Climbing on Words

IN 1912 Smyrna tumbled its terrorized Greek population into the sea; as on the island of Crete earlier and many years later in Cyprus, the people's hatred and suspicion flared and fighting between Turks and Greeks followed. George Seferis had been born at the beginning of the century in the Ionian village of Skala, where he lived until 1914. The ravage delayed his return for 36 years, and sometimes he called himself a seafarer, perpetually seeking roots. The similitude aptly echoed reality, for Seferis traveled and he wrote--offering manuscripts like a wayward sailor tosses corked "bottles" in the sea on the chance they'll be retreived to mark his passage.

When he finally reached Turkey, he stayed in Anatolia for a year with a vague sense of homecoming, although his severed past lay lower, near the coast. In Ankara, he was striken by the bleakness of the surrounding plateau, a feeling recalled by some lines in his journal:

The snow here is endless...

...The snow here

is a zero. Miles below zero,

with the glitter of white sand, faces

without cheeks, without shape, eyes

staring, without the blessed earth...

Seferis breathed desolation everywhere in Turkey. As he traveled towards Smyrna, the landscape grew familiar but his anticipation was tempered with foreboding. The changes Turkish soldiers couldn't rend, time worked more subtly and bewilderingly--it even shrunk the walls and roads. He remembered that

"in my day the two neighborhoods were some distance apart. You had to wind through alley after alley, see many windows and many faces pass through so much life--in order to get from one to the other. Now, among these empty, intersecting streets, one stride seems enough; all the proportions have changed for me. You still pass by the burned debris (left by the fire of 1922) and piles of dirt which look like offal from the crude sprouting of reinforced concrete."

Skala, unlike the larger and important town of Smyrna, was entirely deserted, and Seferis's childhood flickered on its broken facade. He tried to capture it whole in the form of a huge plane tree--but it had died. He looked for it in his initials scratched on a wall, but he couldn't find them anymore. Irretrievable roots...He left for the last time, a seafarer.

Days of 1945-1951, translated by Athan Anagnostopoulos, is excerpted from a journal that George Seferis kept throughout most of his life. At one point in the diary, he noted that "In essence, the poet has one theme: his live body," and in this record of six years, Seferis opens his self--as it was distilled into the poems he wrote, with all of its senses--to view.

The narrative is written in prose but he slips lines of verse into it like additional exclamation marks, or commas, or periods. The poetry is raw but effective, as the fragment from his winter in Turkey. Occasionally you can trace the development of a poem later published; a series of fleet stanzas written during scattered days on the island of Poros educe The Thrush (probably his best-known poem), named after a little ship sunk off its shores. A growing awareness of the fierce Greek sun figures in his Three Secret Poems of 1969. Its singularity is a mystery he often probed in the diary. Consonant with that sun's pure shaft of light he perceived a terrifying black that seemed to trifle with life, as the deathly instant of blindness when you emerge from the sea in summer or the shock of an animal's eyes lit by the headlights on a car, before it is dark again.

BY PROFESSION, Seferis was a diplomat active in foreign affairs, yet politics rarely permeate these pages. His title, Days of 1945-1951, frames the journal in a convulsive period of Greek history that he never refers to overtly. The memory of World War II seeps into his writing like a shadow through the crack under a door, waning steadily. You realize that the civil strife in Greece, the intrigue of state politics and foreign intervention drains him, and the journal would be a weary monologue if he did not shrug them off. Even during his years at the Greek embassy in Turkey, he shies away from public record.

The diary is never routine--entries are spliced over silent lapses, and days pinpointed by a single sentence. The moments Seferis collects reveal the twists of a private world where the work is writing. He makes the difficult transition from one world to the other with the "feeling that I am re-entering a house abandoned in haste many years ago, without anyone's having a chance even to empty the ashtrays."

Seferis's allusions to the feverish mood of people and politicians reveal a curious mix of irony and resignation. "At the Ministry yesterday morning: I seemed to smell the pharmaceutical emissions of a hospital. It's an intense sensation that grabs me by the nostrils, as though I'm in some refuge for rare neurotics." The poet allows himself an awareness of the social climate only through the screen of his own detachment. On a New Year's Eve in Athens he is appalled by the chaos and aimlessness of a raucous crowd; yet he writes as though the lack of coherence that plagues these men and women were fated--a component of the national dissolution cast in iron by the Furies. His strange passivity in the face of political turmoil defies reality, turning slogans into stage props and demonstrators into actors.

With individuals, he is different. An incident at night, involving a prostitute, affects you with the immediacy of Seferis's reaction and his psychological participation.

I ran, trying to see from afar. A body was rolling on the ground, and a man was bent over it, beating it. Three or four policemen and two or three passersby looked on indifferently. The woman shouted, writing on the ground....I was beside myself....'Can't four men handle a woman,'I said, 'must they beat her?' I was impressed with the apathy of the spectators. They were ordinary people. 'Don't get angry, Mister,' someone said, 'she's a whore'....The woman was obviously now going through a fit of hysterics. As they were taking her to the police station...she would sit down on the ground every five steps, scream and lift up her clothes, revealing her nakedness, to show the bruises. 'I'm a prostitute, is that why they have to whip me? It's the pimp's fault--I'll show him!'

The description is stark and real, unlike his impressionistic comments on the Ministry. He evokes the personality of a village Turk, Tsopan, with similar interest and detail--even remembering that the man offered his guests coffee two at a time, because he only owned one pair of demitasses.

THE DIARY reflects a diffusion between the poet's life and work that eludes anecdote, rumor or publisher's blurbs. The song wafted from a nearby taverna and overheard at night; the grace in three ancient pieces of a fallen lintel lit by the noon sun; grief for a cat's death. This interplay of nature, humanity and inanimate objects that affects the fragile balance of Seferis's poetry, always startles him.

Once George Seferis wrote that it is the plight of an artist who grew on a harsh and secluded bit of earth to throw bottles into the sea, without complaint for a greater reward. Whether the mediterranean land that claimed him is any less remote to us now, the life this poet spent on it doesn't need to be. This bottle is worth finding.