Article
Seferis´ letter to Katsibalis
Letter on The Thrush
January 18, 2006
At the end of 1949 my friend George Katsimbalis asked me to write him a letter that might help the well-intentioned reader to read my poem “The Thrush” more easily. * The fact was that at that time this poem appeared to be utterly incomprehensible. I sat down, and in the lighthearted way which one has when writing to a friend, I wrote out for him a kind of scenario. “So,” I wrote, “it may well be that some day “The Thrush” will be shown as a film.” A few people understood what I was driving at; others turned my words against me or hastened to ascribe to me inconceivable intentions; they thought I was trying to give a definitive interpretation of a poem or, more precisely, to complete a poem of mine with a piece of prose. I have now reread this letter and I think that both the first and the second class of readers have already derived whatever good or bad they could from it. Here I am reprinting only the concluding passages, since they contain a few of those more general thoughts that, I think, have their place in this book.
MY DEAR GEORGE…
Any explanation of a poem is, I think absurd. Everyone who has the slightest idea of how an artist works knows this. He may have lived long, he may have acquired much learning, he may have been trained as an acrobat. When, however, the time comes for him to create, the mariner’s compass that directs him is the sure instinct that knows, above all, how to bring to light or to sink in the twilight of his consciousness the things (or, as I should prefer to say, the tones) that are necessary, that are unnecessary or that are just sufficient for the creation of this something: the poem. He does not think of these materials; he fingers them, he weighs them, he feels their pulse. When this instinct is not mature enough to show the way, the most fiery sentiment may become disastrous and useless, like frozen ratiocination; it will be able to do nothing but stammer. Poetry, from a technical point of view, may be defined as “the harmonic word”—with the greatest possible emphasis on the term “harmonic,” in the sense of a conjunction, cohesion, correlation, opposition of one idea to another, of one emotion to another. Once I spoke of a “poetic ear”; I meant the ear that can discern such things as these.
I think that this kind of hearing, as I define it, is less common in Greece now than it was among the Ionians in the time of Solomos; less common also than is usual in present-day Europe. Perhaps this is due to lack of care, perhaps to our linguistic anarchy, perhaps to the fact that here the evolution of our poetry has been too rapid and nobody has really been able to keep up with it. Generally speaking, in Greece there is less response than one might expect from the trained listeners to poetry. To this, I think, must be attributed the fact that we observe so many and such gross mistakes in our poetical judgments. However it may be, one needs an ear to hear poetry; the rest is just chatting round the fire at Christmas, as I am doing now.
I think of this as I try to understand how it came about that in “The Thrush” I had to substitute Socrates for Tiresias. My first answer is that I saw elsewhere the tones that were necessary for the ensemble that I was attempting to complete; the idea of the Theban never even occurred to me. Then—autobiographically—because the Apology is one of the books that has most influenced me in my life; perhaps because my generation has grown up and lived in this age of injustice. Thirdly, because I have a very organic feeling that identifies humaneness with the Greek landscape.
I must say that this feeling of mine, which is shared, I think, by many others, is often rather painful. It is the opposite of that state of ceasing to exist, of the abolition of the ego, which one feels in face of the grandeur of certain foreign landscapes. I should never use such adjectives as “grand” or “stately” for any of the Greek landscapes I have in mind. It is a whole world: lines that come and go; bodies and features, the tragic silence of a “face.” Such things are difficult to express, and I can see the boys getting ready to take up the mocking chorus: “the graverobber of Yannopoulos.” However it may be, it is my belief that in the Greek light there is a kind of process of humanization; I think of Aeschylus not as the Titan or the Cyclops that people sometimes want us to see him as, but as a man feeling and expressing himself close beside us, accepting or reacting to the natural elements just as we all do. I think of the mechanism of justice which he sets before us, this alternation of Hubris and Ate, which one will not find to be simply a moral law unless it is also a law of nature. A hundred years before him Anaximander of Miletus believed that “things” pay by deterioration for the “injustice” they have committed by going beyond the order of time. And later Heraclitus will declare: “The sun will not overstep his measures; if he does, the Erinyes, the handmaids of Justice, will find him out.”
The Erinyes will hunt down the sun, just as they hunted down Orestes; just think of these cords which unite man with the elements of nature, this tragedy that is in nature and in man at the same time, this intimacy. Suppose the light were suddenly to become Orestes? It is so easy, just think: if the light of the day and the blood of man were one and the same thing? How far can one stretch this feeling? “Just anthropomorphism,” people say, and they pass on. I do not think it is as simple as that. If anthropomorphism created the Odyssey, how far can one look into the Odyssey?
We could go very far; but I shall stop here. We arrived at the light. And the light cannot be explained; it can only be seen. The rest of this scenario may be filled in by the reader—after all, he has to do something too; but let me first recall the last words of Anticleia to her son:
The soul, like a dream, flutters away and is gone.
But quickly turn your desire to the light
And keep all this in your mind.
[Odyssey XI, 222-224]
Something like this was told to me by that small ship, sunk in the harbor at Poros, that in the happy days used to sail on errands to supply the naval establishment.
