (as he writes to his friend A. Vassiliou). Hadzidakis, on the other hand, became the founder of modern Greek linguistics: that is to say, he not only brought the science of language to Greece (many could have done that), but he was the first to define the method and to trace the historic outline that has been followed ever since by all scientific research, Greek or foreign, in the national language (and in this his contribution was unique). Koraes was the first to teach the importance of the modern language, even if he did it in order to help the “knowledge” of the ancient. He tells us: “One of the ways to help the teaching of ancient Greek is to compare it to that common language on which we were nursed with our mother’s milk”—this naturally with all the philological or scientific consequences of such a comparison. Koraes’ glory is summed up in this remark, which seems so obvious today, but was not at all so in his time. Hadzidakis’ glory—no small one and exclusively his—was to start from Koraes’ parallel and, with the then newly created science of linguistics, to prove beyond a doubt the descent of the medieval and modern language from the older koine (let us leave aside the disagreements of the linguists about the exact definition of the koine) and to establish this fertile lesson as a scientific principle. He was the first to undertake the scientific investigation of the modern language, and with the help of the laws of his science, was in a better position than 10 Καὶ πάλιν περὶ τοῦ TAwoorxod

Question), Athens, 1907, p. 100.

Znrnuaros

(Again on the Language

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Koraes to teach (and to put into practice) the first and greatest linguistic commandment upon which the expressive flowering of any language depends: namely, that a written language means the written expression of the oral or mother language. Like Koraes, Hadzidakis took the wrong course. From the moment when he hesitated and chose to advocate the theoretically shipwrecked cause of the learned tradition in the question of the written language, Hadzidakis wastefully squandered his scientific capacity in sparrings unworthy of the father of modern Greek linguistics; and his deviation from the golden mean of moderation—as was also true of his opponents (e.g., J. Psycharis)—clouded his mind (and his heart) to the point where he called one of Solomos’ most famous works “that insipid Dialogos.”* The Dialogos says: “There are two flames, master, one in the mind, the other in the heart, that light up in some men, who use different means

at different times to enjoy the same results.” Mind and heart keep the scales in balance; they must not be disturbed by turbulence; otherwise the weighing comes out faulty. Hadzidakis, however, tried to sully a higher spirit like that of Solomos with the wily insinuation that since Solomos himself had not fought or taken any physical risks in the War of Independence, as D. Ypsilantis or A. Mavrocordatos “and others like them had—all of them using with Koraes the written language’ {in other words, those who like Koraes did not write the common language |—Solomos had no right to put in the Dialogos “those improperly said words” about the Pedant and those like him, namely that “our people are shedding their blood beneath the Cross in order to make us free, and he and those like him are fighting as a reward to deprive them of their language.” Solomos, according to Hadzidakis, “living in full peace and security, accused men who were fighting and endangering themselves for the nation of trying to eliminate the language of the nation.” Poor virtue, you are led astray hiding “in mountains and in dens and caves of the 11 ᾿᾽Απάντησι» εἰς τὰ τοῦ K. KpouuBdxep (Answer to K. Krumbacher), loc.ctt.

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earth.” And Hadzidakis concludes: “As I read through that insipid Dialogos years ago and thought about the unfairness done to men who didn’t deserve it, J remember well

[my italics] that I smiled at the weakness and slippery character of human nature” (idid., p. 679). Truly, human nature has weaknesses and its slippery side. Judging Solomos’ Dialogos insipid, Hadzidakis was himself judged. To what advantage? It is with real distress that one writes today about great masters who, with their talent, with their forcefulness, and with their labor, all sought the good of the country, where the influence of an evil demon, it would seem, never let the flock rightly enjoy all the good things that these shepherds intended for it. There is no possibility that some day an impartial generation will emerge. And I do not mean only in Greece. Nor does what we call “impartial history” exist. History is what we are. We shall always be an “adulterous and sinful generation” (Mark 8:38), and out of our despair and old age, there will always emerge the lineaments of our hope and youth, a Solomos or a Dante. We must not be amazed that a philologist like Koraes or a linguist like Hadzidakis taught different things about language than those taught by Dante or Solomos. Nothing prevented them from teaching the same things; the appraisal was not for them a question of scientific integrity or the duty to truth; it just so happened. We know of philologists and linguists who taught the same lesson as Dante and Solomos without violating the laws of their respective sciences, or without betraying the truth. The problem lies elsewhere. For the philologist or the scientist, language is a theory, an external matter, a phenomenon, and finally an object for study. But for the poet—as for the people, whose relation to the language is the bond of need—language is action. Not an external matter, not an object, but a subject for liberation: something that does not hold you by the brain or by your reflective capacity, but by the guts, one might say. As the poet goes his great or small way, he feels the resistance of the language. Language is the poet’s element; in it he soars high

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dove, he never understand per“a poet of great Greek language from which he viewed and knew the subject. One also understands his sur-

or falls headlong, and, contrary to Kant’s imagines he could fly better in a vacuum. I fectly Hadzidakis’ description of Solomos as importance, but totally inexperienced in the and its history,” considering the perspective

prise that “Koraes, Doukas, Vamvas, Koumas, Gennadios, Gazis, Oikonomos, and so many other fathers of the nation”

(ibid., p. 816) could ever be considered harmful to the progress of the language, as they are by implication when Solomos exclaims in the Dialogos: “O Pedants! Are these the lessons you teach the people, wanting to enlighten them? You could enlighten them just as well by throwing a handful of dust in their eyes!” His surprise is natural. Without being the editor of Koraes’ Ἑλληνικὴ Βιβλιοθήκη (Greek Library), and in comparison with Hadzidakis’ linguistic competence, Solomos was “totally inexperienced,” one might say, in the science of linguistics or in historical method; but in spite of this Solomos remained a fountain of wisdom in the matter of language. Perhaps he did not lay a foundation stone for the knowledge of Greek, as Koraes did, nor did he quarry medieval and modern Greek with the scientific sledgehammer of Hadzidakis —this was not his job—but he did something different, something tied more closely to the collective or individual soul of the enslaved nation that was being resurrected: he became the legislator of the written language. Solomos will remain once and for all, “now and in the future,” for the collective and the

individual soul, “both personal and public,” the one who settled the debt that weighed on our language from the distant time of Atticism. He rid us of this crushing burden (“seisachthia”)—“liberating us from the weight,” as Aristotle goes on to say of Solon in The Constitution of Athens (νι, 1)—when in the humiliation and despair of slavery, certain learned Greeks dreamed that they would capture in the written word the golden bird that had flown from the spoken word, without first calculating that the words of a language are not

“whited sepulchers,” but the cradles of life.

