Everyone says how difficult \u201cThrush\u201d is and my God it\u2019s true when you try to tie it all together rationally and bundle it up in a paraphrase. And yet for my money only Seferis himself can create more vivid images or strike at your emotions with more devastating power than he does at some points in this poem, even in translation.<\/p>\n
Anyway, a poetry lover who doesn\u2019t know Seferis can give herself a treat by going to \u201cThrush\u201d at http:\/\/www.poetryfoundation.org\/poem\/181853 and just reading it a few times.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t want to be intrusive with my commentary but will throw in a few further remarks. Some are\u00a0 very subjective and they can easily be ignored.<\/p>\n
Looking just at the first section, the passage from \u201csometimes, near the sea, in naked rooms\u201d strikes me as extraordinarily evocative in a sensual way, haunting and emotionally suggestive, and I think that Keeley and Sherrard have given a compelling musicality to their translation. Here, it doesn\u2019t bother me at all that I find some of what\u2019s being said elusive or ambiguous; in fact I positively Iike the sense that the poet\u2019s thoughts and impressions are mysterious even to himself, that they arrive in all their unanswerable vividness without his feeling compelled or perhaps being able to interpret them completely. A condition of this is that key emotional suggestions are, or at least seem to me to be, clear, simple, strong, and filled with Seferis\u2019s distinctive sensibility. Take the way loneliness and alienation are evoked in<\/p>\n
Sometimes, near the sea, in naked rooms
\nwith a single iron bed and nothing of my own
\nwatching the evening spider<\/p>\n
\u201cNaked rooms\u201d and \u201cwatching the evening spider\u201d may seem to draw us momentarily close to the Eliot of \u201cPreludes\u201d, but \u201cnothing of my own\u201d takes us into tones that separate Seferis from Eliot (the grumpiness that\u2019s been there from the beginning of the poem) and (together with \u201cnear the sea\u201d) strikes a taproot into Seferis\u2019s preoccupation with a sense of personal, ethnic and cultural displacement and alienation, figured throughout Mythistorema<\/em>\u00a0 and in many of his other poems in images of hopeless wandering*. Smyrna, Syracuse and Alexandria, of course, are all part of the lost greater Greece of classical and Hellenistic times, and Rhodes hadn\u2019t been reunited with Greece yet when Seferis wrote\u201dThrush\u201d, though it did become part of the Greek nation in the month of \u201cThrush\u201d\u2019s first publication, so all these names carry a sense of cultural and national loss**. The erotic images of the beautiful woman, lost or only dreamed, and of the lost southern ports have a powerful sensual immediacy that makes a sharp impact on the imagination in the way so much does in the work of this very physical poet, but \u201creturning\u201d connects the idea of this woman elusively and ambiguously with a fundamental element in Seferis\u2019s poetic imagination, something also seen in the hopelessly yearning attempt to find home in Mythistorema<\/em>, the glimpse of the return of Aphrodite at the end of \u201cThrush\u201d itself, and a similar glimpse at the end of \u201cMemory I\u201d. I think the combination of clarity and imaginative force with elusiveness is crucial because it\u2019s together that they draw us into Seferis\u2019s own imagination and into feelings that for the poet himself are both intense and elusive because they are a part of his very self, not ideas to detach for abstract contemplation. I think it\u2019s a great testimony to Keeley and Sherrard\u2019s skill that they have captured both qualities so delicately and so strongly in this passage.<\/p>\n I find the first part of the section less satisfactory in their translated form. Here too, some lines are wonderfully fresh and immediately effective; in others, I feel the power of the idea but it seems to reach me muffled by being a little stilted, if only by Keeley and Sherrard\u2019s own high standards. My Greek was never nearly good enough to know whether they are at all awkwardly expressed in the original.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n *\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 More broadly, I think Seferis\u2019s art in this poem is much sparer, subtler and more mature than that of \u201cPreludes\u201d. He doesn\u2019t tell us anything about the spider, he leaves it to be as a piece of the external world that exists on its own terms, and this reticence allows us to imagine a range of ways in which the lonely man watching it might feel about it. He might see it as lonely like him, or as sinister, he might contrast its purposefulness with his own passivity or he might watch it and be made to feel helpless and entrapped, as Seferis felt helpless and entrapped by his role in the Greek foreign ministry during and after the war. In contrast, the life of Eliot\u2019s brilliant poem is in its lurid subjectivity. \u201cAt the corner of the street \/ A lonely cab horse steams and stamps\u201d. Who knows whether a cab horse in such circumstances does feel lonely? All that matters for Eliot is that it reminds him of his own loneliness, and by projecting this onto the horse and everything else in the poem he can drown the reader in it too. \u201cPreludes\u201d is very much a young man\u2019s poem \u2013 an extraordinarily brilliant young man\u2019s poem, of course\u00a0 \u2013 but more generally I feel that Seferis\u2019s rootedness in and happiness with the body goes with a healthier, more robust attitude to the external world than Eliot enjoyed.<\/p>\n ** In the case of Smyrna, of personal loss too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Everyone says how difficult \u201cThrush\u201d is and my God it\u2019s true when you try to tie it all together rationally and bundle it up in a paraphrase. And yet for my money only Seferis himself can create more vivid images or strike at your emotions with more devastating power than he does at some points […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27,55],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-888","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-world","category-yorgos-seferis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/888"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=888"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/888\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1366,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/888\/revisions\/1366"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=888"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=888"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=888"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}