Patrick Comerford
TS Eliot’s poem ‘The Journey of the Magi’, which I was discussing yesterday, was written in 1927 after he joined the Church of England and is one of the five poems in his Ariel Poems published in 1930. The poem is truly a sermon in poem, and is one of the great works of English poetry in the 20th century.
Another Epiphany poem that comes to mind at this time of year is ‘Epiphany, 1937’, is a poem written in 1937 by Giorgos Seferis, a major figure in Greek literature who became the first Greek Nobel laureate for literature in 1963.
Seferis’s poem ‘Epiphany, 1937’ has had a lasting influence on Greek culture and identity. It was part of Epiphany, a collection that inspired the Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis 30 years later to write a cantata, with songs that are still popular in Greece. When the poem was set to music as an cantata or choral work by Theodorakis, ‘I Kept Hold of My Life’, it became sn expression of resistance to the colonels’ junta from 1967 to 1974.
Seferis’s poem ‘Epiphany, 1937’ and its setting by Theodorakis, continue to be major important and influential cultural works in Greece, and Theodorakis has ensured that the lyrics are widely-known and are regularly performed, in his choral adaptation or setting Κράτησα τη ζωή μου (Kratêsa tê zôê mou, ‘I Kept Hold of My Life’. One of the most moving performances brings together the voice of Maria Farantouri and the jazz instrumentation of Charles Lloyd.
A diplomatic assignment in London for George Seferis influenced the direction of his poetic creativity and marked the beginning of a lifelong friendship between Eliot and Seferis, who translated the works of both Eliot and Ezra Pound into Greek.
George Seferis (1900-1971) was born Giorgos Seferiadis (Γεώργιος Σεφεριάδης) in Smyrna (now Izmir) in Asia Minor in 1900. He went to school in Smyrna and then to the Gymnasium in Athens. When his family moved to Paris in 1918, he studied law at the University of Paris and became interested in literature. He returned to Athens in 1925 and joined the Foreign Ministry the following year. He had a long and successful diplomatic career, that began with postings in England (1931-1934), where he was introduced to Eliot and Pound, and Albania (1936-1938), where he wrote ‘Epiphany, 1937.’
Seferis moved to Crete with the Free Greek Government during World War II, and then into exile in Egypt, South Africa and Italy. Meanwhile, in 1941 he married Marika Zannou, the mother of two young daughters from her previous marriage to Andreas Londos.
He returned to liberated Athens in 1944. He continued to work in the Foreign Ministry, followed by diplomatic postings in Ankara (1948-1950), London (1951-1953) and Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq (1953-1956). He was back in London again as the Greek Ambassador from 1957 to 1961, his last post before he retired to Athens.
After the colonels’ coup in 1967, he went into voluntary seclusion and many of his poems were banned, including the musical versions written and arranged by the composer Mikis Theodorakis.
His poem ‘Denial’ (Άρνηση), first published in 1931 in his collection Turning Point (Στροφή, Strophe), became an anthem of resistance to the colonels. He died on 20 September 1971 and ‘Denial’ (Άρνηση) was sung by the crowds lining the streets of Athens at his funeral. He had become a popular hero for his resistance to the regime. His widow Marika cut off her hair and flung it into his grave.
Seferis’s exclusive use of demotic, or common, Greek as his language of choice earned him a privileged place among his generation of Greek poets, while his wide travels provide the backdrop and colour for much of Seferis’s writing.
As well as Strophe (1931), his early poetry includes E Sterna (The Cistern, 1932), and Mythistorema (1935). Later collections include Tetradio Gymnasmaton (Book of Exercises, 1940), Emerologio Katastromatos (Logbook I, 1940), Emerologio Katastromatos B (Logbook II, 1944), Kihle (Thrush, 1947), Emerologio Katastromatos Γ (Logbook III, 1955) and Tria Krypha Poiemata (Three Secret Poems, 1966).
