I am almost done reading Kimon Friar’s anthology, Modern Greek Poetry (1982), which I scooped at Powell’s for my trip to Athens last month. I cracked it open with an espresso at a cafe near the Acropolis, but only managed a few pages before the journey outpaced me and the book fell to the bottom of my pack. Now back in the States, I have been working through it steadily, and have re-glued the binding, twice.
Modern Greek poets have access to a rich legacy and have had opportunity to negotiate and project that legacy through the experience of modern Greek history. Surprising to me, from the work in this volume, is how naturally they bring that legacy forward, transposing the themes of Greek antiquity to a modern context. Paganism, Christianity, Hellenism all remain organic in an identity that is fresh, almost spiritual. The energy is in a sense of wonder at the mystery of human beings, which has endlessly renews itself and never left Western consciousness:
George Thémelis, from De Rerum Natura:
I move my body, and my soul moves,
I put it to sleep, it sleeps.
I love, and my soul loves,
It tastes my body and my blood.
I sniff the air, and my soul sniffs also.It is I who hunger, it is I who thirst
It is my soul, it is I who suffer.
It is I who wound my fingers.Whatever my soul has heard
Within me, it hears.
Whatever my soul has seen, it sees,
It becomes, it reappears
In a clear sky.
The Greek sense of the beauty of the body is perhaps most iconically conveyed in the antique statue, with its compression and weight, its sense of the fragility and tragic temporality suggested in the curve of the adolescent’s arm—a young man or woman not yet quite fully aware of what it means to be alive and have a body, but old enough to intuit it, yet without a foretaste of death. Zoë Karélli, “Adolescent from Anticythera”:
Wondrous youth,
unique moment, you are not only
the adolescent of perfect beauty,
of radiant youth,
that harmony in the form of the limb's music
of him who keeps his posture and holds it
in natural strength and power,
like the stone or the plant
that exist both simple and perfect together;
hands spread out in ideal balance,
divine curvature,
indestructible innocence of caught time,
smiling face of incorruption,
heightening of our perishable position.Reality and magic,
smooth surface of life,
convex and concave curves
from the impetuosity hidden within you,
guided and controlled.
Offering and acceptance of existence,
in movement and immobility both,
like the balancing of a regal bird.You were born
before we were taught
the meaning of sin.
You are the concession of the spirit
that quenches insatiable privation
and annihilates cupidity.
Though filled with longing,
you remain ready to deprive yourself.
Every foreign disposition to your shape
glides away from you.
You seek the spirit's value,
yet it is you who proffer it, alive and serene body.
In concert with the wonder of the body, there’s a sense of the depth of the cosmos, typically imaged as the blue water of the Aegean, the full sun, and birds arcing across an open sky. Níkos Kazantzákis:
O Sun, great Oriental, my proud mind's golden cap,
I love to wear you cocked askew, to play and burst
in song throughout our lives, and so rejoice our hearts.
Good is this earth, it suits us! Like the global grape
it hangs, dear God, in the blue air and sways in the gale,
nibbled by all the birds and spirits of the four winds.
The sun is the meta-symbol: of God, world, nature, Apollo, poetry, the pole apposite Earth. Friar’s description of Odysseus Elytis’s work as showcasing a “solar metaphysics” could go for many of the poets this anthology.
Yesterday the epistle reading was Acts 17, Paul at the Aeropagus. Having just been there myself, and with all these Greek poems in my head, it was easy to see how sun, morning air, darting swallows, and graceful architecture would open up Paul’s words—or rather how Paul’s words would open these cosmic elements, definitive of the Greek spirit, how ingeniously he reorients the Greek longing for cosmic unity through his message of the coming of the great arche:
And they took him and brought him to the Areopagus, saying, “May we know what this new doctrine is of which you speak? For you are bringing some strange things to our ears. Therefore we want to know what these things mean.” For all the Athenians and the foreigners who were there spent their time in nothing else but either to tell or to hear some new thing. Then Paul stood in the midst of the Areopagus and said, “Men of Athens, I perceive that in all things you are very religious; for as I was passing through and considering the objects of your worship, I even found an altar with this inscription:
TO THE UNKNOWN GOD.
Therefore, the One whom you worship without knowing, Him I proclaim to you: God, who made the world and everything in it, since He is Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands. Nor is He worshiped with men’s hands, as though He needed anything, since He gives to all life, breath, and all things. And He has made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, and has determined their preappointed times and the boundaries of their dwellings, so that they should seek the Lord, in the hope that they might grope for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us; for in Him we live and move and have our being, as also some of your own poets have said, ‘For we are also His offspring.’
How sweet these words must have been to Paul’s audience, for their declaration of a deep intimacy and coherence to the world, and the promise of a universal truth, a complete philosophical revelation for all humankind. Tákis Papatsónis:
…[T]here is so much harmony, so many laws
in the spaces given us to perform our acts,
in hours set aside for us to depict the way!
It's a great thing how the twilight slowly, slowly falls.
And a little later falls the Night. With its enormous
Aphrodite. The one surrounded by all her handmaidens. The one
who despises the pale, silver-golden sickle of the newest Moon.
(from “Self-Scrutiny”)
Intriguing names from this collection to in the file:
George Themelis
Andreas Embericos
George Seferis
The Pappas spouses: Nikos Pappas, and especially Rita Boumi-Pappas
Melissanthi
Odysseus Elytis