Translator's Introduction to "Introduction to T. S. Eliot," by George Seferis

Out of the Archive provides a regular forum for the publication of rare or little-known documents concerning the history of modernism and the avant-gardes. Its compass is global and its aim is to prompt critical reflection on how the past's material remains shape present understandings.

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The years 1935 and 1936 were pivotal for George Seferis, Nobel Laureate poet (1963) from Greece. In 1935, Seferis published Mythistorema, the collection of 24 poems that launched his mature style, as well as his reputation as a force to be reckoned with in Greece; and in 1936, he published his translation of The Waste Land, prefaced by his first essay to appear in print, "Introduction to T. S. Eliot," itself a major event in the history of Greek letters. For Seferis, born in 1900, the mid-1930s was a time of self-discovery as he searched within himself, within the Greek tradition (extending from Homer to the twentieth century), and equally important, within the works of contemporary poets to find his authentic voice.¹ Seferis, who in 1935 was also devoting himself to a systematic study of Dante, was certainly nel mezzo del camin: seeking and finding artistic/spiritual teachers. And supreme among them was T. S. Eliot, about whom Seferis had written the following in his diary of 1933: "I should start an essay on Eliot . . . . I know things which nobody else in Greece knows, and this man interests me. Last year I thought he was the only poet whom I have influenced! I could not explain this similarity in our inclinations and quests in any other way."² (Perhaps Seferis was thinking of Baudelaire, who, as he notes in the essay that follows, found in the works of Poe "entire sentences expressed precisely as he himself had conceived them.")

Seferis dates his acquaintance with Eliot to Christmas of 1931, when he happened upon a copy of the poem, "Marina," in a bookshop on Oxford Street and was struck by its Mediterranean feeling: "[F]or many of us," he recalled, "the bows of ships have a special place in the imagery of our childhood."³ A few months earlier, in May 1931, Seferis had published in Athens his first poetry collection, Turning Point, highly personal rhymed poems which show the influence of French symbolism and for which he was accused of writing "poésie pure."⁴ A sea change in his approach seems to have occurred some time in the early 1930s, for Seferis began to experiment with his own brand of "mythical method." His collection Mythistorema, which he was composing while translating The Waste Land, is dramatic rather than personal in tone, perhaps inspired by Eliot's dictum in "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (which he quotes in this essay) that "the progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality."⁵ Indeed, to many, Mythistorema conveys what Seferis himself called the "feeling 'Waste Land'" common to much postwar art.⁶ And he achieves this through techniques he also found in Eliot: citations from literary texts, as well as historical personages (including, in Seferis's case, Odysseus, Orestes, Astyanax, Jason and the Argonauts) who appear as living presences in the poems of Mythistorema. But Seferis was a Greek, firmly rooted in his heritage, so that his own allusive method relies primarily on Greek sources (e.g., the Greek national poet Dionysios Solomos), even though he clearly acknowledges European influences (e.g., the epigraph by Arthur Rimbaud). Furthermore, the Seferis work recalls shattered dreams after the Asia Minor Catastrophe of 1922 destroyed hopes of a great Greek nation, extending as far as Constantinople. As Seferis writes in the essay—as much about himself as about Eliot: "[H]istory is not whatever has died, but whatever is still living. Living. Present. Contemporary."

It is as if the work of Eliot gave Seferis permission to publish a certain kind of poetry, a new kind of poetry, a poetry that ultimately would be enhanced by notes—in short, as Seferis puts it, a "difficult" poetry: "The difficulty...