Seferis first became acquainted with Eliot in London in Christmas 1931, when he found a copy of the poem ‘Marina’ in a bookshop on Oxford Street and was struck by its Mediterranean feeling. He published his translation of Eliot’s poetry in 1936 in The Waste Land and Other Poems, prefaced by his first essay in print, ‘Introduction to TS Eliot’, itself a major event in modern Greek literature. Seferis also translated WB Yeats, DH Lawrence, Ezra Pound and WH Auden.
In 1963, Seferis became the first Greek to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. He received several honorary doctorates from Cambridge (1960), Oxford (1964), the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (1964), and Princeton (1965).
I believe his poem ‘Epiphany, 1937’ shows strong influence from Eliot’s Epiphany poem ‘The Journey of the Magi’. In the Orthodox Church, the Baptism of Christ is principal theme in celebrating the Feast of the Epiphany. While Eliot’s poem draws on the Epiphany theme of the Visit of Magi, these two poems share similar imagery, although Seferis is writing in a secular, non-religious way.
The poem starts by addressing a second-person singular, as a shared reminiscence of a locus amoenus, with the sea flowering and the mountains in the moon’s waning (verses1-5).
As the reader proceeds from this introductory section to the main part of the poem, summer’s eutopia gradually yields to an icier landscape, culminating with the terse third-person closure: ‘The snow and the water frozen in the hoofmarks of the horses.’
The whole poem can be read as the personal, almost internal, voice of a lone walker, traveller, or hiker who at times encounters other, equally lonely, walking figures during his journey. The speaker is travelling among yellow trees, climbing the mountains, his road having no end, having no relief, at times meeting a woman bent as she walks giving her child the breast, or a man who walks blindly across the snows of silence.
A second-person singular shows up at key positions of this main section, following or preceding the recurring phrase ‘I’ve kept a rein on my life.’ Who is this second-person singular? The identity seems to fluctuate along the flow of the poem, at times appearing as the distant nostalgic memory of the beloved, at other times as an alternative to the speaker’s own persona, now addressing himself in the second person
One eventually realises that even if the whole poem is nothing but the utterance of a first-person speaker in love, this is love experienced in sheer loneliness.
With the date 1937, Seferis offers a landmark in his own life. In that year, he was the Greek consul in Korçë (Κορυτσά, Korytsa) in south-east Albania, near the border with Greece. It had once been one of the wealthiest communities in northern Epirus, Greek had remained the language of business and trade, and it was briefly held by Greece during the opening years of World War I.
During the summer before his posting to Korçë, Seferis had fallen deeply in love with Marika Zannou, the wife of Andreas Londos, a former naval officer, and the mother of two girls. Their affair began during mutual holidays on the island of Aegina, but was cut short when Seferis returned to Athens in September 1936 and found he had been appointed to Albania. He endured the winter of 1936-1937 in isolation, writing several times a week to his beloved Maro, then still unhappily attached to Andreas Londos back in Greece.
Perhaps ‘Epiphany, 1937’ marks an epiphanic landmark in the writer’s his own poetic itinerary. The word epiphany (ἐπιφάνεια, epiphania) has very specific reference points too. Epiphanies are moments of revelation. But linking this noun with the year in the title ‘Epiphany, 1937’ also seems to refer to the Feast of the Epiphany on 6 January, when the Greek Orthodox Church celebrates the baptism of Jesus by Saint John in the Jordan.
The continuing presence of water in Epiphany evokes this feast, where immersion in water is combined with bestowing identity on the person being baptised. January also provides the setting for the ice-covered landscape of the main part of the poem.
In classical Greek literature, epiphanies are associated with acquiring an authoritative poetic identity. In Hesiod’s Theogony, for example, the anonymous shepherd pasturing his flock on Mount Helicon appears in his own poem with the name Hesiod only at the moment when the Muses’ epiphany to him is being narrated.
