Patrick Comerford
In recent weeks, I have been a series of occasional blog postings and photographs of a dozen modern sculptures in the streets and parks of Thessaloniki, the second city of Greece. In a posting on Thursday ( October 06), I looked at a marble monument that honours Sokratis Karantinos (1906-1979), a prominent theatre director and critic who was the first artistic director of the National Theatre of Northern Greece (NTNG) in the 1960s.
The inscriptions on the sculpture include a dedication to Sokratis Karantinos and a poignant verse by the Nobel Prize winning poet George Seferis:
Θυμότανε κανείς γέροντες δασκάλους που μας άφησαν ορφανούς
One remembered old teachers who left us orphaned
This haunting quotation is from the closing stanza of ‘The Last Day’, a powerful poem written by Seferis in Athens in February 1939. The line expresses a profound sense of spiritual and cultural abandonment. For Seferis, the ‘old teachers’ (or elders/spiritual leaders) represent the guiding authority of tradition, wisdom, and moral stability. By leaving the younger generation ‘orphaned’ they left them without direction in a broken world.
The poem was written on the brink of World War II and during the oppressive Metaxas dictatorship and captures a pervasive sense of powerlessness, impending doom, and total annihilation. The line quoted on the sculpture highlights a deep disappointment with the previous generation, whose cowardice, political missteps, or silence left ordinary people completely vulnerable to the oncoming historical catastrophe.
George Seferis (1900-1971) was a poet, Nobel laureate and diplomat, and many of his poems became popular throughout the 1960s and 1970s when they were set to music by the composer Mikis Theodorakis and sung by artists like Maria Farantouri, turning his poems into songs of protest and resistance.
In recent days, I have also turned to his poem ‘Days of June ’41’, written by Seferis 85 years ago as he fled first to Crete in 1941 during World War II, and then went into exile in Alexandria and South Africa. This poem, later included in his collection Logbook II (Ημερολόγιο καταστρώματος Β), is datelined ‘Crete – Alexandria – South Africa, May-September ’41’.
The poem is set primarily in Alexandria but in it Seferis expresses his pain for Crete and the longing of an exile:
After the Germans had taken Crete
The new moon came out over Alexandria
with the old moon in her arms
while we were walking towards the Gate of the Sun
in the heart’s darkness – three friends.
However, unlike many other well-known poems by Seferis, ‘Days of June ’41’ was never set to music by Theodorakis and so never recorded by Maria Farantouri. But it is on the curriculum in second level schools and is well-known among many people in Crete because of its references to the island.
George Seferis (Γιώργος Σεφέρης) 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 London (1931-1934), where he was introduced to Eliot and Pound, and Albania (1936-1938), where he first met his future wife Marika Zannou.
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 Maria (‘Maro’) Zannou, the mother of two young daughters from her previous marriage to Andreas Londos.
He returned to liberated Athens in 1944, and continued to work in the Foreign Ministry, with 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.
In 1963, Seferis became the first Greek writer to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. He is one of the two Greek poets to have been honoured with the Nobel Prize for Literature – the other poet is Odysseas Elytis (1911-1996), who was born in Iraklion in Crete, and together Seferis and Elytis can be credited with the modernisation of Greek literature.He received several honorary doctorates from Cambridge (1960), Oxford (1964), the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (1964), and Princeton (1965).
After the colonels’ coup in 1967, Seferis went into voluntary seclusion and many of his poems were banned by the regime, including the musical versions written and arranged by 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 was buried in the First Cemetery in Athens. ‘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 Maria cut off her hair and flung it into his grave.
He has commemorative blue plaques on two of his homes in London – the Greek Ambassador’s residence at 51 Upper Brook Street, off Grosvenor Square, and 7 Sloane Avenue.
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 his writing.
As well as Strophe (1931), his early poems include 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 TS 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 moment in modern Greek literature. Seferis also translated WB Yeats, DH Lawrence, Ezra Pound and WH Auden.
Seferis arrived in Chania from Athens in April 1941 as German Nazi forces were sweeping through the Greek mainland. As the Nazi army advanced towards Athens in 1941, the Greek Prime Minister of the day, Alexandros Koryzis, died by suicide on 18 April. He was succeeded as Prime Minister on 21 April by Emmanuel Tsouderos (Εμμανουήλ Τσουδερός) (1882-1956), who was born in Rethymnon in Crete.
A day later, a newly-married Seferis arrived in Crete on 22 April 1941 as part of the team preparing the way for a Free Greek government that would go into exile. As the army command prepared to capitulate, a defiant and heroic Tsouderos fled from Athens to Crete with King George II on 29 April 1941. Back in his native Crete, Tsouderos reorganised the Greek forces to resist the Germans.