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Solomos did not study or write the history of the Greek language, but with his writing he acquired a place in its history. And along with the people who unceasingly give shape to the language, only those who acquire by their writing a place in the history of their language can finally be said to exist for it. Before writers such as Dante and Solomos, there

was less spiritual room in the language. With their writing and the place it earned for them in the history of the language, they bequeathed to others a voice more alive and sharp. The language that they left behind occupied a broader area on the maps of the spirit or the psyche. How many can be said to have gained such annexations for their language? More than one hundred years after the Dialogos of Solomos was first published (1859), we find ourselves still burdened by the problem of the written language, a problem still far from solved. To be sure, we have progressed slightly, especially if we take into consideration that—since the years of Atticism— the first attempt as a nation to follow (or not to follow) the path of the Dialogos in the matter of the written language has been made in our own times. During the past century the hopes for a solution of the problem in keeping with the ideas of Solomos have been based less on substance than on statistics. This distinction does not mean that the hopes do not exist, and it does not in the least mean that these hopes are vain. So much for the student who follows the linguistic position of the Dialogos and the De Vulgari Eloquentia. A follower of the learned tradition need only substitute the word “fear” for

the word “hope.” His position would be the opposite. Emmanuel Stais, of Kythera, one of the first who took it upon himself to “remove the critical mind of Greece from its swaddling clothes” (in the words of Polylas) noted with farreaching vision in his pamphlet “Κριτική. Ὁ Δάμπρος τοῦ Σολωμοῦ” (The Lambros of Solomos: a Critique): “... and at last J saw the nation being directed unswervingly toward 12 Published in Athens six full years (1853) before the Dialogos and the Prolegomena of Polylas.

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that road .. . which the word of its Prophet had revealed since the day its freedom dawned.” Further on, with even greater critical acumen, he wrote: “It was enough for them to listen to Solomos’ general concept about the language, a concept that he not only expounded but also put into practice in his writing as no one else had been able to do.” And still further on, this

time from another angle and with a positive viewpoint unusual for his times: “People with opposing views (and many with opposing interests) found themselves at the same time at the head of the school, of the community, and of the whole

national movement, and they gave it a different direction than the one he wanted to give it.” Emmanuel Stais had digested the broader teaching of Solomos: “The nation must learn to consider as national that which is true.” He was able to add, over and above the linguistic problem, words of a kind that had not been heard in the world since the time of the apostle Paul: “... I am convinced that nationalism must yield to Christianity, that is, to love for humanity, and enlightened by this feeling, I consider without any passion both the superiority of the Greek to the foreigner and the superiority of the foreigner to the Greek.” This is what Emmanuel Stais had to offer in publishing the first notable critical analysis of Solomos’ Lambros. Solomos established the form of the written language once and for all, both for poetry and for prose. His language is the golden rule. With his Dialogos we have the first written example, or the prototype, for Greek prose writing, completed and perfected in an unrivalled way a little later (1826-1829) with the enigmatic Ῥυναίκα τῆς Ζάκυθος (The Woman of Zakythos). The excerpt from Romeo and Juliet (v, i, 42-48) included in his Dialogos at the point where, in speaking of those who “write in that obscure way,” he says that “they should be compared to those people who, in order to make a living, sell poison,” and recalls how “Shakespeare so excellently

describes the workshop of one of them’”—this excerpt be-

comes, in Solomos’ hands a kind of ovum mundi, the egg of the universe, out of which have come the best specimens

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(the few that we have) of our modern literature. This workshop and Shakespeare’s words “remind” Solomos of “the manner in which the books of the learned pedants were written.” Let me first cite Shakespeare’s text: And in his needy shop a tortoise hung,

An alligator stuff’d, and other skins Of ill-shap’d fishes; and about his shelves A beggarly account of empty boxes, Green earthen pots, bladders, and musty seeds, Remnants of packthread, and old cakes of roses Were thinly scatter’d, to make up a show. And now Solomos’ translation:

Ἐκρέμονταν ἀπὸ τὸ πατερὸ τοῦ φτωχότατου ἐργαστηριοῦ µία ξεροχελώνα, ἕνας κροκόδειλος ἀχερωμένος καὶ ἄλλα δερµάτια ἄσχημων ψαριῶν: ἦτον τριγύρου «ς

2

4

>

\

or

x

an

/

3

πολλὰ συρτάρια ἀδειανὰ μὲ ἐπιγραφές, ἀγγειὰ ἀπὸ χοντρόπηλο πράσινο, ἦτον φοῦσκες, ἦτον βρωμµόχορτα Ν

4

3

‘\

XN

>

ve

>

ΔΝ

3

x

παλιωµένα, κακομοιριασµένα δεµάτια βοῦρλα, παλιὰ κομμάτια ἀπὸ διαφόρων λογιῶν ἰατρικά, ἀριὰ σπαρµένα ἐδῶ κι ἐκεῖ γιὰ νὰ προσκαλέσουν τὸν ἀγοραστή.”

This passage is, in miniature, the arsenal that supplied the weapons for everyone who has fought—each according to his ability—to preserve intact his own voice, from Sikelianos to Seferis. The two virtues mentioned in the Dialogos, virtues which Solomos never forgot—‘“is there anything else in my mind but freedom and language?”—these two virtues found their superlative expression in his work: the one in his early Hymn (1823), the other in his early Dialogos (1824). At that time the great dark cloud of isolation had not yet covered the poet of Ἐλεύθεροι Πολιορκημένοι (The Free Besieged), as hap-

pened later, when, as Polylas puts it: “. . . Solomos was no

longer showing his writings to anyone.” For as long as a Greek language exists, the Dialogos, together with the Ὕμνος

