A wandering minstrel he
Nigel Clive
A BOTTLE IN THE SHADE: A JOURNEY IN THE WESTERN PELOPONNESE by Peter Levi Sinclair-Stevenson, f17.99, pp. 277 Peter Levi was Oxford's Professor of Poetry in the 1980s and is himself a trans- lator of modern Greek poetry, as well as being a classical scholar and archaeologist and the author of biographies of Shake- speare, Milton and Tennyson. This has made him no ordinary traveller and made his book no ordinary account of a journey in the Peloponnese. In going back to take another look at places he had seen before, he asserts there was no doubt that it was his own past, as well as the Greek past and present, that he was exploring. It is to be hoped that this book will soon be trans- lated into Greek, where it will have a welcoming readership.
Last year, Levi arrived at Patras, 'now a huge city . . . not as I remembered it 30 years ago', and made his way to Pyrgos to meet up with his travelling companion and old friend, the poet Giorgis Pavlopoulos, now universally revered after his talent had been recognised by the Nobel laureate George Seferis. They soon went for a walk to admire the provincial countryside, 'cob- webbed with mythology', to listen to Giorgis reading his poem 'The Gypsy' and later record his verdict that Greek poetry would never be the same again after Seferis, as it never was after Solomos, and as English poetry never was after Eliot. They made their way across the Mani's `extraordinary repertory of rocks' to stay in Paddy and Joan Leigh Fermor's house in Kardamyli, which is 'completely expressive of its owners', with pictures by Ghika and Craxton and distant memories of Maurice Bowra and more recent ones of Philip Sherrard, who first introduced Levi to Seferis, 'the sun in the sky to all of us who loved Greece from the late Thirties to the early Seventies'. Leigh Fermor's variety of knowledge, reading and scholarship made this visit 'the refreshment of a dream deeply buried'.
Then there were walks to villages like Lepreon, where there was not much to see when Pausanias visited it in the second century AD, and wanderings through Arcadia and on to Olympia. Giorgis talked about Solomos and Nikos Gatsis, the poet whom Levi greatly admired and had cherished as an old friend. It was on Gat- sis' grave in the village of Asea that he dropped a little white rosemary. He has also added a moving Lament for Gatsis as an appendix to this book. On a visit to a Zakynthos rebuilt after the 1953 earth- quake, they saw the house of Kolokotronis, where he stayed before he set sail for Greece to start the War of Independence, and admired the ikons in the Solomos Museum, as well as the elaborate gilded woodwork which is a Zakynthian speciality. They also swapped views of contemporary Greek painters — Ghika, Moralis and Tsaroukhis, whom Giorgis admired most.
Typical evidence of what Levi was carry- ing in his head comes in an observation that 'if you compare Virgil on dogs in the Georgics with Xenophon on hunting, you will see what a chasm may yawn between two authors not far distant in time'. Final- ly, they celebrated Greek Easter back at Pyrgos with Giorgis' family and relished the lamb which is 'a symbol of mountain liberty'. In the introduction, Levi men- tioned that one of the things he most want- ed to see was the fall of the River Styx about which he had been dreaming for more than 30 years. This accounts for the penultimate chapter analysing the differing evidence from Virgil and Ovid, Homer, Hesiod and Herodotus.
Previous page
