Books: Of Man & Statues

COLLECTED POEMS, 1924-1955 by George Seferis. 490 pages. Princeton University Press. $10.

On the eve of World War II, Greek Poet George Seferis took the measure of impending events and sadly quoted Germany’s pre-Romantic Poet Friedrich Holderlin: “What is the use of poets in a mean-spirited time?” Now Seferis provides his own answer in his Collected Poems. Greece’s only Nobel prizewinner is a deeply civilized and profoundly Greek man who draws on the whole heritage of his people, their literature, their myths and legends, their wariness born of defeat and exile, their toughness born of a stubborn struggle for survival. In his work, he shows how the present (his and theirs) was seeded in the past, how man’s fate now as always reflects the unstable mixture of the unattainable and the possible.

The Seferis flavor of pessimism does not arise from resentment induced by a bruised ego or a frail sensibility. It comes, rather, from an unsentimental estimate of what life offers and what it holds back. To suggest that the more man changes the more he remains the same, Seferis has only to search his well-stocked mind for ancient parallels to modern quandaries:

I see the hands beckon each dawn to the vulture and the hawk
bound as I am to the rock that suffering has made mine.
I see the trees breathing the black serenity of the dead
and then the smiles—that don’t develop—of the statues.

Asked about his poet’s intent, Seferis gives an answer wholly in character: “What is the central point in Homer’s Odyssey? Ulysses’ travels in the world. Well, my poems are my own voyages over the world.” The answer is not as simple as it seems, because it includes both voyages of the mind and those that came of exile and a lifelong career as a Greek diplomat. His family lost all it had during the disastrous Greek-Turkish war in 1922. As regimes changed, his antimonarchist father, a professor of law, was hired or fired. The young poet lived as a diplomat or political exile in a bewildering succession of places—Albania, Crete, South Africa, Egypt, Italy, Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Iraq. During World War II, when the Germans and Italians occupied Greece, he remained with his government in exile. From 1957 until 1961, he was Greece’s Ambassador to London. He once wrote:

Ah, were life but straight
how we’d live it then.
But it’s fated otherwise,
you have to turn in a small corner.

Body Like a Grape. For him, the small corner has always been Greece, and recurrently he reached back to it in memory from wherever he went. Today, 67 and in retirement, he lives in a beautiful house behind the Athens stadium. He likes to eat well, drink well, trade ideas with good companions, and idle away an hour with sailors and fishermen at the harbor.

Many years ago, he had already asked the big question:

Body, black in the sun’s heat like a grape
body, my rich ship, where are you traveling?

But the knowledge of death has never got between him and life. His sense of humor has never been overrun. When the Greek government requisitioned a piece of land he owned for use as a military cemetery, Seferis said: “Alas, even if they gave it back I fear it would be hard to raise the rent.” To read Seferis is to experience a sense of honesty, a cool scorn for any kind of evasion. His austere prescription for self-knowledge is, therefore, almost predictable:

And if the soul
is to know itself
it must look into a soul:
the stranger and enemy, we’ve seen him in the mirror.

Probably no winner of the Nobel award ever wrote fewer words than Seferis. No winner counted them out to surer purpose.