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εἰς τὴν Ἐλευθερίαν (Hymn to Liberty), will occupy unshakably the deep center of nationhood: “il centro profondo della nazionalita.” With his writing Solomos demonstrated that the common language (naturalis) can compete with the artificial one (artificialis), just as Dante had proved that the common language of his time could compete with Latin. Solomos understood that the written language must be a written formulation of the spoken one, and that in following this principle, the writer is free to use—as Polylas appropriately puts it—both “the royal treasury of the ancient language and the poor purse of the demotiki.” Solomos leaned on the sound foundation of the living language, today’s common language, the blessed spoken word that offers the unimaginable intellectual advantage of having behind it the three-thousand-year-old richness of one of the basic languages of the world. To the unambiguous lesson of Solomos—and of Dante—concerning the written language, we must outspokenly answer with a simple “Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than those cometh

of evil” (Matthew 5:37). Kifissia,

Summer 1969

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“Nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me” said the Apostle Paul in his “large letter” to the “foolish” Galatians, written in his own Παπά." For the Christian faithful and initiated (Solomos was one of them), these words affirm the reality of transition from our everyday self, in the narrow sense of the word (J), to our true Self (Christ). They stand for the World of the Law

and the World of Faith; the individual in his

physical being and in his metaphysical being; the “Jerusalem which now is” and the “Jerusalem which is above.”® For the pre-Christian faithful in the ancient Greek world, the corresponding words are “idia φρόνησις (1), and “Evvds λόγος” (Self), as we find them in Heraclitus; indeed, Heraclitus’ Fragment 50 is amazingly close to Paul’s meaning: “οὐκ ἐμοῦ, ἀλλὰ τοῦ λόγου axovoavras.”* It is the same true Self to which another of the initiated, Socrates, bowed in humility,

preaching far and wide the Delphic “know thyself.” In the modern Western world, last among many others, an inspired boy, unquestionably endowed with the gift of foresight— Arthur Rimbaud—hinted at a similar state of being; in a letter dated May 15th, 1871, rightly entitled “Lettre du Voyant, Ὡς stressed: Car JE est un autre,” Anyone progressing along the road of faith, which is also the road of great art and the road of truth (beyond a certain point, there is a common center toward which all roads converge), knows that “it is not ye that speak, but the Spirit of your Father which speaketh in you.”* There comes an end to empty boasting and a loss of physical identity. “A poet has no 1 Galatians 2:20; 6111; 3:1. 2 Thid., 4:25. 2 «6 3 Fragment 2: “personal thought,” “common /ogos.” 4 Fragment 50: “listened not to myself, but to logos.” 5 Matt. 10:20.

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identity . . . no nature,” wrote John Keats in a letter dated October 27th, 1818. Once a person reaches this point, he partakes of the spirit. Solomos knew that his for the grace of having regardless of whether he the slow process of “time

voice belonged to another. In return been chosen, he celebrated the gift, finally became worthy of it through and toil”:®

And glory and wealth to you, Good Spirit, that it pleased you to give me a voice.’

The spirit gave him a voice with a perfectly free will, because it thus pleased it. It is the divine prerogative to freely create the world ex nthilo, in the Christian tradition of Solomos; it is

the cosmic play of the divinity, the /#a, in the Hindu tradition. The verb “pleased” expresses the total freedom of God and his pleasure in his works. Solomos used that verb and no other. He had his own deep motive in doing so. As opposed to lesser voices that usually fall short of the mark, he had to utter the truth directly; he spoke literally. What voice would be ours today, if he had not spoken then? Solomos is our voice.

The gift he received he had to pass on to others in turn, according to the command: “Freely ye have received, freely give.”*> And now let us stand before his great invocation, spoken in that ancestral voice that can never be attained again, not in a thousand years, because it was a God-given Greek voice: Mother, magnificent in suffering and in glory, even if your children always live—with thought, with dream— embraced by your secret mystery, what joy have these eyes, 8 Solomos, “Notes to On the Death of Lord Byron.” 7 Solomos, “To the King of Greece.” 8 Matt. 10:8.

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my eyes, to see you in the desolate wood which—look—has suddenly scattered around your feet leaves of Easter, Palm Sunday leaves. Calm as you are, like the sky with all its beauty half hidden, half disclosed, I have not seen, not known,

your divine step.

But, Goddess, am I not to hear your voice

and to bestow it at once on the world of Greece? Her dark rock is full of glory, and her dry grass.° What joy, indeed, falls upon mortal eyes when they behold a transcendental vision containing the promise of a double Resurrection; resurrection of the world (springtime) ο altra cosa for the Greeks, and resurrection of the spirit (Eastertide). Solomos may not have heard or seen the divine footstep within the forest, but at least he sought to hear the voice of the Goddess in order to bestow it forthwith as a gift upon the Greek world. Need we add that he did hear the voice, and

handed it as a gift to us in the form of that very invocation, particularly that final line with its fifteen syllables that evoke not only the radiant land, but the soul of that small place which is the world of the Greeks: “Her dark rock is full of glory, and her dry grass.” A “secret mystery” governs the life of man. Solomos refers to it in The Cretan, saying that it “hems in nature”; the passage echoes the teaching of Paul about “the earnest expectation of the creature for the manifestation of the sons of God.”*? Within that mystery, there are always two roads leading out of the desolate wood of Solomos’ invocation: thought and dream; we find them once more coupled together when the Cretan recalls the moon-dressed girl, and he cannot tell whether it was his waking thought that “created her” or a dream he had when he was still at his mother’s breast. With thought and with dream, with these two fundamental resources, man must ® Translated by Philip Sherrard. 10 Romans 8:19.

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go forth within the secret mystery of life until the day he is set free.

The voice that Solomos bestowed as a gift upon the Greek world was that world’s own voice, miraculously preserved, together with its faith, through the “menace” and the “slavery” of centuries, filtered through the treasure-house of Solomos’ mind, ever rooted in oral tradition, in the language of the folk songs (“la lingua clefta”), yet not ending there, but raised perpendicularly: “é bene si, piantarsi su quelle orme, ma non é bene fermarvisi: conviene alzarsi perpendicolarmente.”?” Solomos served his apprenticeship among the people —in order to learn from them, not to teach them or tamper with their speech and faith like Koraes and the other literati of his age.’* This is “the secret of my art,” as he says in his “Notes to the Hymn to Liberty.” The whole passage reads: “Who told me this? The secret of my art and the example of the great masters.” Himself a master, he faithfully followed the example of the masters—who else was he to follow? Dante was his constant teacher, but there were others as well,

according to this other sentence from the “Notes”: “I find art wherever art is to be found.” This is the double school that Solomos refers to in the Italian phrase quoted above: the people and, out of the root of the people, alzarsi perpendtcolarmente, always concentrating on the great exemplars.

