Giorgos Seferis | Mythic History (Part II)
Lorenzo Costa, 'The Argonauts Leaving Colchis' (ca. 1480)
"The greatest mistake of my life”, wrote Giorgos Seferis in 1931, “was that I was born a man of the sea and became a man of the land. It is a characteristic of the seaman not to be content anywhere.” The poetic journey dominates Seferis’s poetry. A modern Odysseus, the poet endlessly voyages across many embittering seas, moving from the present back to a mythic time and land in search for a paradisal state of spiritual fulfilment and also, as Seferis notes, in an attempt to “shape and render meaning” to the futility and anarchy of modern history [1]. But the repetitiveness of the journey frustrates the effort and it even effaces the poet himself. What remain are the journey and its perpetual re-enactment with every reading of the poem.
Mythic History
XXI
We who set out on this pilgrimage
glanced at the broken statues
that death has unexplored paths
and its own justice
that when we die standing on our feet
in the brotherhood of stone
unified by cruelty and weakness,
the old dead would break away from the circle and rise
smiling in a strange calm.
X
Our land is closed, mountains all around
that are crowned day and night by a low sky.
We have no rivers, we have no wells nor water springs,
only a few cisterns, and even they are empty; they echo and we worship them.
It is a flat hollow sound, just like our solitude
just like our love, just like our bodies.
It seems strange that long ago we managed to build
our houses, our sheds and our pens.
And our weddings, the fresh wreathes and the caressing fingers
become riddles that remain inexplicable to our soul.
How did our children get born, how did they grow?
Our land is enclosed
by the two black Colliding Rocks. On Sunday
when we walk down to the port seeking relief
we see illuminated in the sunset
broken planks from journeys that have not ended
bodies that no longer know how to love.
In ‘Argonauts’, the interminable voyage, far from offering countless opportunities for enjoyment or the thrill of new experiences, affords no regenation, no return to a promised land, no recovery of a lost paradise. One does not become wiser for having undertaken the arduous journey. Death and oblivion await the traveller. And yet, there is a pervading sense of justice.
IV (Argonauts)
And the soul
if it is to know itself
must look
within a soul:
the stranger and the enemy we saw in the mirror.
The shipmates were good fellows, they did not complain
either out of exhaustion or out of thirst or out of cold,
they assumed the manner of the trees and the waves
withstanding the wind and the rain
withstanding the night and the sun
without changing with change.
They were good fellows, for days and days
they sweated at the oars – eyes cast low
breathing rhythmically
and their blood flamed red under their subdued flesh.
At times they sang, eyes cast low
when we sailed past the empty island with the fig trees
in the west, beyond the cape of
the barking dogs.
If it is to know itself, they would say
it must look within a soul, they would say
and the oars would strike the golden sea
in the sunset.
We sailed past many capes, many islands, the sea
that begets another sea, seagulls and seals.
Wretched women would at times lament
their lost children
and others would in rage seek Alexander the Great
and past glories submerged in the recesses of Asia.
We anchored off coasts where night fragrances and bird song
filled the air, where the waters stirred in their flow
memories of a great happiness.
But there was no end to the journeys.
Their souls became one with the oars and the locks
with the austere face of the bow
with the rudder’s foamy trail
and the water that distorted their visage.
The shipmates all passed away one by one,
eyes cast low. Their oars
mark their resting place on the shore.
No one remembers them. Justice.
if it is to know itself
must look
within a soul:
the stranger and the enemy we saw in the mirror.
The shipmates were good fellows, they did not complain
either out of exhaustion or out of thirst or out of cold,
they assumed the manner of the trees and the waves
withstanding the wind and the rain
withstanding the night and the sun
without changing with change.
They were good fellows, for days and days
they sweated at the oars – eyes cast low
breathing rhythmically
and their blood flamed red under their subdued flesh.
At times they sang, eyes cast low
when we sailed past the empty island with the fig trees
in the west, beyond the cape of
the barking dogs.
If it is to know itself, they would say
it must look within a soul, they would say
and the oars would strike the golden sea
in the sunset.
We sailed past many capes, many islands, the sea
that begets another sea, seagulls and seals.
Wretched women would at times lament
their lost children
and others would in rage seek Alexander the Great
and past glories submerged in the recesses of Asia.
