The Thammasat University Library has acquired a new book that should be useful for students interested in European literature, Greece, poetry, diplomacy, and related fields.

George Seferis: Collected Poems offers a representative choice of works by the Nobel Prizewinning Greek poet George Seferis.

The TU Library collection owns other books about different aspects of Greek poetry.

Born in Urla near Smyrna in Asia Minor, part of the Ottoman Empire (now İzmir, Turkey), Seferis was a career diplomat in the Greek Foreign Service, and served as Greece’s Ambassador to the United Kingdom.

A presentation speech at the Swedish Academy praised him in these terms:

This year’s Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to the Greek poet Giorgos Seferis, who was born in 1900 at Smyrna, which he left at an early age to accompany his family to Athens. After the Greeks were driven out of Asia Minor, and Seferis’s home town had gone up in flames, homelessness – ever the fate of an oppressed and scattered people – was to play a decisive role during his adult years in more ways than one.

Seferis studied in Paris, then entered the diplomatic service, went into exile with the Free Greek Government when Greece was occupied in 1941, and was moved about from country to country during the Second World War, when he served his country in Crete, in Cairo, in South Africa, in Turkey, and in the Middle East. After six years as ambassador in London, he retired last year and returned to Athens to devote himself entirely to his literary work.

Seferis’s poetic production is not large, but because of the uniqueness of its thought and style and the beauty of its language, it has become a lasting symbol of all that is indestructible in the Hellenic affirmation of life. […]

When reading Seferis we are forcibly reminded of a fact that is sometimes forgotten: geographically, Greece is not only a peninsula but also a world of water and foam, strewn with myriad islands, an ancient sea kingdom, the perilous and stormy home of the mariner. This Greece is the constant background of his poetry, in which it is conjured up as the vision of a grandeur both harsh and tender. Seferis does this with a language of rare subtlety, both rhythmical and metaphorical.

It has rightly been said that he, better than anyone else, has interpreted the mystery of the stones, of the dead fragments of marble, and of the silent, smiling statues. In his evocative poems, figures from ancient Greek mythology appear together with recent events in the Mediterranean’s bloody theatre of war. His poetry sometimes seems difficult to interpret, particularly because Seferis is reluctant to expose his inner self, preferring to hide behind a mask of anonymity.

He often expresses his grief and bitterness through the medium of a central narrative figure, a kind of Odysseus with features borrowed from the old seamen in the lost Smyrna of the poet’s youth. But in his hollow voice is dramatized much of Greece’s historical fatality, its shipwrecks and its rescues, its disasters and its valour. Technically, Seferis has received vital impulses from T. S. Eliot, but underneath the tone is unmistakably his own, often carrying a broken echo of the music from an ancient Greek chorus.

Seferis once described himself, “I am a monotonous and obstinate man who, for twenty years, has not ceased to say the same things over and over again.” There is perhaps some truth in this description, but one must remember that the message he feels bound to convey is inseparable from the intellectual life of his generation as it finds itself confronted with ancient Greek civilization, a heritage that presents a formidable challenge to the impoverished heir.

Seferis stated at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm in 1963:

I feel at this moment that I am a living contradiction. The Swedish Academy has decided that my efforts in a language famous through the centuries but not widespread in its present form are worthy of this high distinction. It is paying homage to my language – and in return I express my gratitude in a foreign language. I hope you will accept the excuses I am making to myself.

I belong to a small country. A rocky promontory in the Mediterranean, it has nothing to distinguish it but the efforts of its people, the sea, and the light of the sun. It is a small country, but its tradition is immense and has been handed down through the centuries without interruption. The Greek language has never ceased to be spoken. It has undergone the changes that all living things experience, but there has never been a gap. This tradition is characterized by love of the human; justice is its norm.

Here are excerpts from poems by Seferis, as posted online:

An Old Man on the River Bank

 

And yet we should consider how we go forward.

To feel is not enough, nor to think, nor to move

nor to put your body in danger in front of an old loophole

when scalding oil and molten lead furrow the walls. […]

 

I want nothing more than to speak simply, to be granted that grace.

Because we’ve loaded even our song with so much music that it’s slowly sinking

and we’ve decorated our art so much that its features have been eaten away by gold

and it’s time to say our few words because tomorrow our soul sets sail.

 

If pain is human we are not human beings merely to suffer pain;

that’s why I think so much these days about the great river,

this meaning that moves forward among herbs and greenery

and beasts that graze and drink, men who sow and harvest,

great tombs even and small habitations of the dead.

This current that goes its way and that is not so different from the blood of men,

from the eyes of men when they look straight ahead without fear in their hearts,

without the daily tremor for trivialities or even for important things;

when they look straight ahead like the traveller who is used to gauging his way by the stars,

not like us, the other day, gazing at the enclosed garden of a sleepy Arab house,

behind the lattices the cool garden changing shape, growing larger and smaller,

we too changing, as we gazed, the shape of our desire and our hearts,

at noon’s precipitation, we the patient dough of a world that throws us out and kneads us,

caught in the embroidered nets of a life that was as it should be and then became dust and sank into the sands

leaving behind it only that vague dizzying sway of a tall palm tree.

*

The Companions in Hades

 

Since we still had some hardtack

how stupid of us

to go ashore and eat

the Sun’s slow cattle,

 

for each was a castle

you’d have to battle

forty years, till you’d become

a hero and a star!

 

On the earth’s back we hungered,

but when we’d eaten well

we fell to these lower regions

mindless and satisfied.

*

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)