The New Criterion

All cities are architectural conglomerates of their past, but few have the historical reach of Athens. Within a five-mile radius, one can view the Parthenon (completed in 438 B.C.), the remains of the Temple of Zeus Olympios (begun in the sixth century B.C. but only completed during the Roman Emperor Hadrian’s rule in A.D. 131–2), the post-Byzantine Athens Cathedral (finished in 1862), and the postmodern New Acropolis Museum (opened in June 2009). Coming across these various buildings, built for their various purposes, one might sense the great history that makes Athens its contemporary whole. Or one might feel like Claude in Arthur Hugh Clough’s Amours de Voyage, who saw in Rome neither the remnants of a great civilization, nor the vibrancy of the living Mediterranean, but “all the incongruous things of past incompatible ages”: ruins and remains of civilizations which lie at the feet of modernity as if they are one solid thing.

The Greek Poets: Homer to the Present attempts to draw out the congruity and compatibility of poetry written in the Greek language over the course of some three thousand years. It is divided into four sections: Classical Antiquity, Byzantium, Early Modern, and Twentieth Century. The poems are translated into English by one hundred and twenty translators, and follow an editorial preference “for translations in a contemporary mode.”

What’s immediately unclear is whether this anthology is about the Greek poetry tradition, the poets who wrote poetry in Greek, the poetry written in Greek, or all three. The differences are slight but important. The title emphasizes “poets,” but the four section headers point towards the different societies in which the poets lived and worked. The basic premise of the book is that there is continuity between the Byzantine poet Kassia (early ninth century) and the post-Surrealist poet Miltos Sachtouris (1919–2005). The truth is: there is and there isn’t. They shared an alphabet and some root words, but not precisely the same language and definitely not the same definitions of what “Greek” meant.

Kassia was a Roman, and would have considered herself as such (the designation “Byzantine” was first applied by sixteenth-century scholars and has been used since to identify the culture and history of the Eastern Roman Empire). She would have spoken Greek and also, likely, Latin. The center of her world was Constantinople, Constantine’s city. And while the Byzantines placed great emphasis on Classical Greece in their literature—to the extent that the statesman and philosopher Theodore Metochites (1270–1332) wrote that the great men of antiquity had said all to perfection and there was nothing left to say—they wrote their poetry in a language that was pronounced so differently from what they read in the classics that they had to modify ancient forms and rhythmic effects to suit their poetic ends.

Sachtouris was the citizen of a modern nation, Greece, the center of which is Athens, though the Greeks spent a good fifth of the twentieth century trying to reclaim Constantinople. Kassia and Sachtouris do have some things in common. Sachtouris drew on the Byzantine period in his poetry, particularly on its strong folk tradition. He treated religion, however, with an irony Kassia would never have known, as his world was light-years away from hers. His immediate surroundings were full of the bloodshed and terror of modernity, and he lived through a turbulent era of military dictatorship, war, occupation, civil war, and the Colonels’ junta. He would have recognized the recent economic turmoil as only the latest phase of his country’s difficult connection to modern Europe. For his part, Sachtouris was part of that connection to Europe, or rather another poet trapped between it and the Greek tradition. He turned to Surrealism, as many of his generation did, to reconnect and “update” his tradition to European (that is, Parisian) standards.

Most Greeks today can read but won’t understand Byzantine Greek, let alone Ancient Greek. A friend once suggested to me that the difference between reading Homer and Seferis was similar in English to reading Chaucer and Eliot. But I want to suggest here the difference is far closer to reading Virgil and Montale. The alphabet is the same, some of the words are recognizable, but little else. No one would pick up an anthology titled The Latin Poets: Virgil to the Present and expect to find much continuity. Of course, Italy had the Futurists, who refused any such connection and wanted to destroy the ruins around them. Greece has had no equivalent and instead has banked on tourists wanting to see the old world in the new.

Greece is a country where culture is local and historical, where one can meet a person called Antigone or Euripides in the street. But then one can bump into a Jason or even a Homer in the United States and not make the connection. Modern Greek poets have struggled with this dual-identity. The point is made clear in Sachtouris’s “He Is Not Oedipus,” a poem from his 1948 collection, Ballads:

then silence falls like night in the streets
and the blind man comes out with his cane
children follow on tiptoe
he is not Oedipus
he is Ilias from the vegetable market

The poem illustrates the problem of connecting the classical and the modern, alongside the great disasters of the twentieth-century in Greece, by listing names of local men who are killed in their houses and in the streets: “Kostas killed / Orestes killed / Alexis killed.” These men could be ancient heroes or local schlubs, mixing the ancient with the then-contemporary. But, in the end, “he is not Oedipus,” not the hero but a local, blind to the confusion.

This duality—the knowledge that one is both part of a larger tradition and yet alien from it—is not addressed in the critical commentary. Instead, it takes for granted an historical continuity which is questioned in the poetry itself. Even more problematically, the historical context given is slight. Each section has a two-page introduction, which offers little room for depth of thinking. And the editors have handed over the space for a critical introduction to Robert Hass, who, tasked with introducing three thousand years of poetry he admits he doesn’t know fully (“there was a small gap in my acquaintance with Greek poetry—between Callimachus, who died about 240 B.C., and the great flowering of modern Greek poetry that began with C. P. Cavafy, whose first poems appeared in the 1890s”), comes off gracefully. But for all the good that grace serves to poetry in translation, an introduction needs more.

Without context, continuity is easy. In the case of The Greek Poets, there is a further sense of forced connection, because the language is rendered in contemporary English throughout. The history of Greek, of the development of the Greek language, is absent, so that readers fresh to the tradition might believe the language unchanged for three thousand years. In a traditional English-
language anthology, Chaucer forward, one feels the tension of language developing—without it, there is a stagnancy. Language isn’t the only binding force in an anthology, but it is the single most important one.

But isn’t poetry more than language? One of the contributors to The Greek Poets, Philip Sherrard, thought so. In a 1982 review of Constantine A. Trypanis’s Greek Poetry: From Homer to Seferis, a critical history of poetry written in Greek, Sherrard wrote:

The claim that “Greek poetry constitutes the longest uninterrupted tradition of the Western world” is certainly true if, as is the case in this book, the sole criterion of what constitutes poetic tradition is a linguistic one. . . . But can one define poetic tradition simply in linguistic terms? Surely poetic tradition, if it is to mean anything, must include components other than language.

Unfortunately, Sherrard is not precise on what other than language constitutes poetry (“the expression of a certain sensibility, of a certain mode of apprehending reality”). But his point is valid. Poetry does not develop in a vacuum. Despite some rhyming translations by Daryl Hine and Paul Muldoon in the Classical Antiquity section, for example, rhyme only arrived in Greek literature with the poetry the Crusaders brought east to Constantinople. The great Cavafy himself wrote poems based on Homeric events (interestingly not included), but the language of these poems reflects his reading of Alexander Pope’s translation of Homer, not Homer’s Greek.

Those seeking a clearer investigation into the development of poetry written in Greek should aim for Constantine Trypanis’s out-of-print anthology The Penguin Book of Greek Verse (1971), with plain prose translations by the editor. Trypanis could be dismissive about the poetry he didn’t admire (and was particularly hard on the Moderns), but the anthology is actually in Greek, so that those familiar with the Greek alphabet can at least see the differences in construction. More importantly, his long introduction places the poetry in historical and geographical context, and notes developments within and between the eras and places in which the poets lived and wrote: He creates a city out of the different lives and works he anthologizes, one that feels lived-in. The Greek Poets: Homer to the Present is oddly ghostly.