Stergiopoulou, K. - Pound, Seferis

Between the Lines: Seferis Anti-Writing Pound's Homer
Author(s): KATERINA STERGIOPOULOU

Source: Comparative Literature , Fall 2014, Vol. 66, No. 4 (Fall 2014), pp. 375-398
Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of the University of Oregon
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KATERINA STERGIOPOULOU
Between the Lines:

Seferis Anti-Writing
Pound's Homer
ROMAN JAKOBSON
intralingual, FAMOUSLY
interlingual, IDENTIFIED(429).
and intersemiotic threeOf kinds of trans
the three, it is
ond, interlingual translation, that is "translationproper"—defined as "the inte
tation of verbal signs by means of some other language"—and the Russ
guist devotes to it most of his essay on translation (429). Although it involve
"examination of [the two languages'] mutual translatability" rather than
antee, interlingual translation presupposes the existence of two langua
ken perhaps contemporaneously in different places or by different gr
speakers, that can be more or less circumscribed (Jakobson 430). Jakobs
stays within a synchronic model when he defines intralingual translat
"rewording" that is more or less a concise paraphrase: "The intralingual trans
of a word uses either another, more or less synonymous, word or resorts
cumlocution" (429). It is thus "an interpretation of verbal signs by means of
signs of the same language" (429). The question that remains unaske
course, what counts as "the same language" (see, also, Derrida, "Des Tou
Babel" 217). Since intralingual translations presuppose both similarity and
ence, how much difference is too much? That is, what if we were to think o
guage diachronically? How can we tell where one (stage of a) language en
where another begins?1 In this essay I examine Giorgos Seferis's translation o
Pound's first canto as a translation that stands at the limit of intralingu
interlingual translations. The Greek poet's translation practice allows us
test Jakobson's distinction between intralingual and interlingual transla
well as its rearticulation by Seferis himself (see section 2 below)—particularly
not exclusively in the case of Greek; as such, it warns us that we lose more b
ing lines than by blurring them.
1 On the constant necessity of translation even within what might be construed as a

language—a view that turns translation from an accidental or occasional event that migh
language or text into an essential one, and intralingual translation into a precursor for it
gual variety—see the opening of Schleiermacher's famous essay on translation (43-44) an
ger in, for example, Parmenides 17-19 (German), 11-13 (English). See also Benjamin ("Tas
rida ("Des Tours" and Schibboleth), and Blanchot ("Translating"), all of whom insist on the im
of linguistic difference for interlingual translation, arguing that it is precisely that internal d
harbored in a given text that calls for further transposition.
Comparative Literature 66:4

DOI 10.1215/00104124-2823844 © 2014 by University of Oregon

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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE / 376
Arguably Greece's most famous modernist poet, and the Nobel Prize winner i
Literature in 1963, Giorgos Seferis was, like many of his English and America
contemporaries, also a translator—and of those same contemporaries. As Yorgi
Yatromanolakis has noted, Seferis's "linguistic ideology" was shaped by translating
in 1928 Paul Valery's "La Soiree avec Monsieur Teste" for the journal Nea Esti
(241). He subsequently translated T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land and Other Poems (1936,
1949) and Murder in the Cathedral (1963), and brought out a volume of collecte
translations—from W.B. Yeats, Paul Valery, W.H. Auden, and Ezra Pound, amon
others—entitled Antigrafes (1965).- Seferis was also a prolific intralingual trans
tor. He published two volumes of translations from the Greek Bible—the Song
Songs (completed 1960, published 1965) and John's Revelation (1966)—and a c
lection of his unpublished translations from Ancient Greek texts (titled Metagrafes
came out posthumously in 1980. In both cases Seferis's overarching intention is to
test if his language is, as Pound once put it, "fit to bear some charge hitherto born
only by some alien tongue"—crucially not taking for granted that it can do so even
when it comes to its "own" older reincarnations (Literary Essays 36).
Although they have received almost no critical attention, the translations of
Pound's work that Seferis completed in the 1930s, and especially his translatio
of Canto 1, constitute an exemplary site for investigating, on the one hand,
Seferis's translation theory and practice, as well as his understanding of lingu
tic tradition and "Greekness" (sWoiviKoiriTa), and, on the other, the implicatio
of such a practice and the particular, and particularly idiosyncratic, case of
Greece, for translation theory. Undertaking a reading that, in Rainer Nagele
words, "does not merely follow the 'nicely woven' texture of the texts but instead
takes into account the cuts, the loose and frazzled threads" that reveal "the
intermingling of texts and languages," I argue below that translation—and the
translation of Pound especially—allows Seferis to push against the demand,
prevalent in the 1930s, to define and circumscribe not only "Greekness" but also
what counts as "Greek language," while also defining himself as a modernist
poet against both Pound and Homer (16). To do so, he simultaneously adheres
to — rather than simply navigates between — two apparently opposed transla
tional strategies: the syntactic and lineal literalness praised by Walter Benjamin
in his famous "Task of the Translator," and a precise, historically conscious
notion of dynamic linguistic equivalence, a version of which is espoused by
Pound in his first canto. This is what I call, adapting one of Seferis's terms for
translation, anti-writing: a translation that is both a kind of copy or faithful tran
scription functioning as a mirror of another language's characters and charac
teristics, and a transformation or even reversal of some of the original work's
textual strategies in accordance with demands made by the translator's own lin
guistic and cultural context. Pushing Pound's already convention-challenging
translation work further, Seferis exposes the porous borders between languages
and between kinds of translation.
2 That the plan for Antigrafes was already in place in November 1942 (see Seferis-Malanos Lett
164), in the middle of the Second World War and while the diplomat Seferis was in exile in Ca
with the rest of the Greek government, attests to the importance Seferis attached to his work
translator. For a concise overview of Seferis as an interlingual translator, see Connolly; see als
Loulakaki-Moore's more recent, and lengthier, study.