I hope that all this has shown you that I am a monotonous and obstinate sort of man who, for the last twenty years, has gone on saying the same things over and over again—things that are not even his own…
And now, since we have forgotten about it entirely, do me the favor to read, as though it were a Christmas carol, the poem called “The Thrush.”
Happy New Year,
G.S.
Ankara
27 December 1949
© Translation: Rex Warner and Th. D. Frangopoulos From: On the greek style ,1966
Published: Atlantic-Little, Brown
MY DEAR GEORGE…
Any explanation of a poem is, I think absurd. Everyone who has the slightest idea of how an artist works knows this. He may have lived long, he may have acquired much learning, he may have been trained as an acrobat. When, however, the time comes for him to create, the mariner’s compass that directs him is the sure instinct that knows, above all, how to bring to light or to sink in the twilight of his consciousness the things (or, as I should prefer to say, the tones) that are necessary, that are unnecessary or that are just sufficient for the creation of this something: the poem. He does not think of these materials; he fingers them, he weighs them, he feels their pulse. When this instinct is not mature enough to show the way, the most fiery sentiment may become disastrous and useless, like frozen ratiocination; it will be able to do nothing but stammer. Poetry, from a technical point of view, may be defined as “the harmonic word”—with the greatest possible emphasis on the term “harmonic,” in the sense of a conjunction, cohesion, correlation, opposition of one idea to another, of one emotion to another. Once I spoke of a “poetic ear”; I meant the ear that can discern such things as these.
I think that this kind of hearing, as I define it, is less common in Greece now than it was among the Ionians in the time of Solomos; less common also than is usual in present-day Europe. Perhaps this is due to lack of care, perhaps to our linguistic anarchy, perhaps to the fact that here the evolution of our poetry has been too rapid and nobody has really been able to keep up with it. Generally speaking, in Greece there is less response than one might expect from the trained listeners to poetry. To this, I think, must be attributed the fact that we observe so many and such gross mistakes in our poetical judgments. However it may be, one needs an ear to hear poetry; the rest is just chatting round the fire at Christmas, as I am doing now.
I think of this as I try to understand how it came about that in “The Thrush” I had to substitute Socrates for Tiresias. My first answer is that I saw elsewhere the tones that were necessary for the ensemble that I was attempting to complete; the idea of the Theban never even occurred to me. Then—autobiographically—because the Apology is one of the books that has most influenced me in my life; perhaps because my generation has grown up and lived in this age of injustice. Thirdly, because I have a very organic feeling that identifies humaneness with the Greek landscape.
I must say that this feeling of mine, which is shared, I think, by many others, is often rather painful. It is the opposite of that state of ceasing to exist, of the abolition of the ego, which one feels in face of the grandeur of certain foreign landscapes. I should never use such adjectives as “grand” or “stately” for any of the Greek landscapes I have in mind. It is a whole world: lines that come and go; bodies and features, the tragic silence of a “face.” Such things are difficult to express, and I can see the boys getting ready to take up the mocking chorus: “the graverobber of Yannopoulos.” However it may be, it is my belief that in the Greek light there is a kind of process of humanization; I think of Aeschylus not as the Titan or the Cyclops that people sometimes want us to see him as, but as a man feeling and expressing himself close beside us, accepting or reacting to the natural elements just as we all do. I think of the mechanism of justice which he sets before us, this alternation of Hubris and Ate, which one will not find to be simply a moral law unless it is also a law of nature. A hundred years before him Anaximander of Miletus believed that “things” pay by deterioration for the “injustice” they have committed by going beyond the order of time. And later Heraclitus will declare: “The sun will not overstep his measures; if he does, the Erinyes, the handmaids of Justice, will find him out.”
The Erinyes will hunt down the sun, just as they hunted down Orestes; just think of these cords which unite man with the elements of nature, this tragedy that is in nature and in man at the same time, this intimacy. Suppose the light were suddenly to become Orestes? It is so easy, just think: if the light of the day and the blood of man were one and the same thing? How far can one stretch this feeling? “Just anthropomorphism,” people say, and they pass on. I do not think it is as simple as that. If anthropomorphism created the Odyssey, how far can one look into the Odyssey?
We could go very far; but I shall stop here. We arrived at the light. And the light cannot be explained; it can only be seen. The rest of this scenario may be filled in by the reader—after all, he has to do something too; but let me first recall the last words of Anticleia to her son:
The soul, like a dream, flutters away and is gone.
But quickly turn your desire to the light
And keep all this in your mind.
[Odyssey XI, 222-224]
Something like this was told to me by that small ship, sunk in the harbor at Poros, that in the happy days used to sail on errands to supply the naval establishment.
I hope that all this has shown you that I am a monotonous and obstinate sort of man who, for the last twenty years, has gone on saying the same things over and over again—things that are not even his own…
And now, since we have forgotten about it entirely, do me the favor to read, as though it were a Christmas carol, the poem called “The Thrush.”
Happy New Year,
G.S.
Ankara
27 December 1949
Published: Atlantic-Little, Brown
© George Seferis
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