wordς alone ...

    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 absent-mindedly we ...

    Konstantinos Parthenis, 'Angel' (post-1940)     If, for Yiannis Ritsos, the work of the poet should reflect his engagement with history, projecting a politicised image of the artist as a public persona seeking to interpret and furthermore cultivate a response to historical reality, the poetry of his contemporary Giorgos Seferis proposes a somewhat different viewpoint, one that derives from a fictional (and mythical) universe populated by solitary figures. Paradoxically, it was one of the latter's poems, “Denial”, set to music by Mikis Theorodakis, that epitomised for the Greek nation the struggle for freedom. Seferis’s funeral in 1971 turned into a mass demonstration againsts the repressive regime of the dictators and a lament for a life that, in the poet’s words, had begun “with such feeling, such force, with such desire and passion” and had gone bitterly wrong. Born in Smyrna – a prosperous, commercial city in Asia Minor with a thriving Greek population – in ...