In January 1968, 31 years after Seferis completed ‘Epiphany, 1937’, the composer Mikis Theodorakis conceived of it as a choral piece, Επιφάνια-Αβέρωφ (Epiphania-Averof), naming the cantata after the prison in central in Athens. He had been detained there since August 1967, after the colonels right-wing junta had seized power on 21 April 1967, and was denied the Christmas amnesty extended to many other political prisoners in December 1967.
Gail Holst’s book, Theodorakis: Myth and Politics in Modern Greek Music (Amsterdam, 1980), shows that for Theodorakis setting the entire ‘Epiphany, 1937’ to music was a tour de force, his own epiphanic moment in the junta’s jail cells.
Theodorakis worked on the poem as a cantata to be performed with the help of his fellow prisoners. Each evening, while other prisoners listened to the radio in a communal hall from 7:30 to 8:30, Theodorakis used the hour to train his choir of 10 prisoners.
The poem’s first-person-singular refrain Κράτησα τη ζωή μου (Kratêsa tê zôê mou) is translated into English by Keeley and Sherrard as ‘I’ve kept a rein on my life’. It could also be translated as ‘I’ve kept a hold on my life’. In this refrain, Theodorakis heard a multiplicity of voices, the universality of their utterance further enhanced by the composer’s preference for a mixed chorus of both men and women.
This recurring phrase throughout the main part of the poem struck Theodorakis’s sensitivity and curiosity. Seferis’ refrain creates a sense of monotony and repetition and at the same time the sense of one carrying something heavy.
Epiphany, 1937, by George Seferis, translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard:
The flowering sea and the mountains in the moon’s waning
the great stone close to the Barbary figs and the asphodels
the jar that refused to go dry at the end of day
and the closed bed by the cypress trees and your hair
golden; the stars of the Swan and that other star, Aldebaran.
I’ve kept a rein on my life, kept a rein on my life, travelling
among yellow trees in driving rain
on silent slopes loaded with beech leaves,
no fire on their peaks; it’s getting dark.
I’ve kept a rein on my life; on your left hand a line
a scar at your knee, perhaps they exist
on the sand of the past summer perhaps
they remain there where the north wind blew as I hear
an alien voice around the frozen lake.
The faces I see do not ask questions nor does the woman
bent as she walks giving her child the breast.
I climb the mountains; dark ravines; the snow-covered
plain, into the distance stretches the snow-covered plain, they ask nothing
neither time shut up in dumb chapels nor
hands outstretched to beg, nor the roads.
I’ve kept a rein on my life whispering in a boundless silence
I no longer know how to speak nor how to think; whispers
like the breathing of the cypress tree that night
like the human voice of the night sea on pebbles
like the memory of your voice saying ‘happiness’.
I close my eyes looking for the secret meeting-place of the waters
under the ice the sea’s smile, the closed wells
groping with my veins for those veins that escape me
there where the water-lilies end and that man
who walks blindly across the snows of silence.
I’ve kept a rein on my life, with him, looking for the water that touches you
heavy drops on green leaves, on your face
in the empty garden, drops in the motionless reservoir
striking a swan dead in its white wings
living trees and your eyes riveted.
This road has no end, has no relief, however hard you try
to recall your childhood years, those who left, those
lost in sleep, in the graves of the sea,
however much you ask bodies you’ve loved to stoop
under the harsh branches of the plane trees there
where a ray of the sun, naked, stood still
and a dog leapt and your heart shuddered,
the road has no relief;
I’ve kept a rein on my life.
The snow
and the water frozen in the hoofmarks of the horses.
Κρατησα Τη Ζωη Μου, Γιωργοσ Σεφερησ: Επιφανια
Τ' ανθισμένο πέλαγο και τα βουνά στη χάση του φεγγαριού
η μεγάλη πέτρα κοντά στις αραποσυκιές και τ' ασφοδίλια
το σταμνί πού δεν ήθελε να στερέψει στο τέλος της μέρας
και το κλειστό κρεββάτι κοντά στα κυπαρίσσια και τα μαλλιά σου
χρυσά· τ' άστρα του Κύκνου κι εκείνο τ' άστρο ο Αλδεβαράν.