The secret of Solomos’ art is his identification with the people and his “perpendicular” rising out of the people. As I said, he served his apprenticeship with the people, but not in order 11 From The Hymn to Liberty. ‘Letter to Tertsetis dated June Ist, 1833: “it is indeed good to tread upon those footprints, but it is not good to stop there; one must raise oneself perpendicularly.” 13 Adamandios Koraes (1748-1833), Greek humanist and scholar. As regards language, he advocated “the middle way,” a compromise between the two extremes of purist and demotic Greek. As regards religion, he believed the Greek Church should be “autocephalous,” ice., independent of the Patriarchate in Constantinople.

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to teach them or remove them from “the unhappy ages of barbarism” and “the sleep of ignorance.”'* That was not all. Other Greeks have also been close to the people; they have studied the people and spoken on their behalf with competence and love (after all, we all originated from the people). Yet in everything they have said one senses a tone of superiority, whether implicit or explicit. They seem to refer to a different way of life; one feels, in these writers, as it were, a

desire to raise the people to their own level and make them part of their own vision. Apart from the question of faith, we also see this in the question of language, where both the opposing camps of the language controversy, with very few exceptions, keep ripping off whole chunks from the body of the Greek language, constantly doing violence to it, stitching and unstitching, mending and spoiling, until they literally come very close to “robbing the people of their language,”** thus endangering one of the most wonderful linguistic heritages. Centuries ago, Greeks, dispersed throughout the immense

empire of Alexander the Great, among alien people, tried desperately to recapture in the classical Greek world the roots they so sadly lacked in those outlandish places. The result was what later became known as atticism. Though it was condemned from the start, this barren and perhaps absurd experiment was not entirely unjustified. But we are unjustified: we are no longer dispersed; we have our spiritual roots, deep and far-reaching, which need only be tended to give us plentiful nourishment. They cannot be replaced by artificial roots. It is a pure waste of time, and we have wasted far too much time already. “Our people are shedding their blood under the Cross to make us free,” says Solomos in his Dialogos. After all, the literati, whether enlightened or unenlightened, were not the

ones who liberated the enslaved Greeks. It was the enslaved who set free the literati, together with the rest of the Greeks. 14 Koraes. 16 Solomos, Dialogos.

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Did “our people” have to be rewarded by being in danger of losing both their faith and their speech? If we are to progress as a people, we can achieve it only through our faith and our language; therein lies our truth. Thanks to these two things alone we have been saved from many disasters until now, and thanks to them alone we may be saved in the future. The more we adulterate faith and language, the farther away we relegate the day of deliverance. Whoever transgresses the law of natural continuity is mutilated. It is inconceivable that we should believe we can make these arbitrary linguistic leaps across the centuries without finding the void of rhetoric gaping beneath us. How can we sweep aside two or three millennia of constant, active practice of the language—this immeasurable language, thanks to which we exist as audible, articulate beings (and also thanks to which we now construct all our elaborate linguistic theories)—and how can we forcibly shift around the various evolutionary stages of our language and attempt to speak or write in a different manner from that which life has assigned to us at the precise historical moment when we happened to be born, whether our name is Herodotus, Plutarch,

Maximus Kallipolitis, or Makriyiannis? We have done the same thing in matters of religion. Here is a striking instance: we allowed ten or fifteen centuries of faith, solidly founded upon the much afflicted body of an Aegean church, the Katapoliani of Paros, which not long ago sheltered a whole island under its whitewashed wings, to be interfered with in the name of art and scholarship. The old church was reduced to a pile of rubble; layer after layer of plaster was stripped away from it, stone, clay, earth, wood

carried there by the

faithful swallows through centuries of famine, plague, earthquakes, floods, wars, all scattered and pulled apart, in order to arrive at the original corpse, the dead fossil of a Justinian basilica. This was supposed to be an admirable work of restoration, “re-antiquation,” as they called it; so it seems we even

fabricate antiquity! What are we doing about our faith and language today? What has happened to our self-knowledge?

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Who are we? Do we exist? Or have we become convinced we are no different from those unbaptized, educated Greeks at the time of their downfall around Α.Ρ. 400 whom Palladas?® mentions? Apa μὴ θανόντες γε 3/ ὃ nves ἄνδρες, : ὄνειρον εἰκάζοντες ἢ ζῶμεν ἡμεῖς τοῦ

”/

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τῷ δοκεῖν ζῶμεν µόνον, ϕ A , συμφορᾷ πεπτωκότες, 5 εἶναι τὸν βίον; βίου τεθνηκότος; A

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Solomos alone identified himself utterly with the people. The bond which connects him to the totality of the people is spiritual: community of faith and language; the spirit, not only the letter, of faith and language. The letter, at least, can be taught or defined or even directed; the spirit remains unfathomable. “The wind bloweth where it listeth.”*7 Solomos sought them both at their inexhaustible common spring, in the place where faith still flowed and language still breathed. Solomos had no reservations or preconceived ideas about altering our faith or weeding our speech. Constant service, humble apprenticeship in the spirit of the community alone can lend authority to individual contributions. There must be obliteration of individuality in the cleansing waters of the community, a loss of the “I” in the “we,” as Makriyiannis said. There must

be unconditional surrender and submission to the faith and language of a people, the realm which embraces and consecrates the Saint and the Poet. In faith there is humility before the One, in language humility before the many. And where there is humility, there is also elevation, as the Gospels say and as Solomos echoes back; where there is loss of the soul, there lies the discovery of the soul. No man

can evade his mother tongue. There is no such

16 Alexandrian poet and author of epigrams, included in the Palatine Anthology. “Can it be that, though already dead, we live in appearance only,/ Greek men, fallen on bad times,/ Imagining that life is a dream?/ Or do we live on while life itself is dead?” 17 John 3:8.

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thing as linguistic emigration. I know of only one case, the seafaring Joseph Conrad (Konrad Korzeniowski). If we may say of the great masters of literature that in their struggle for expression they touched either the skin or the flesh or the bone of their language, according to their gifts, then about Solomos we can only say that he reached the very marrow of the modern Greek language. Apart from the anonymous popular poets, he is the only one who was graced with this gift. Our logic may not grasp why and how this was so, but we can feel it in our flesh. This explains why his poetry is so hard to translate. I might add that if one is to be allowed to watch the Naviceila Greca** sail past in “the proud full sail of his great verse,” to use the words of Shakespeare, it is not enough to have studied or read the language of Solomos; one must have been born to it. Solomos’ utterance is part of the soul of this small place, this world. They are one and the same thing; they are born of this soil. And that is a rare thing. Pushkin is an analogous case; there is the same total identity between him and the Russian language. Quite early in Solomos’ writing, in the poem Lambros (Fragments), we witness an astonishing welding of the verse, which

consists,

at times,

almost

exclusively

of verbs

and

nouns. Never before Solomos do we find so many verbs and nouns in so small a space: verbs crowding on top of each other, condensing the action or stretching the sinew of the line; nouns shaking off the adjectives, pushing aside every element of platitude or vain ornamentation. With the few

examples that follow, I do not hope to show the final poetic result—that should be sought in Solomos’ mature period—so much as his method of working: I look at him, help, I tell him, I have

no sail, no tiller, and I am sailing the sea. Here is another:

And she sings, and as she sings, she weeps,

And he: “Don’t weep, don’t sing,” he tells her. 18 Title of a poem by Solomos.

