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language: Greek (English tr. Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard)
country: Greece
year: 1935
form: poetry
dates read: 30.7.22
over the years I’ve read most of George Seferis’s Mythistorema (1935), his first collection of unrhymed poetry, but I’d never sat down and read through the whole thing, but I’ve been thinking again about the pillaging of Greek antiquities over the past hundred and fifty years (even the Archaeology Museum in Istanbul has material the Ottomans took from Greece in the 19th century!), which reminded me of the second poem, and so I decided to take a break from Aleko Konstantinov’s Bai Ganyo and finally read the whole collection.
it’s so good.
it’s an incredibly bitter collection, which returns throughout to the ambivalent relationship between modern Greece and classical antiquity — the bitterness of the knowledge that the rest of the world only cares about Greece as long as they can produce more “εἴδωλα καὶ στολίδια“ / “idols and ornaments” to fill foreign museums; the desperate search for “τὴν ἄλλη ζωή, / πέρα ἀπὸ τ᾽ ἀγάλματα” / “the other life, / beyond the statues” — but it’s also a collection that’s committed to finding ways to keep moving whenever possible: “Ξαναμπαρκάραμε μὲ τὰ σπασμένα μας κουπιά.“ / “We set out again with our broken oars.”
in addition to the poems as a whole, Seferis is also just…really good at putting together impactful lines (like “We set out again with our broken oars”). there’s something epigrammatic about the poems here, in a way that part of me wants to connect with the fragmentary artifacts scattered through them. lines and poems assembled from fragments of language.
the combination of my vestigial Duolingo modern Greek and my very rusty ancient Greek is enough that I can get some enjoyment and appreciation from the original poems, but mostly I’m relying on Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard’s translations (my appreciation of the Greek is based on looking at the English, then back at the Greek and then being able to see how the Greek is put together), which are mostly good but occasionally mess around with the word and line order in ways I think could be avoided.
moods: dark, mysterious, polemic, reflective