A Poet Speaks Out

We have all learned, we all know, that in dictatorial regimes the beginning may seem easy. Yet tragedy waits at the end, inescapably. It is this tragic ending that consciously or unconsciously torments us, as in the ancient choruses of Aeschylus.

The measured words were those of onetime Greek Diplomat Georgos S. Seferiades, 69, who under the pen name George Seferis won the 1963 Nobel Prize for literature for his lyrical poetry and his "deep feeling for the Hellenic world of culture." Seferiades has lived in seclusion in Athens since retiring as ambassador to London in 1962. For the past two years he has published nothing in Greece as a political protest against the military regime running the country.

Seferiades explained in last week's statement that "for some months I have felt within me and around me that more and more it is becoming imperative for me to speak out on our present situation. It is almost two years since a regime was imposed upon us utterly contrary to the ideals for which our world--and so magnificently our people--fought in the last world war. It is a state of enforced torpor in which all the intellectual values that we have succeeded, with toil and effort, in keeping alive are being submerged in a swamp, in stagnant waters."

"I pray to God that never again may I find myself under such compulsion to speak," said Seferiades, who then sent copies of his protest to Greek newspapers. Boxed in by censorship, no editor printed it. Knowing the message would nonetheless surely reach the outside world, the government issued a 500-word countercharge notable only for its ineptness. Quoting "authoritative circles in Athens," the statement, issued in English as was Seferiades' own message, accused Seferiades of being a Communist agent. It also suggested that he had spoken "to counterbalance and neutralize the inexorable law of wear and tear and oblivion, which was a natural consequence of nothing but biological causes responsible for his intellectual barrenness and absence from the field in literature." Presumably this was a way of saying that Seferiades is senile, but it was difficult to tell. Under the ruling junta, authoritative Greek choruses are not as eloquent as they used to be.

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