I am not of Greek ancestry. Nor do I understand Greek, ancient, modern, demotic or katharevousa. I am, though, a poet of place--I believe deeply that a poet's job is to relentlessly bore into his or her's home place, until the stones, the mountains, the coast, the buildings, the sky, are so well understood that they speak thru the poet. Few poets do this better than "modern" and contemporary Greek poets. Again, I don't know Greek. This means I'm having to read these great writers thru translation. No matter: the fact that the song of their land still pours thru one language removed just proves my point concerning the depth and breadth of their artistry.
Perhaps my favorite of these Greek poets is George Seferis (1900-1971). I don't take things like Nobel Prizes too seriously, but if there was ever a poet who attained this honor who truly deserved it it is this late master. I've often thought there are few jobs harder than being a modern Greek poet, who has to bear on his or her shoulders the weight of Homer, Hesiod ... an intellectual tradition that gos back at least to the mists between Mycenae and pre-classical Athens.
Seferis deals with this problem (like all exceptional people deal with their problems) head on. Homer and Hesiod and every poet ... playwright since their time, becomes a, well, Greek chorus to his exploration of what it mean to be Greek, to be a human being, in our transient age. In Mythhistorema he writes*:
I woke with this marble head in my hands;
it exhausts my elbows and I don't know where to put it
down.
It was falling into the dream as I was coming out of the
dream
so our life became one and it will be very difficult for it
to separate again.
This is the poetry of a courageous man, a man who will not allow himself to be buried under the alluvium of history, but instead let himself be nourished by it, demand that it be the fuel of the future.
Beyond this provocative stance concerning history, its Seferis' feeling of a timeless Greece as a living breathing entity that most draws me to than man's poetry. But as I write this I realize that I can't quote a single passage of his that is separate from the long hot wind of Greek history: his past is his future: Greece is Greece, be it the pain of Achilles or the pain of Seferis--they are one thru time, negating time ...
OK, I've lost track of myself a bit here; let me try a different track. Seferis was no mere product of Greek history. He was a diplomat, a traveler; he loved Henry Miller, he wrote haiku. Here are a couple of the latter (about women, because that's what I'm about too):
Meditative
her breasts heavy
in the looking glass.
Naked woman
the pomegranate that broke
was full of stars.
Fine, here it goes: what I love most about Seferis is that his Greece contains so much that is analogous to my Southern California. My land is one of burning sunshine, wine-dark seas and crumbling chaparral cliffs (what do they call these plant communities in Greece?). Add this to the gift given to me that is the Greece-based intellectual history of the Western world and where do I finally find myself sitting: square in the middle of some coastal Greek village, looking for meaning in a burning blue sky and Aristotle's brain, via Homer's heart. Now all I have to do is figure out how to sing all this in Chumash and I'll be well on my way home.
*All quotes from:
Collected Poems 1924-1955,
Princeton University Press, 1969.