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The third example has a piece of prose accompanying the verse: “As she spoke, she spread out her slender fingers to the wild weeds growing in that solitary place, she wove them into a crown for her most wretched head, put around her neck the braid made of sighs and into the waves, which are like a mirror to her,

she looks again, smiles, and falls.”

Certain of these qualities Solomos may have received from Dante. Perhaps he owed his method to Dante or to the “example of the masters.” But the basis—“the secret of my art”— and a great many of its later applications, do not belong to any one person; they belong to the people. For there he served

his apprenticeship. First of all Solomos had to utter the truth. Where did he learn the truth? This is where:

Down by the white stone and the cold water, There lies Yannos, the son of Andronicos,

Hacked and slaughtered and unrecognizable.*® What is the secret of art, any art, any piece of work that is well and rightly done—in this case, what is the secret of poetry, infinitely simplified and free of philosophical verbosities? Telling the truth. As soon as a writer introduces in his work the slightest lie, he suddenly loses weight, grows flimsy, becomes a weather-cock spinning in the wind. In the three lines I have just quoted, things do not seek to become other than what they are. And what they are is sufficient. The anonymous poet of the people is not afraid of naming things. “And Adam gave names,””° we read in the book of creation. We read those three lines once again: the stone is white, the 19 From a Greek folksong. N. Politis, Selections from the songs of the Greek people, Athens, 1914. 20 Genesis 2:20.

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water is cold. No concession, no slipping away into some other, irrelevant direction. Absolute literal accuracy. A man appears before us, fatally wounded in the wilderness. Three lines. A whole world. Nothing is missing. Next, Solomos had to utter the truth directly. The direct

approach he also learned at the same source: the folksong, where immediacy of language is such that there is no room for anything else between the words; they drive straight to reality, and reality drives straight into the words. “With time and toil,” language becomes nature. All is washed in light. No obscurity, no

awkwardness,

no

vagueness

or hesitation,

no

fear that the finished result may not conform to the formula of some disfigured, fictitious world taunting ,us from the opposite shore: Le sens trop précis rature Ta vague littérature.” Nothing like this; no wandering in Daedalian fabrications of our own, no clouding of the mind. The words are not just flung out here and there “like straw on the threshing-floor,” to use the words of another folksong, but take their place within the sentence with total inevitability. All constructions of this kind, anywhere in the world, are thus simple and unaffected; they are not begotten of some secondary law, but of the highest law of necessity which old Simonides spoke of:

ἀνάγκᾳ 8 οὐδὲ θεοὶ paxovrat.” >

/

>

The folksong is sturdily built; each word is hewn and fitted perfectly to the one that follows it; there are no gaps, no filling. The words are secured into place once and for all, powerful means serving a concise purpose, safely in the care of the anonymous, omniscient people who speak them, like the 31 Mallarmé, “Petit air (guerrier).” 33 “But against necessity not even the gods fight.” Simonides, Fragment 4, translated by C. M. Bowra, Greek Lyric Poetry, Oxford.

“ULTIMA

VERBA”’

191

stones in a Cyclopean wall, like mountain-paths, like Byzantine kourasani,”* like a rubble fence. This is where Solomos

learned the “secret mystery” which is to be found in all these imperishable popular texts, not recorded on paper but fashioned out of the very heart-beat of life. We must not forget that, behind the language, the words of these unassuming testimonies of our civilization, we can capture almost physically the song and the voice that spoke them; behind the song and the voice, we register the instruments, the music; behind the instruments and the music, we visualize the steps, the dance; and behind the dance and the dancer, we embrace

everything, man himself, and within man the whole mystery of God, inextricably absorbed in the surrounding world. Having reached this point, can we go any farther? As Yeats said: How

can we know the dancer from the dance?

As for the people, the wise, anonymous

creator of these

texts, it is fitting to repeat what Plato said about Homer

in

the last book of the Republic: τὴν Ἑλλάδα πεπαίδευκεν οὗτος 6 mountys.** If only we could listen more attentively to the message, the “secret mystery” which “hems in nature” (The Cretan) and shelters the children of the Mother Goddess (The Free Besieged)! Within this mystery Solomos searched for his true self from his earliest youth; there is a clear hint of this in the line:

Light flashed and the boy knew his true self?

which brings us back again to Plato: “éfaidyns, οἷον ἀπὸ πυρὸς πηδήσαντος ἐξαφθὲν dds, ἐν τῇ ψυχῇ yevopuevor.””* Out of this mystery Solomos proceeded to make his “perpendic23 From the Turkish Aorasan, a mixture of pulverized tiles and asbestos used in building. 24 «Ἡο has been the educator of Hellas.” The Republic, 6ο6ε. 25 From the poem “Porphyras.” 26“ | suddenly, like a blaze kindled by a leaping spark, it is generated in the soul.” Epistulae, 7, 341d. Translated by L. A. Post.

οιUM ASV ESRB ee

192

ular” ascent. In the language of the people, and in the faith of the people, he successively discovered both the letter and the spirit of his prophetic mission. Thus Solomos passed from his everyday self, in the narrow sense of the word, to his true Self; from personal thought to common logos. In order to go forward, he receded; in order to be raised, he humbled himself. A two-way movement: in language (the letter) he moved from common logos to personal thought; in faith (the spirit) he moved from personal thought to common logos. If he became worthy of hearing the voice of the Mother Goddess and bestowing it as a gift upon the Greek world, it was the result of “time and toil,” or

as Plato put it: “μετὰ τριβῆς πάσης καὶ χρόνου πολλοῦ.”Ἔ' It is through this long, slow process that man prepares himself for spiritual illumination, no matter how suddenly it may come in the end. All these great matters, the Christian “I live;

yet not I, but Christ liveth in me” and the Delphic “know thyself,” the partaking of the spirit, he learned from the most humble things, the primitive, the insignificant, the unobserved “lilies of the field,” the wild flowers of folk poetry, about

which we can also unhesitatingly say: “even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.”?® Sleep in your cradle, in your fat swaddling-clothes This is a line from an old lullaby which has reached us from Byzantine times; Solomos’ plebian mother may well have sung him to sleep with it when he was small. Who else could have placed this adjective before the word “swaddlingclothes”? None but the people. Direct, simple, sound, the word hits the mark, but in a totally natural, unforced manner. Still one may ask: who actually put that adjective there? No one did; man did, Homer’s οὗτις, the common, 27“

unqualified

. . by constant practice throughout a long period.” Epistulae, 7,

344b. 28 Matt. 6:28-20.

