Greeks Bearing Gifts

THE COMPLETE POEMS OF CAVAFY (234 pp.)--Translated by Rae Dalven--Harcourt, Brace & World ($6.75).

POEMS (127 pp.)--George Seferis--Translated by Rex Warner--Atlantic-Little, Brown ($3.75).

The two greatest Greek poets of the 20th century, C. P. (Constantine Peter) Cavafy and George Seferis, were not born in Greece. Cavafy spent almost his entire life (1863-1933) in Alexandria, the site of his family's business. Seferis. 61, was born and brought up in Smyrna, educated in Paris, and after a lifetime of diplomatic service he is currently Greece's Ambassador to Britain. Thus each man brought the special, painful clarity of exile to the common task of all modern artists, and particularly of Greek artists: to define their relation to their country, and their country's relation to its own past.

In Greece, the link with the past is the rupture with the past. The creative act is throttled by a sense of futile competition with the appalling glory of the Golden Age and its poet-playwrights, sculptors and philosophers. Yet the voice of the past is muted in the barren landscape, marble shards and ever pregnant silences. Seferis captures the sense of frustration and modern creative drought in Eliot-accented lines as two friends talk amid the ruins:

He was on his way to the Ionian headlands,

To empty shells of theatres where now

Only the lizard crawls on the dry stones,

And I asked him 'Will they ever be full again?'

And he replied 'Perhaps, at the hour of death.'

And he rushed into the orchestra, yelling out,

'O let me listen to my brother's voice!'

And the silence stood around us hard as rock,

Making no trace upon the glass of the blue.

Myth of the Golden Age. It is this cruel sense of the past that makes both Seferis and Cavafy poets of defeat. But as demonstrated in these two excellent collections the two poets have widely differing attitudes toward this defeat. It is, essentially, the fate of man in history, but to the dry, witty, elegant and overcivilized Cavafy, history is sheer irony; the Golden Age never was, except as a crude, sensational and vulgar replica of modern times and all times. To Seferis, on the other hand, history is a parable of man's oft deluded but intrinsically noble search for his own soul. Seferis recognizes human frailty:

Man is soft, a bundle of grass;

Lips and fingers hungering for a white breast,

Eyes half-shut to the glare of the day,

And feet that will run, however tired they may be.

Towards the least whisper of profit.

But he refuses to equate man's frailty with his destiny. He never confuses the tragic with the merely hopeless. Seferis' career as a diplomat in many of the world's trouble spots has conditioned his view of history as a terrain of action rather than impotence. Indeed, so diligent a diplomat is Seferis that he writes all his poetry at night, often as late as 3 a.m., when he can concentrate in solitude.

Amid the French furniture, Greek marbles and African carvings of London's Greek embassy, he and his statuesque blonde wife regularly entertain such philhellenic men of letters and personal friends as Lawrence Durrell, E. M. Forster, John Lehmann and Classicist Maurice Bowra.

Whenever he can, the poet-diplomat escapes to the sea and the company of simple fishermen. The sea perhaps accounts for the deep-fathomed mystical strain that haunts Seferis' poetry, a quality he himself has spoken of as that "perfect liberation which some call return to a lost Paradise and others union with God."

The Artist as Redeemer. Perfect liberation for Cavafy, on the other hand, was the act of poetry itself. He believed in esthetic salvation, by which the work of art brings order into the underlying chaos of events and redeems the brevity of human life. Steeped in the dandified fin de siecle tradition that flourished with Wilde, Pater and Huysmans. Cavafy performed his own idiosyncratic rituals on the altar of beauty. When an especially handsome guest entered his orientally furnished, book-lined labyrinth in the old Greek quarter of Alexandria, Cavafy would light an extra candle in silent tribute. E. M. Forster once described his presence on the streets of Alexandria, "a Greek gentleman in a straw hat. standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe." One of Cavafy's angles of deviation was his homosexuality, which he neither flaunted nor concealed. His erotic poetry is so unsentimentally and unremorsefully pagan that it confers honesty, if not innocence, on the theme.

The son of a cotton broker. Cavafy for a time padded out his income by speculating on the Alexandria stock exchange, but his most spectacular gamble was in language. Even Greek-born Rae Dalven's evocative translation cannot fully convey it. With a kind of Joycean audacity, Cavafy fashioned the language he needed by combining three elements: traditional high "literary" Greek; words and phrases common to educated Alexandrian society; the demotic spoken language. For a man who wore his world-weariness like an epaulet, Cavafy is astonishingly jaunty, zestful, and even impassioned. Intellectual irony banked but never extinguished his poetic fire. The fear of nemesis, an almost ingrained habit of Greek thought, haunted Cavafy--as it does Seferis. Since nemesis singles out every man for his own inevitable fate, it reduces both the sense of responsibility for one's own lot and the degree of concern one is likely to feel for the lot of one's fellow men. But in one of his famous poems, The Trojans, Cavafy transcends his dry realism in a keening compassion for the defeats that all men suffer everywhere:

Our efforts are the efforts of the unfortunate;

our efforts are like those of the Trojans.

We succeed somewhat; we regain confidence

somewhat; and we start once more

to have courage and high hopes.

But something always happens and stops us.

Achilles in the trench emerges before us and with loud cries dismays us.--

Our efforts are like those of the Trojans.

We think that with resolution and daring,

we will alter the downdrag of destiny . . .

But when the great crisis comes, our daring and our resolution vanish . . . and we run all around the walls seeking to save ourselves in flight.

However, our fall is certain. Above, on the walls, the dirge has already

begun. The memories and the feelings of our

own days weep. Priam and Hecuba weep bitterly for us.

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