We anchored off coasts where night fragrances and bird song
filled the air, where the waters stirred in their flow
memories of a great happiness.
But there was no end to the journeys.
Their souls became one with the oars and the locks
with the austere face of the bow
with the rudder’s foamy trail
and the water that distorted their visage.
The shipmates all passed away one by one,
eyes cast low. Their oars
mark their resting place on the shore.
No one remembers them. Justice.
(My translation ~ January 2007, August 2024)
Offering his own interpretation of the poem in a letter that proposes a cinematic directorial approach to his later collection The Thrush (in Greek, Κίχλη), Seferis portrays the silent Argonauts not as anti-heroes but rather as less than heroic; ordinary men whose subdued demeanour reveals their unremarkable and somewhat naïve, albeit likeable, nature. In this sense, Seferis deems it just that they be forgotten, erased from memory and history [2].
But Greek philosopher Dimitris Liantinis prefers to view the Argonauts of Seferis’s poem as heroic figures; symbols of courage, boldness and bravery in the face of inevitable defeat by a harsh and indifferent cosmic fate and I must say I find this reading quite attractive. For Liantinis then, the Seferian concept of Justice in ‘Argonauts’ acquires an ontological rather than a moral meaning, akin to the notion of Justice we find in Anaximander or Heraclitus; an ultimate principle that ensures balance in the general cosmic economy of beings. In such a system, in which the death of one being becomes the gain of another, human beings are no more or less provileged than a tree, the wind behind the sails or a distant star. Freed from any human moral encoding that Seferis imposes, argues Liantinis, the Argonauts become part of the cosmic order of things [3].
Such a portrayal of the Argonauts as fearless explorers of undiscovered regions is also echoed by Friedrich Nietzsche in The Gay Science. But for Nietzsche, these modern-day travellers have little interest in homecoming, enthralled as they are by the wonders of the journey.
But Greek philosopher Dimitris Liantinis prefers to view the Argonauts of Seferis’s poem as heroic figures; symbols of courage, boldness and bravery in the face of inevitable defeat by a harsh and indifferent cosmic fate and I must say I find this reading quite attractive. For Liantinis then, the Seferian concept of Justice in ‘Argonauts’ acquires an ontological rather than a moral meaning, akin to the notion of Justice we find in Anaximander or Heraclitus; an ultimate principle that ensures balance in the general cosmic economy of beings. In such a system, in which the death of one being becomes the gain of another, human beings are no more or less provileged than a tree, the wind behind the sails or a distant star. Freed from any human moral encoding that Seferis imposes, argues Liantinis, the Argonauts become part of the cosmic order of things [3].
Such a portrayal of the Argonauts as fearless explorers of undiscovered regions is also echoed by Friedrich Nietzsche in The Gay Science. But for Nietzsche, these modern-day travellers have little interest in homecoming, enthralled as they are by the wonders of the journey.
And now, after we have long been on our way in this manner, we argonauts of the ideal, with more daring perhaps than is prudent, and have suffered shipwreck and damage often enough, but are, to repeat it, healthier than one likes to permit us, dangerously healthy, ever again healthy — it will seem to us as if, as a reward, we now confronted an as yet undiscovered country whose boundaries nobody has surveyed yet, something beyond all the lands and nooks of the ideals so far, a world so overrich in what is beautiful, strange, questionable, terrible, and divine that our curiosity as well as our craving to possess it has gotten beside itself — alas, now nothing will sate us any more!
V 382 [4]
Notes
[1] Giorgos Seferis, Dokimes Ι' (1936-1947), ed. G. P. Savides, Athens: Ikaros, p. 353.
[2] Giorgos Seferis, Dokimes ΙΙ' (1948-1971), ed. G. P. Savides, Athens: Ikaros.
[3] For a comprehensive interpretation of Seferis's poem 'Argonauts' by Dimitris Liantinis, you can read here.
[4] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Trans. Walter Kaufmann, Vintage Books: New York.
All three poems are from the collection Mythic History (Μυθιστόρημα) published in 1935. You can read the Greek text here.
Seferis was, of course, a keen reader of D. H. Lawrence’s 'Last Poems', which contain some lovely verses about the sea. And often, even before he'd had his coffee and toast for breakfast, Lawrence would imagine the Argonauts sailing by ... "They are not dead, they are not dead!"
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