The Drama of Quality: Selected Essays (review)

Zissimos Lorenzatos,The Drama of Quality: Selected Essays by Zissimos Lorenzatos. Translated by Liaidain Sherrard. Evia, Greece: Denise Harvey Publishers. 2000. Pp. 220. $27.00 cloth, $15.00 paper.

"Oedipus in Kifisia: Senescit sed Amat"

The Drama of Quality is the second collection of Zissimos Lorenzatos's essays to appear in English, following Kay Cicellis's The Lost Center (1980). It is also the sixteenth volume in Denise Harvey's Romiosyni series, a theme-oriented collection concerned "with the history, culture and ethos of post-Byzantine Greece." The topics engaged in these essays are almost always drawn from the literary tradition (though the words "literature" and "tradition," in Lorenzatos's writing, have a deeper than usual resonance and connotation), and range from the Skiathot writer Papadiamandis to the Athenian architect Dimitris Pikionis and the American poet Ezra Pound. The essays also range in date from one of the very first of Lorenzatos's career, on the seaman-poet D.I. Antoniou (1938), to later ones on Sikelianos (1986) and Demetrios Capetanakis (1996), and, in his most recent work, the Greek poet Nikos Karouzos, published during "the halcyon days of 1999." All the essays were written, without exception, in the Athenian suburb of Kifissia.

In the book's last and best essay, "From Pisa to Athens: A Consideration of Pound," Lorenzatos likens the "Pisan" Pound to the old, exiled Oedipus from Sophocles's Oedipus at Colonus (a man still capable of argument but also, and more importantly, love, l.1617)--a comparison that could hold equally true for Lorenzatos himself. Lorenzatos is an anomaly in today's cultural climate, writing and publishing plainspoken but intensely learned essays about little-read poets. Generally, his work begins and ends with Greece and Greek lettters, but the intellectual and cultural ambit he traverses in-between is arguably unmatched by any other living essayist. He has no academic affiliation, no "pressure to publish," yet he has written steadily over the past 60 years on topics that today have become the sole possession of the academy, an institution from which Lorenzatos might well regard himself as being in voluntary exile. The narrow specialization and tendency to jargon within much current academic discourse and intellectual debate may cause him to be viewed as inhabiting its margins. But it is surely Lorenzatos's insistence on the spiritual foundation of literature, the critical importance of getting, as Dante urged, "through literature beyond literature," that will place him, for many, off the page altogether. Once, with ardent sympathy, Lorenzatos cited as the epigraph to an essay Orwell's words: "ours is a civilization in which the very word 'poetry' evokes a hostile snigger or, at least, the sort of frozen disgust that most people feel when they hear the word 'God.'" This is a man who believes that poetry is not here to "enlarge one's sensibility" or to be used as a tool for "self-realization," but rather, as he writes in all seriousness, "to save us." As David Ricks rightly mentions in his foreword to the volume, Lorenzatos does not shrink "from seeing culture as being ad majorem Dei gloriam" (p. x).

The foreword by Ricks and the textual note that begin the book make public the criteria used to select the essays included in the volume. In accord with the orientation of the Romiosyni series, the essays chosen were to focus on post-Byzantine Greece, while the Pound essay earned its inclusion because it "particularly reveals the author's breadth of vision and reference when engaging with such a complex subject" (p. 13). Overall, the essays constitute a valuable cross-section and do an admirable job of putting the author's Mississippi on the map; his major preoccupations and positions are clear to see. Yet, after reading the concluding essay on Pound, which is indeed particularly revealing (so much so that one wishes that others of its caliber were also included), the...