“ULTIMA

VERBA”’

ος

mortal, downtrodden again and again through the vicissitudes of history; the many-faced people caught in the changing social and political mechanisms of past, present, and future (Thucydides: “ἕως ἂν ἡ αὐτὴ φύσις ἀνθρώπων 7”) ;* the people, “always credulous and always betrayed,” in Solomos’ words.*°

Le saint n’a pas d’esprit propre. I] fait sien l’esprit du peuple.

We find this verse at the end of the remote Tao té king.** And in antiquity, it is again this mode of life which the soul of Odysseus chooses after death in the last book of Plato’s Republic: “Biov ἀνθρώπου ἰδιώτου ampadypovos.”*? The soul remembers all it has gone through in its former life and is thus freed of ambition: "μνήμη δὲ τῶν προτέρων πόνων Φιλοτιμίας ekwpyxviav.”** The man of many devices, the much-travelled king of Ithaca, must have known something that the others did not know; the last to draw lots, he chose a way of life despised and overlooked by all: the life of a common man. He would have chosen it even if he had happened to draw the first lot. And he chose this life joyfully: “καὶ ἀσμένην €héobau.”** ¢

Ν

Thy youth is renewed like the eagle’s.35

Solomos’ spirit lives on among us, not owing to the work of literary historians and critics, but thanks to those true craftsmen who quietly make sure that whenever a major or even a minor poet falls silent in this country, the ageless poetry of «

29 Thucydides, Book 3, par. 82, 19. ‘ . while human nature is what it is... .” (Translated by Rex Warner, Penguin Classics.) 30 “To the Heptanesians,’ Fragment. 31 Translated by Liou Kia-Hway, Gallimard, 1967. 82 The Republic, 620c. “The life of an ordinary citizen who minded

his own business.” 33 [2]. “From memory of its former toils having flung away ambition.” 84 ]214. “And chose it gladly.” 35 Psalms 103:5.

“ULTIMA

VERBA”’

σαι

Greece will unfalteringly take the next step along the course it has been following almost without break from Homer to our time. Kifissia, 1972

PRINCETON

ESSAYS

IN LITERATURE

The Orbit of Thomas Mann. By Erich Kahler On Four Modern Humanists: Hofmannsthal, Gundolf, Curtius, Kantorowicz. Edited by Arthur R. Evans, Jr.

Flaubert and Joyce: The Rite of Fiction. By Richard Cross A Stage for Poets: Studies in the Theatre of Hugo and Musset.

By Charles Affron Hofmannsthal’s Novel “Andreas.” By David H. Miles Kazantzakis and the Linguistic Revolution in Greek Literature. By Peter Bien

Modern Greek Writers. Edited by Edmund Keeley and Peter Bien

On Gide’s Prométhée: Private Myth and Public Mystification. By Kurt Weinberg

The Inner Theatre of Recent French Poetry. By Mary Ann Caws

Wallace Stevens and the Symbolist Imagination. By Michel Benamou Cervantes’ Christian Romance: A Study of “Persiles y Sigismunda.” By Alban K. Forcione

The Prison-House of Language: a Critical Account of Structuralism and Formalism. By Frederic Jameson Ezra Pound and the Troubadour McDougal Wallace Stevens: Morris

Imagination

Tradition.

By Stuart Y.

and Faith. By Adalaide

K.

On the Art of Medieval Arabic Literature. By Andras Hamori

The Poetic World of Boris Pasternak. By Olga Hughes The Aesthetics of Gyorgy Lukdcs. By Béla Kiralyfalvi The Echoing Wood of Theodore Roethke. By Jenijoy La Belle Achilles’ Choice: Examples of Modern Lenson

Tragedy. By David

The Figure of Faust in Valéry and Goethe. By Kurt Weinberg

The Situation of Poetry: Contemporary Poetry and Its Traditions. By Robert Pinsky The Symbolic Imagination: Coleridge and the Romantic Tradttion. By J. Robert Barth, S. J. Adventures in the Deeps of the Mind: The Cuchulain Cycle of W. B. Yeats. By Barton R. Friedman

Shakespearean Representation: Mimesis and Modernity Elizabethan Tragedy. By Howard Felperin

in

René Char: The Myth and the Poem. By James R. Lawler Six French

Poets of Our

Time:

A Critical and Historical

Study. By Robert W. Greene Coleridge’s Metaphors of Being. By Edward Kessler

INDEX

Aeschylus, 125n Akominatos, Michael, 159 Alain, 51n Alcoforado, Marianna, 42 d’Alembert, 20, 50

Cavaty, C., 6, 8, το, 12, 18, 25, 27,

Alexander the Great, ϱ, 185 Amalia, Queen, 20

Cézanne, I1, 13

Απιρὂτε, 20 Anagnostopoulos, Athan, 129n Apollinaire, 44 Aragon, 44 Arethas of Caesaria, 162n

Aristophanes, 163 Aristotle, 176 Artaud, Antonin, 98, 990, 108, r12n, 113 Bach, J. S., 34, 44 Bacon, Francis, 153 Balzac, Honoré, 26

Barbolani, 171n Basil the Great, 157 Baudelaire, Charles, 6, 10, 25, 38,

41, 45, 48n, 60 Bergson, 29 Bertrand, Aloysius, 66 Berzelius, 20

Blunden, Edmund, 113n du Bos, Charles, 123n Bowra, Ο. Μ., 1gon Breton, André, 42, 44, 45 Brighenti, Carlo, 70

Budé, 130 Buffon, 76

28, 39, 43, 46, 47, 55, 58-60, 64, 68, 92-96, 101, 105, 106, III, 127,

163 Centranico, Domenico, 171n

Charles X, 20 Clairaut, 20

Clarke, D. E., 162n Claudel, Paul, 99 Coleridge, S. T., 3, 6, 21, 51 Collingwood, R. G., 3 Conrad, Joseph, 188 Constantine Porphyrogennitos, 158 Corbinelli, 148 Corneille, 62 Cumont, Franz, 104 Dalton, 20 Daniel, Arnaut, 47

