Meletes (review)

English-speaking readers may be familiar with Zissimos Lorenzatos’s The Lost Center and Other Essays in Greek Poetry, published by Princeton University Press in 1980. They may also be interested to know that Lorenzatos was the first to present Greek readers with excellent translations of Ezra Pound’s Cathay, William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (accompanied by an unusually discerning introduction), and the work of a number of other English poets.

In 1995 Lorenzatos turned eighty. It is fitting that his contribution to Greek letters is being celebrated with these two volumes that include thirty essays representing the best of his literary output and giving evidence of a steady progression over the 50 years of his involvement with literary studies. The themes of these Melétes resemble musical études transcendantes. In his preface, the author indicates that

one of the meanings of the word melªth in Greek—as in the passage from Phaedo (81a), the well-known melªth uanŒtoy (“practice of death” or “an exercise de mort”) . . . is closely related to the Latin meditatio or, later, to the Christian ascetic exercises. I use the word in a parallel meaning by publishing these studies . . . that together form one single, continuous study, meditatio, or ascetic exercise progressively developed on themes pertaining to the spirit and the letter . . .

What makes Lorenzatos’s essays especially interesting is his ability to show that, everywhere in the world, one’s relationship to the eternal is defined not just by religious endeavors but also by artistic and even scientific endeavors in all their diversity. Behind this view is his belief in a universal human nature irrespective of cultural differences. In its most authentic form, human nature expresses itself through a long tradition shaped by a quest for the eternal. In Greece, the relationship to the eternal results from a development that owes as much to the ancient and Hellenistic heritages as to the Byzantine. These rich historical eras have bestowed upon modern Greece a unique tradition preserved in the Greek language and in Orthodox spirituality. By virtue of his single, continuous melªth /meditatio/ascetic exercise, Lorenzatos has become an authentic part of this heritage that has always been revitalized by the combined ascesis of the spirit and the letter.

But Lorenzatos does more than just explore self-gratifying themes of national grandeur. His interests extend to T. S. Eliot’s poetry, to Edgar Allan Poe and André Gide (his first fruits in literature), to a quatrain by Hölderlin, to the poetry of Attila Jozsef, Osip Mandelstalm, and Anna Akhmatova, to a personal reading of Ezra Pound entitled “From Pisa to Athens,” and to the autobiographical writings of Einstein. Regarding modern Greek culture, the collection includes essays on Solomos, Cavafy, Papadiamantis, Sikelianos, Karyotakis, Seferis, Kougeas, Makriyannis, the architect Dimitris Pikionis, and a tribute to Greek women called “Oi Rvmiªq .” Regarding ancient culture, there are analyses of Aristotle’s Poetics, Horace’s Ars Poetica, and Longinus’s On the Sublime, and an essay entitled “The Palimpsest of Homer” that reaches back to embrace the origins of poetry.

Because he is interested in more than just the ramifications of interacting styles, Lorenzatos differs from most contemporary literary critics. Concentrating on the text itself, he focuses on ways in which a work may help us to reach a deeper understanding of the world and, above all, of ourselves. He explores the text’s limits in a personal manner, seeking to transcend those limits in order to reach an inner reality relating to “the broader foundations of art, which always remain spiritual or metaphysical—directed, in other words, toward the eternal” (The Lost Center, v.)

His approach to each topic is meticulous. Despite the painstaking research involved in every essay, his style, as if animated by a breath of fresh air, radiates such simplicity and ease that the total effect is one of relaxation coupled with intense concentration. The reader feels that the topics discussed had once been active but had then fallen into a long period...