Greeks Bearing Gifts
Poems. By George Seferis. Translated by Rex Warner. (The Bodley Head, 15s.)
Six Poets of Modern Greece. Translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. (Thames and Hudson, 21s.) Nostalgia. Poems by J. Paco d'Arcos. Translated (Hutchinson, 16s.)
THERE are, after all, some advantages in ignor- ance. I have just been reading George Seferis's great poem 'Thrush' in two English versions: one by the editors of Six Poets of Modern Greece and the other by Rex Warner in his volume of translations from Seferis. The effect is hallucina- tory, fecundating, rather like the experience of the cinema at its best. In each version, the same images come and go in the same order, and the central identity which directs the poem is the !lame, though he speaks with different voices; it is like having the same dream twice over. If I knew Greek, I should have the pleasure of read- ing the poem Seferis wrote: as it is, I"have this strange, galvanising dream, in which the struc- ture and images of the poem appear to me in -their own nakedness, not clothed in any per- manent garment of language. It isn't the experi- ence of 'reading poetry' as one habitually knows It; as a matter of fact it is more like writing a Poem, or having one written through me by another mind. An extraordinary sensation! As a literary critic 1 am quite unable to deal with it. There is no terminology, for one thing. But it does point the way to a general principle: to read a poet in a language you don't understand, enlist the help of as many translators as possible. Mr. Warner, for instance, has produced 'a Seferis who sounds more relaxed, looser in rhythm and softer in outline than the Seferis we meet with Messrs. Keeley and Sherrard, whose versions have more spring and recoil. Not that it matters; I am not trying to guess at the qualities of the original, only to expose myself to the rays ?f the poet's imagination through two filters instead of one. In short, I am grateful for both translations.
It is the same with Cavafy. Messrs. Keeley and ,Sherrard are here in co-operation (not, please, competition') with Mr. John Mavrogordato, Whose version has so far been Cavafy's principal (Or only?) English costume. The result is, once again, to give one this haunting impression of falling asleep and dreaming great poetry. Cavafy's bitter, refined melancholy does not represent the whole truth about anything, but it strikes a note we have all heard; everyone, or at least every sensitive person, has times when he feels like the 'I' of Cavafy's poems, whom the editors describe in a striking passage of their introduction as 'the sick guest of an aesthetic city . . . lonely, hollowed out, old as the ages, all nostalgia, animal and sage, all bare, with no ambitions, gnawed by the dread of death.' A deep, narrow poet, Cavafy channels everything through the psychology of this kind of man, and the kind of life he lives; and the result is that his poetry is 'classic' in the sense that it does some- thing once and for all.
It will by now have appeared that I think Six Poets of Modern Greece a very useful book. By carefully absorbing text, introduction and notes, a reader who knew nothing about modern Greek poetry could put himself in a position to explore it with enjoyment and profit. Generous selections from Cavafy, Sikelianos and Seferis are followed by short selections from three younger poets, Antoniou, Elytis and Gatsos. The translations I can't judge, but they do have the obvious merit of not making the poets sound all alike. And one doesn't, in any case, read these versions 'as if' they were English poems; this, a fatuous proceed- ing at the best of times, is impossible with Greek poetry because—to put it simply—the Greek atmosphere is so strong, and so different from an English atmosphere, that nothing could make them blend. The relevant and stimulating com- parison, here, is with the work of Constantine Trypanis: Greek poems written straight into English by a bi-lingual poet who is also a classi- cal scholar.
J. Paco d'Arcos, a major Portuguese novelist,
published in 1952 his one volume of verse under the title Poemas Imperfeitos. The title was a good one, because these are not in any sense finished poems; they are short meditations, half notes, half lyrics; but Roy Campbell was also right to give his version the English title of 'Nostalgia.' The poems deal entirely with memories—not connected, orderly, sequential memories, but those odd fragments of things seen and heard in once-visited cities that haunt the imagination of a travelled man. Senhor d'Arcos would probably not claim the title of 'poet,' and no one is going to say that this is an important volume of poems, but categories, after all, don't matter much; the poignancy, the tenderness, the occasional sharp cry of grief or the groan of loneliness and bore- dom—all these, suspended in a fluid of pure, economical descriptive writing, make a very attractive little book. The highly elegant format, and the slight sense of elegiac piety evoked by the fact that these translations were Roy Camp- bell's last work, also help the poems by creating the right mood in which to read them.
Finally, this year's 'Pen Anthology.' It is always difficult to find much to say about these discreetly edited and eager-to-please little books. They serve a purpose in bringing a lot of names together so that the reader who is interested in exploring contemporary poetry can use them as a starting-point. That, at any rate, is the idea, though the sales of anthologies remain so con- sistently higher than the sales of individual poets that I sometimes wonder whether this interested reader is not a myth. This year's offering seems much like all the others, the only perceptible difference being that it is a shade more un- adventurous than most. The editors' taste seems to have guided them to the kind of poem likely to have been already chosen by other antholo- gists; three of the poems have appeared in the Guinness book for this year, though doubtless the editors didn't know about this (Continued on page 740)
overlapping. I just feel that there ought to be some kind of agency where anthologists could check up on what had been skimmed oil from the cur- rent year's output. Or better still—much better still—let the whole idea of the twelve-monthly anthology go to sleep for a bit.
JOHN WAIN
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