Dante, 9, 37, 38, 46, 47, 48, 68, 74, 86, 89, 109, 112, 125, 127n, 147152, 155-158, 160, 165, 166, 168, 169, 171, 172, 175, 177, 180, 184, 189 David, Louis, 21 Demetrios Sotir, 95n De Quincey, 51 Diadochus of Photike, 141 Dionysios of Halicarnassus, 157 Doukas, N., 163, 176

Burnet, John, 56

Eckhart, Meister, 133n, 141 Einstein, Albert, 78

Byron, 15, 36n, 182n

Eliot, T. S., 3, 33, 38, 43, 45, 47,

Calvos, 10, 12, 16, 18, 25, 30, 46,

47, 58, 59, 63, 68, 93, 126

75n, 78, 98, 101, 102Η, 105, 108n, 109, 122, 123, 125, 126, 140

Eluard, 44 Elvin, Lionel, rorn

de Heredia, José-Maria, 89 Herodotus, 83, 186

Eriugena, Johannes Scotus, 141 Euclid, 8 Euripides, 64, 65 Eustathios of Thessaloniki, 159 Evagrius, 141 Ezekiel, 119

Hesiod, toon Hesychius of Jerusalem, 141 Holderlin, 118 Homer, 104, 111, 115n, 138, 146, 160, 161, I9I, 192, 194 Horace, 172 Huet, Bishop of Avranches, 165 Hugo, Victor, 62, 63, 64 Hulme, T. E., 98

Faba, Guido, 152

Ingres, 21

Fallmerayer, 91, 120 Fauriel, C., 161, 171 Ficino, Marsilio, 76n Flaubert, Gustave, 6, 11, 31, 38, 45, 47

Isaak the Syrian, 141 Isocrates, 90, 162n

Elytis, 100 Empedocles, 132 Engels, F., 123, 161

Foscolo, Ugo, 70, 73, 74, 75, 76. 82

Fraser, Frangiska, 84n

Jaeger, Werner, 130 Jenkins, Romilly, 171n

John Climacus, 141 Jouve, 44 Jowett, B., gon, 1o7n

Joyce, James, 38, 44, 45 Gauss, 20

Gautier, Théophile, 26, 38, 89 Gazis, A., 176 Gennadios, G., 176 al-Ghazali, 141 Giannaris, A., 55n Gibbon, Edward, 92, 161 Gide, André, 62, 67, 99

Kabasilas, Nicholas, 142 Kaftanzoglou, 87 Kallipolitis, Maximus, 186 Kant, Emmanuel, 21, 49, 176 Karouzos, C., 70, 71 Karyotakis, K., 47n, 86, 90, 91, 94,

Goethe, 10, 20, 21, 28, 29, 32, 63,

Keats, John, 21, 131, 182

123n, 130, 144 Greco, 90, see also Theotokopoulos Gregory of Sinai, 142 Gryparis, 89

Keeley, Edmund, 7n, 28n, 94n, g5n Kia-Hway, Liou, 193n Kleanthis, 87

Guinicelli, Guido, 47

von Klenze, Leo, 87

Guyon, Madame, 138 Gyzis, N., 88

Kodrikas, John, 163

Hadzidakis, G., 168, 172-176

Hegel, 49 Heliodorus, 160n Heraclitus, 130, 139, 181 Herder, 21

05, 96

Kommetas, S., 163 Komnena, Anna, 159 Kondoglou, 81 Koraes, Adamantios, 159-168, 173176, 184, 185 Kornaros, V., 12n, 161

Korzeniowski, Konrad, 188

INDEX

Kougeas, S., 162n Koumas, C., 176

Krumbacher, K., 157, 172n, 174n Krystallis, C., 12

Lachelier, 31 Lagrange, 20 Lamarck, 21 Laskaris, Janus, 172 Lautréamont, 44, 98, 99 Lavoisier, 20

Leibniz, 20, 29, 35 Eco XS Pope; 172 Leontios, 158 Liddell, H. G., 168 Lorca, 100, 136n, 137 Louis I, of Bavaria, 81n Louis XVIII, 20

Louis-Philippe, 20 Luther, 152 Lytras, N., 88

Makriyiannis, 87, 115-118, 128n, 131, 136, 142n, 167, 168, 186, 187 Malalas, 158 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 25, 38, 45, 62, 63, 64, 99, 112, 129, 133, 134, 1ΟΙ Manzoni, 23 Marat, 20

Marx, K., 123, 161

Matisse, 98 Mavrocordatos, A., 174 Maximus the Confessor, 141 Metternich, 20

Michelangelo, 116 Migne, 157 Mirsky, D. S., 123-126 Mistriotis, G., 164n

Moliére, 41 Montaigne, 67 Moréas, Jean, 120Π Miller, C., 73

199

Napoleon, 19, 20, 21 Napoleon III, 20 Newton, Isaak, 20 Nicephorus the Solitary, 142 Nicias, 73, 74n Nicodemus the Athonite, 142 Nietzsche, F., 103

Oikonomos, C., 173, 176 Otho, King, 20, 81n, 172 Owen, Wilfred, 113n Palamas, Gregory, 132, 142 Palamas, Kostis, 47, 51-55, 59, 62,

64, 90, 92, 93, 94n, 95n, 127

Palladas, 187

Papadiamandis, Alexandros, 18,

19n, 68, δή Pascal, Blaise, 64, 80, 132 Perse, St. John, ror Petrarch, 130, 150 Philip II, of Spain, 65n Philistus, 71, 73 Photius, 142 Picasso, 98 Pindar, 71n, 74 Plato, 4n, 10, 40, 56, 74n, 76n, roon, 107N, 114, 125n, 128, 135n, 144, 162n, 101, 192, 193 Plutarch, 64, 65, 73, 186 POG Εν Atts Politis, L., 22n, 70, 71, 74, 84n, 148 Politis, N., 189n