In Chania, Seferis stayed at the Hôtel Ellas (Hotel Hellas). He was the secretary to Tsouderos’s Minister of Press, Emmanouil Nikolaoudis, and supervised the publication of the very first edition of the Government Gazette printed outside mainland Greece.
Just days before arriving in Crete, Seferis married Maria ‘Maro’ Zannou in Athens on 10 April 1941. Their time at the Hotel Hellas in Chania was brief, but Sfereis documented their presence there in a brief, pencil-written note to his close friend, the author Lawrence Durrell, written on the back of a page torn out of the hotel’s guest book.
But Seferis spent only three weeks in Chania. Tsouderos fled again during the Battle of Crete and headed the Greek government in exile until 13 April 1944. Seferis and his wife Maria Zannou escaped Crete by ship to Alexandria on 16 May 1941, four days before the German airborne invasion of Crete and the beginning of the Battle of Crete.
Over 25 years later, Seferis returned to Crete again briefly in April 1967 to read his poems and to give a talk to the Lyceum of Greek Women, founded in in 1911 by Kalliroi Siganou Parren, who was born in Rethymnon. It was one of his last prominent public appearances in Greece before the colonels seized power on 21 April 1967 and forced him into an outspoken, self-imposed public silence and resistance.
Unlike other well-loved and well-known poems by Seferis, such as ‘Arnisi / Sto Perigiali’ or ‘Epiphany’, which were set to music by composers like Mikis Theodorakis, ‘Days of June ’41’ has no popular musical setting.
Seferis wrote ‘Days of June ’41’ while he was fleeing the Nazi invasion of Greece, moving first to Crete, then to Alexandria and moving on to South Africa with the Greek government-in-exile.
Despite spending less than a month on Crete, for Seferis it had become ‘the beautiful island’, ‘the calm island’, ‘the strong, innocent island’, and you can hear his pain as he thinks out loud of how Crete is bleeding, how the people are being killed, their ‘bodies like broken branches, / like roots uprooted’:
… the beautiful island is bleeding,
wounded; the calm island – the strong, innocent island.
And the bodies like broken branches,
like roots uprooted.
The poem reflects displacement, exile, the loss of youth and physical vitality (‘we believed in the omnipotence of the body’), the trauma of war in Crete (‘the beautiful island is bleeding, wounded’), and wandering through blacked-out war-time Alexandria with his close friends.
Μέρες του Ιουνίου ’41, Γιώργος Σεφέρης
Βγήκε το νέο φεγγάρι στην Αλεξάνδρεια
κρατώντας το παλιό στην αγκαλιά του
κι εμείς πηγαίνοντας κατά την Πόρτα του Ήλιου
μες στο σκοτάδι της καρδιάς — τρεις φίλοι.
Ποιός θέλει τώρα να λουστεί στα νερά του Πρωτέα;
Τη μεταμόρφωση τη γυρέψαμε στα νιάτα μας
με πόθους που έπαιζαν σαν τα μεγάλα ψάρια
σε πέλαγα που φύραναν ξαφνικά·
πιστεύαμε στην παντοδυναμία του κορμιού.
Και τώρα βγήκε το νέο φεγγάρι αγκαλιασμένο
με το παλιό· με τ’ όμορφο νησί ματώνοντας
λαβωμένο· το ήρεμο νησί, το δυνατό νησί, το αθώο.
Και τα κορμιά σαν τσακισμένα κλαδιά
και σαν ξεριζωμένες ρίζες.
Η δίψα μας
ένιππος φύλακας μαρμαρωμένος
στη σκοτεινή πόρτα του Ήλιου
δεν ξέρει να ζητήσει τίποτε: φυλάγεται
ξενιτεμένη εδώ τριγύρω
κοντά στον τάφο του Μεγάλου Αλεξάντρου.
Κρήτη – Αλεξάνδρεια – Νότιος Αφρική, Μάης ‒ Σεπτέμβρης 1941
Days of ’41’, George Seferis
After the Germans had taken Crete
The new moon came out over Alexandria
with the old moon in her arms
while we were walking towards the Gate of the Sun
in the heart’s darkness – three friends.
Who wants to bathe in the waters of Proteus now?
We looked for metamorphosis in our youth
with desires that played like big fish
in seas suddenly shrinking;
we believed in the body’s omnipotence.
And now the new moon has come out embracing
the old; and the beautiful island is bleeding,
wounded; the calm island – the strong, innocent island.
And the bodies like broken branches,
like roots uprooted.
Our thirst
a guard on horseback turned to marble
at the dark Gate of the Sun –
he doesn’t know how to ask or anything: he stands guard
exiled somewhere around here
near the tomb of Alexander the Great.
(Translation © Björn Thegeby, 2020)
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