Conversing Identities: Encounters Between British, Irish and Greek Poetry, 1922–1952 by Konstantina Georganta (review)

It is the year 1931 and Greek poet George Seferis is wandering around the British Museum and London bookshops. He comes across a copy of T. S. Eliot’s “Marina.” Seferis eventually translates Eliot’s The Waste Land, Konstantina Georganta explains, and in his prologues to his translations, he calls for the kind of dialogue she traces throughout Conversing Identities: Encounters Between British, Irish and Greek Poetry, 1922–1952. In her clear, engaging prose, Georganta effortlessly navigates geographical terrain from the Thames to the Aegean as well as the pages of British, Greek, and Irish, poetry in the three decades following 1922. She contextualizes this year—the year Eliot published The Waste Land—as an important one, especially in Greek history. It was the year that the Greek army retreated from Asia Minor and the year of the massive fire at Smyrna’s port. Georganta explains that the poets she studies were “either influenced by their actual travel to Britain or Greece or divided in their various allegiances and reactions to national or imperial sovereignty” (4). In these writers’ different depictions of diaspora she studies their version of the “homeland myth,” taking as one of her starting points Stathis Gourgouris’s idea that “myth” “is always contemporary” (6, 1).

In the various chapters of Georganta’s book the reader will encounter studies of English and Irish literature by authors including W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, William Plomer, John Lehmann, and Louis MacNeice—who use images of ancient and modern Greece to imagine an alternative homeland or to make sense of their own—as well as Greek writers, including Seferis, C. P. Cavafy, Kostes Palamas, and Demetrios Capetanakis. These Greek writers encounter English texts and interact with Englishness through published translations, radio, and personal interaction. Georganta’s range of writers is impressive, as is the scope of her comparative work. [End Page e-1]

Grounding her literary analysis in historical and biographical context, she explains parallels such as Cavafy’s figure of the student Myrtias in “Dangerous Thoughts” and Eliot’s Fisher King in The Waste Land, and studies the English reception of Cavafy’s “Ithaca,” which Eliot’s The Criterion published in 1924. Authors themselves engage in comparative explorations, such as MacNeice’s link between “refugees” in Greece and Ireland in Ten Burnt Offerings, and Lehmann’s reflections on England in his “Visions of Islands” through the lens of his visit to Greece (164). Lehmann, like Eliot, attempts to “resolve a post-war identity crisis with a poetic return to myth” (149). Throughout the book, the meticulously researched publication and reception histories of each author strengthen Georganta’s rationale for focusing on this particular group of writers. For example, Georganta traces how Capetanakis—who wrote critical essays and poems in English and inspired Lehmann in particular—reshapes British readers’ idealized conception of Greece in the face of war through poems such as “Abel” and “Experienced by Two Stones.”

The book is organized chronologically according to the date each work was written—not the publication date—in order to examine more fully the “significance of the works discussed at the moment of their appearance” (8). This structure is effective. Chapter 1 sets the scene for the historical and cultural context of the early twentieth century in order to consider the figure of Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant who appears in Eliot’s The Waste Land; she contextualizes Mr. Eugenides within the history of the city. Georganta’s use of compelling primary-source material throughout the book, such as articles from The Times about events in Greece, including the 1922 crisis in Smyrna, brings these connections to life. Other chapters are centered on one or two authors, often pairing a Greek and British or Irish poet. Within each chapter, Georganta lays out the rationale for her comparative work. In chapter 4, for example, Georganta explains, “Yeats and Palamas never met . . . yet the cultural and political atmosphere that surrounded them...