Polybius, 72, 73 Polylas, 13, 27n, 76, 77, 151, 177, 179, 180 Post, L. A., r91n

Pound, Ezra, 3, 38, 44, 45, 47, 1ΟΙ Prodromos, Theodoros, 149, 158,

159 Proios, D., 161

Psellos, 159 Pseudo-Dionysius, 141

Psycharis, 90, 93, 174 Pushkin, 188

Racine, 26, 34, 65, 98n Raphael, 99

Rimbaud, 44, 45, 98, 99, 101, 103, 121, 138n, 181

Stais, Emmanuel, 177, 178 Stavrou, T., 55n

Stendhal, 23, 46, 63, 98, 99 Stethatos, Niketas, 142 Strabo, 164 Stranis, L., 148 Symeon the New Theologian, 142

Rodin, Auguste, 50 Rodostamo, Emilia, 103 Rose, A., 163

Rydkan, 113n St. John of the Cross, 140 St. Paul, 32, 178, 181, 183 Sakellion, I., 162n Sappho, 12 Savidis, G., 28n

Schelling, 49 Schiller, 10, 21, 24, 49 Schleiermacher, 131 Scott, R., 168 Seferis, ο 72,74 7035 ὃτ ὃς, 86, 94, 96, 97, 105, 106, 108-111, 123N, 126-133, 135-138, 140, 142,

143, 145, 146, 179

de Selincourt, Aubrey, 83n Shakespeare, 21, 98n, 1ogn, 178, 179, 188 Shelley) Ε.Β. ου 130 Sherrard, Philip, 7n, 28n, 54n,

63n, 83n, 94n, 95n, 183n

Shorey, Paul, 135n Sikelianos, 59, 90, 93, 104, 123n,

Tertsetis, G., 153, 154, 170, 171, 184n Theophanes, 158 Theotokopoulos, El Greco, 17, 653: see also Greco Thomas, Dylan, roo Thucydides, 71n, 73, 193 Timaeus, of Tauromenium, 71n,

72, 73 Trikoupis, Spyros, 13, 14, 15 Trissino, 148, 151 Valéry, Paul; 3, 10, 25, 27, 33, 385

45, 47, 49, 51, 62, 97, 99, 100, To2n Vamvas, N., 176

Vassiliou, A., 160, 164, 167, 173 Vaugelas, 64 Vilaras, 81 Villon, Francois, 37, 65 da Vinci, 47, 116 Virgil, 150, 172 Vlachoyiannis, 116n Volta, 20 Voltaire, 21, 87, 161

138, 179 Simonides, 190 Socrates, 4, 56, 76n, 181 Solomos, 8-19, 21-27, 29, 32-36, 30,

Warner, Rex, 193n

Wilamowitz, U. von, 76n Winckelmann, 24

40, 43, 45-55, 57-71, 73-84, 88, 89, 93, 103, 110, 12In, 128n, 130,

Xanthopoulos, Callistus, 142

137, 147-149, 151-157, 159-161, 164n, 165, 167-185, 187-193 Solon, 176

Yeats, W. B., 101, 112, 113n, 122n,

da Somavera, Alessio, 82

ΤΟΙ Ypsilantis, D., 174

Spengler, Oswald, 125 Spinoza, 32

Zeno of Elea, 49

LIBRARY

OF

CONGRESS

CATALOGING

IN

PUBLICATION

DATA

Lorentzatos, Zésimos.

The lost center and other essays in Greek poetry.

(Princeton essays in literature) Includes index. 1. Greek literature, Modern—zoth century—History and criticism—Collected works. Te Ρις

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CENTRAL LIBRARY SOO MCKINNEY

RITSOS

IN PARENTHESES

Translation

and Introduction

by EDMUND

KEELEY

Perhaps Greece’s most important liying poet, Yannis Ritsos follows such eminent predecessors as Cavafy, Sikelianos, and Seferis in the dramatic and

symbolic expression of a tragic sense of life. The three volumes of Ritsos’s poetry

translated

here—Parentheses,

1946-47, Parentheses, 1950-61, and The Distant, 1975—represent a thirtyyear poetic journey and a developing sensibility that link the poet’s subtler

perceptions at different moments of his maturity. In his introduction

to the poems,

and as an explanation of the book’s title, Edmund Keeley writes: “The two signs of the parenthesis are like cupped hands facing each other across a distance, hands that are straining to come together, to achieve a meeting that would serve to reaffirm human contact between isolated presences; but though there are obvious gestures toward closing the gap between the hands, the gestures seem inevitably to fail, and the meeting never quite occurs.” In terms of the development of Ritsos’s poetic vision, the distance within the parenthesis is shorter in each of the two earlier volumes than in the most recent volume. There the space has become almost infinite, yet Ritsos’s powerfully evocative if stark landscape reveals a stylistic purity that is the latest mark of his greatness. The Lockert Library of Poetry in Translation Cloth: ISBN 06397-4. Paper: ISBN 01358-6. 178 pages. 1979.

GEORGE SEFERIS Collected Poems, 1924-1955 Translated and edited by

,

EDMUND KEELEY and PHILIP SHERRARD

“This is a book and a translation worthy of Seferis, which is to praise it as highly as it could be praised. If any contemporary poet could be said to be essential, Seferis is that poet, and this is the true body of his work admirably, besubialys _ and intelligently presented.”—Archibald MacLeish “The translations are impressively accurate, they create and sustain a consistent style... . [T]hey skilfully maintain the balance between poetry and πας and offer the best complete presentation so far made of Seferis’s er or one might add, of any other modern Greek poet’s.” — —The Times Lee Supplement “Keeley and Sherrard’s translation is not merely poetic but a real literary accomplishment, for it manages to retain in English as many merits of the Greek original as possible.” —Comparative Literature Studies The Lockert Library of Poetry in Translation Cloth: ISBN 06379-6. Paper: ISBN o01300-4. 198 pages. 1967.

eo

ς MODERN GREEK WRITERS _ Edited by EDMUND

KEELEY and Phe: BIEN

~The eee literary renaissance of Modern Greece is the subject of essays by ten critics and scholars on the theme, “Modern Greek Literature and its European Background.” From Zissimos Lorenzatos’ discussion of the nineteenth-cen‘tury poet Solomos to Peter Bien’s analysisof Kazantzakis’ fervent demoticism, they give evidence of the tremendous cre-

ative activity that has been going on as Greek writers in all ‘genres turn outward to Europe—and inward to their own ue as well—to form a unique modern literature. a) fascinating glimpse of the complexity, range and See of the Greek literary renaissance over the past two centuries. a1 he Times Literary Supplement on

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Princeton Essays in κα

ISBN 7

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06215-3. 261 pages. 1972. iy

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"Princeton University Press-Princeton, Newος

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