Patrick Comerford
With some time on my hands in Iraklion one Saturday afternoon, between visiting some churches and having a late lunch with an old friend, I found myself in the narrow streets of the old town, between Saint Minas Cathedral and the Martinengo Bastion with the grave of Nikos Kazantzakis.
It was a sunny, sleepy afternoon, and I was searching for a taverna or café where we could have lunch. In these side streets, none of the restaurants had yet opened – perhaps it was too early in the afternoon on a holiday weekend; perhaps families were too busy, preparing for their Easter celebrations.
But as I wandered around, almost aimlessly, after visiting the grave of Kazantzakis, I came across some colourful street art in the streets of the old town and reminders of the poetry of two great Greek poets, George Seferis and Odysseas Elytis.
Only days before, I had been musing on the poetry of both Seferis and Elytis on the journey from Iraklion Airport to Rethymnon, where I was spending Holy Week and Easter on a personal ‘mini retreat’.
Vourvourladikon looks like an attractive and inviting restaurant lose to the Church of Agios Mathaios Sinaites, offering Greek and Mediterranean cuisine and known too for its decor.
One large bright blue board facing the street is decorated with the words of ‘The Jasmine’, a haiku or short poem by George Seferis:
Είτε βραδιάζει,
είτε φέγγει,
μένει λευκό, το γιασεμί.
Whether it gets dark
or light
the jasmine stays
always white.
(– translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard)
Giorgos Seferis (1900-1971) is a major figure in Greek literature and in 1963 he became the first Greek Nobel laureate for literature. He has had a lasting influence on Greek culture and identity, and many of his poems have been set to music or have inspired the Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis including ‘I Kept Hold of My Life’, which became an expression of resistance to the colonels’ junta from 1967 to 1974.
George Seferis was born Giorgos Seferiadis in Smyrna (now Izmir) in Asia Minor and went to school in Smyrna and Athens, before his family moved to Paris in 1918. He joined the Greek Foreign Ministry in Athens in 1925 . He had a long and successful diplomatic career, that began with postings in England (1931-1934), where he was introduced to TS Eliot and Ezra 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 London 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. He became a popular hero for his resistance to the regime, and his widow Marika cut off her hair and flung it into his grave.
On an old wooden door in front of the restaurant, but half-hidden by spring growth, is a quotation of two lines from Το Μονογραμμα (‘The Monogram’), one of his great love poems by the poet Odysseas Elytis (1911-1996):
και στην αγάπη ξέρω
Να μπαίνω σαν Πανσέληνος
and in love I know
how to bathe like a full moon
Elytis was born in Iraklion, and Mikis Theodorakis has set many of his poems to music and sung by one of Greece’s most loved singers, Maria Farantouri.
His great epic poem, Το Άξιον Εστί (To Axion Esti, It is Worthy), published in 1959, is a hymn to creation inspired by the Greek Orthodox liturgy and the 17th century epic poetry of Crete, including the Erotokritos (Ἐρωτόκριτος) by Vikentios Kornaros. It is a composition of song and praise that explores the essence of his being and the identity of his country and people. Theodorakis set the Axion Esti to music in 1964, and it became immensely popular throughout Greece. This setting by Theodorakis later contributed to Elytis receiving the Nobel Prize.
During the colonels’ junta, Elytis lived in exile in Paris (1969-1972). After returning, he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1979. He died on 18 March 1996, at the age of 84, and was buried at the First National Cemetery.
In his poem Το Μονογραμμα (‘The Monogram’), Odysseas Elytis also refers to jasmine flowers and it is set in Crete in Easter:
High on the veranda or under the garden’s cobblestones
With the horse of the saint and the egg of Easter
Like from a wrecked wall painting
Big as the little life wanted you,
The poem also refers to wall paintings, and close to the restaurant are two other works of street art that could also have been inspired by lines in Το Μονογραμμα (‘The Monogram’):
On the wall, the Mermaid with tresses unbraided
The cat that watched us in the dark
Odysseas Elytis, ‘The Monogram’ (Το Μονογραμμα):
I will always mourn – hear me? – for you, alone, in Paradise.
I.
Fate, like a switchman, will turn
Elsewhere the lines of the palm
Time will concede for one moment
How else, since man loves and is loved
The heavens will perform our insides
And innocence will strike the world
With the scythe of death’s blackness.
II.
I mourn the sun and I mourn the time that comes
Without us and I sing of others who’ve passed
If this is true
The bodies addressed and boats sweetly gliding by
The guitars that flicker under the waters
The ‘believe me’ and the ‘don’t’
One in the air and one in the music
The two small animals, our hands
That tried to climb one another in secret
The flowerpot cool through the open garden gate
And the parts of sea coming together
Beyond the dry-stone wall, beyond the hedge
The windflower you held in your hand
Whose purple shuddered three times for three days above the waterfall
If this is all true, I sing
The wooden beam and square tapestry
On the wall, the Mermaid with tresses unbraided
The cat that watched us in the dark
A child with incense and the red cross
The hour when night falls on unapproachable rocks
I mourn the garment that I fingered and the world came to me.
III.