Κράτησα τη ζωή μου,
κράτησα τη ζωή μου ταξιδεύοντας
ανάμεσα σε κίτρινα δέντρα κατά το πλάγιασμα της βροχής
σε σιωπηλές πλαγιές φορτωμένες με τα φύλλα της οξυάς,
καμμιά φωτιά στην κορυφή τους· βραδυάζει.
Κράτησα τη ζωή μου· στ' αριστερό σου χέρι μια γραμμή
μια χαρακιά στο γόνατό σου, τάχα να υπάρχουν
στην άμμο τού περασμένου καλοκαιριού τάχα
να μένουν εκεί πού φύσηξε ό βοριάς καθώς ακούω
γύρω στην παγωμένη λίμνη την ξένη φωνή.
Τα πρόσωπα πού βλέπω δε ρωτούν, μήτε η γυναίκα
περπατώντας σκυφτή, βυζαίνοντας το παιδί της.
Ανεβαίνω τα βουνά· μελανιασμένες λαγκαδιές· o χιονισμένος
κάμπος, ώς πέρα ο χιονισμένος κάμπος, τίποτε δε ρωτούν,
μήτε o καιρός κλειστός σε βουβά ερμοκκλήσια, μήτε
τα χέρια που απλώνονται για να γυρέψουν, κι οι δρόμοι.
Κράτησα τη ζωή μου ψιθυριστά μέσα στην απέραντη σιωπή,
δεν ξέρω πια να μιλήσω, μήτε να συλλογιστώ· ψίθυροι
σαν την ανάσα του κυπαρισσιού τη νύχτα εκείνη
σαν την ανθρώπινη φωνή της νυχτερινής θάλασσας στα χαλίκια
σαν την ανάμνηση της φωνής σου λέγοντας «ευτυχία».
Κλείνω τα μάτια γυρεύοντας το μυστικό συναπάντημα των νερών
κάτω απ τον πάγο το χαμογέλιο τής θάλασσας τα κλειστά πηγάδια
ψηλαφώντας με τις δικές μου φλέβες τις φλέβες εκείνες πού μου ξεφεύγουν
εκεί πού τελειώνουν τα νερολούλουδα κι αυτός ό άνθρωπος
πού βηματίζει τυφλός πάνω στο χιόνι τής σιωπής.
Κρατησα τη Ζωη Μου -Β
Κράτησα τη ζωή μου, μαζί του, γυρεύοντας το νερό πού σ' αγγίζει
στάλες βαρειές πάνω στα πράσινα φύλλα, στο πρόσωπό σου,
μέσα στον άδειο κήπο, στάλες στην ακίνητη δεξαμενή,
βρίσκοντας έναν κύκνο νεκρό μέσα στα κάτασπρα φτερά του,
δέντρα ζωντανά και τα μάτια σου προσηλωμένα.
Ο δρόμος αυτός δεν τελειώνει, δεν έχει αλλαγή, όσο γυρεύεις
να θυμηθείς τα παιδικά σου χρόνια, εκείνους πού έφυγαν, εκείνους
πού χάθηκαν μέσα στον ύπνο· τους πελαγίσιους τάφους,
όσο ζητάς τα σώματα πού αγάπησες να σκύψουν
κάτω από τα σκληρά κλωνάρια τών πλατάνων εκεί
πού στάθηκε μια αχτίδα τού ήλιου γυμνωμένη
και σκίρτησε ένας σκύλος και φτεροκόπησε ή καρδιά σου,
ο δρόμος δεν έχει αλλαγή·
Κράτησα τη ζωή μου.
Το χιόνι και το νερό παγωμένο στα πατήματα των αλόγων.
• Copyright acknowledgement: George Seferis, ‘Epiphany, 1937’ from Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard (trans and edit), George Seferis, Collected Poems (Princeton: Princeton University Press, revised ed, 1995).
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