Like so I speak of you and me
Because I love you and in love I know
How to enter in like the full moon
From everywhere, about your small foot in the boundless sheets
How to pluck the jasmine – and I have the power
To blow the wind and take you in sleep through the moon’s passages and the sea’s secret colonnade
– Hypnotized tree of silvering spiders
The waves have heard of you
How you caress, how you kiss
Around the neck, around the bay
How you whisper the ‘what’ and the ‘eh’
Always we the light and the shadow
Always you the little star and always I the dark vessel
Always you the harbor and always I the light shining from the right
The wet jetty and the glint on the oars
High on the vine-laden house
The bound roses and cooling water
Always you the stone statue and always I the shadow that grows
You the hanging shutter and I the wind that blows it open
Because I love you and I love you
Always you the coin and I the worship that gives it value
So much the night, so much the humming in the wind
So much the mist in the air, so much the stillness
Around the despotic sea
Heavenly arch full of stars
So much your faintest breath
That I no longer have anything else
Within these four walls, this ceiling and floor
But to call for you and for my own voice to hit me
To smell your scent and for people to fear
Because people can’t bear the untried
And foreign and it’s early you hear
It’s early still in the world my love
To speak of you and me.
IV.
It’s early still in this world, do you hear me
They haven’t tamed the beast, do you hear me
My wasted blood and sharp, hear me, knife
Like a ram running across the heavens
Breaking the tails of comets, hear me
I am, hear me
I love you, hear me
I hold you and I take you and I dress you
In the white gown of Ophelia, hear me
Where do you leave me, where do you go and who, hear me
Holds your hand above the flood
The enormous flames and volcanic lava
Will bury us, hear me, and the day will come
A thousand years later when we will be, hear me
Shining fossils, hear me
For the heartlessness of men to burnish, hear me
And throw above them in a thousand pieces
And on the waters one by one, hear me
I measure my bitter pebbles, hear me
And time is a great church, hear me
Where once the forms
Of saints
Shed true tears, hear me
The bells ring loudly, hear me
I cross a deep ford
Where the angels wait with candles and funeral psalms
I go nowhere, hear me
Neither or both together, hear me
This flower of the storm and, hear me
Of love
Once and for all, we pick it
And it never comes to flower anywhere else, hear me
On another earth, on another star, hear me
There isn’t soil, there isn’t air
That we touch, the same, hear me
And no gardener was ever so lucky
To produce such a flower from such a winter, hear me
And such northern winds, only we, hear me, In the middle of the sea
Only from the mere wish for love, hear me
Raised an entire island, hear me
With caves and capes and crags in bloom
Listen, listen
Who speaks in the waters and who cries, hear
Who seeks the other, who calls, hear
I am the one who calls and I am the one who cries, you hear me
I love you and I love you, hear me.
V.
I have spoken of you in old times
With wet nurses and veteran rebels
From where your beastly sorrow comes
The brilliance of trembling water on your face
And why it must be that I come near you
I who don’t want love but want the wind
But want the gallop of the uncovered, upright sea
And none had heard of you
Neither dittany nor wild mushroom
Of Cretan highlands, none
Only God grants and guides your hand to me
Here and there, carefully around the whole turn
Of the face’s seashore, the bay, the hair
On the hill rippling off to the left
Your body in the stance of the solitary pine
Eyes of pride and of transparent
Depth, in the house with an old china cabinet
Of yellow lace and cypress wood
Alone I wait for where you’ll first appear
High on the veranda or under the garden’s cobblestones
With the horse of the saint and the egg of Easter
Like from a wrecked wall painting
Big as the little life wanted you,
To hold within a little candle the stentorian volcanic glow
So no one will have seen or heard
Anything about you in the wilderness of dilapidated houses
Neither the buried ancestors at the edge of the garden fence
Nor the old woman with all her herbs
Of you, only I, and maybe the music
That is concealed inside me but shall return more strongly
Of you, the unformed breast of twelve years
Turning toward the future and the red crater
Of you, a bitter odor finds the body
And like a pin punctures memory
And here the soil, here the doves, here our ancient earth.
VI.
I have seen much and the earth to my mind seems more beautiful
More beautiful in the golden breath
The sharp stone, more beautiful
The dark blue of the isthmuses and the roofs among the waves
More beautiful, the rays where you pass without stepping
Unbeaten like the goddess of Samothrace atop the sea’s hills
Like so I have seen you and that will suffice
For all and time will be exonerated
In the wake of your passage
My soul like a green dolphin follows
And plays with the white and azure
Triumph, triumph, where I have been conquered
Before love and together
With the hibiscus and passion-flower
Go, go, and let me be lost
Alone, and let the sun be a newborn that you hold.
Alone, and let me be the homeland that mourns
Let it be the word that I sent to hold the laurel leaf for you
Alone, the lone, strong wind and the full
Pebble under the eyelid of dark depths
The fisherman who caught then threw Paradise back into Time.
VII.
In Paradise I have marked out an island
Akin to you and a house by the sea
With a large bed and a small door
I have thrown an echo into the depths
To see myself every morning when I rise
Half to see you passing through the waters
Half to weep for you in Paradise.
(– translated by Aliki Caloyeras)
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