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SEFERIS ANTI-WRITING POUND S HOMER / 377
1. On (Not) Knowing Greek: Towards a Greek Hellenism

Jacques Derrida has written eloquently on the originary alienation inherent in
every language, the impossibility of linguistic "propriete," encapsulated in the
paradoxical motto he repeats throughout Monolingualism of the Other: "je n'ai
qu'une langue, ce nest pas la mienne," "I only have one language; it is not mine"
(Monolinguisme 15, 13; Monolingualism 2, 1). Yet, as Derrida also argues, this
absence of "propriety" leads not to the neutralization of differences between lan
guages but to the re-politicization of the stakes involved: where "propriete," or its
right, does not exist naturally, it becomes ever more necessary to identify mov
ments and ideologies of appropriation (Monolingualisme 122; Monolingualism
63-64). The Greek case is particularly complicated because of an almost pe
manent diglossia that became intensified in the late eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, and whose persistence reinforced movements of linguistic appropria
tion and prescribed monolingualism (see Mackridge, Language and "Katha
revousa"). After the emancipation of Greece from Turkish rule and the estab
lishment of the modern Greek state in 1831, nationalist scholars constructed a
"Hellenic image" of modern Greece on the basis of the European image of classi
cal Greece.3 At the same time, there was a movement to construct and then pro
mote in all domains of public and intellectual life (schools included) an archaic,
"scholarly" language, the so-called katharevousa—grammatically a participle, the
word means "tending towards purity." Although some factions demanded a com
plete return to Ancient Greek, most proponents of katharevousa argued for a par
tial revival of Ancient Greek vocabulary and morphology, as well as a purification
(or de-orientalization) of the modern idiom from foreign — mainly Turkish —
vocabulary.4 Despite the fervor of its supporters, however, katharevousa never suc
ceeded in becoming a spoken language; its aggressive promotion only led to an
artificial diglossia that hindered the communication and education of the aver
age Greeks who either did not or only half-understood this artificial official lan
guage. In the late nineteenth century, after fifty years of relatively small and insig
nificant literary production in katharevousa, the opposite movement flourished,
advocating the use of popular so-called "demotic" Greek in both literature and
education."'
Both positions had important implications for translation. For the katharevousa
camp, purification would make intralingual translation unnecessary. Thus, esp
cially around the turn of the twentieth century, the translation of classical an
biblical texts into Modern Greek became a controversial endeavor, implying as
did that modern Greeks could not otherwise understand what was supposedl
;i On the European image of Greece that emerged out of the work of Winckelmann, see Ferr
On nationalism and classical antiquity in the particular case of Greece, see Bastea, Gourgour
Hamilakis, Herzfeld, and Peckham.
4 For a sixteenth-century literary occurrence of something like katharevousa in the case of Italian,
see Agamben's "Dream of Language" (45).
5 As Mackridge shows in "'Zujicpowa j.ie xov Kavova Kai j.ic y0^)GT0,: 0 Môxapriq Kai xa opia ttj<5y?tcooGiicr)<;
TD7ro7roiriai'|c" and Language and National Identity 203-32, the first demoticists were, at least in their
critical work, as rigid and extreme in their demoticism as the purists were in their purism—and
equally interested in systematizing the Greek language.

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their patrimony.6 At the same time, katharevousa necessitated a daily translation

process between the official public language, which had its own syntactic and
grammatical structures, and the private one. For the demoticists, in contrast, a
functional equivalent for ancient texts and particularly Homer was to be sought in
the meters and vocabulary of folk songs because a centuries-long Greek oral
poetic tradition had been purportedly maintained in them. Nikos Kazantzakis,
for example, invented a slightly longer line than that of the Greek folk song for his
translation of the Odyssey and set about to create as many compound adjectives
and epithets as could be found in Homer. In the former case, the very project of
an intralingual translation (metagrafi, to use Seferis's term) is suspect; in the latter,
the intralingual translation rewrites the older text in accordance with the modern
language's system.
Modernist poets of the 1930s generation like Seferis and Odysseas Elytis thus
found themselves in a linguistic and intellectual quandary; they rejected the
archaism of katharevousa, but wanted to reclaim Greek tradition apart from
both the West's and the official Greek state's appropriations. For this reason,
they also rejected the sweeping and rigid demoticism (and its mode of transla
tion) that had prevailed in the previous three decades (see Mackridge, Language
294-95). Not unjustly, Seferis and Elytis have been called "the last poets to fight
for the continuity"—but not the unity—"of Greek poetic voice" (Calotychos
228). Responding to a question by Edmund Keeley concerning the relation of a
Greek poet to his historical tradition, Seferis says: "I meant Greece is a continu
ous process. In English the expression 'ancient Greece' includes the meaning of
'finished,' whereas for us, Greece goes on living for better or for worse; it is in
life, has not expired yet" (22). In an essay on the monasteries of Cappadocia, he
argues the same for Byzantium:
Our "glorious Byzantinism" ... is not a hieratic fossilized shape, nor a pretext to neutralize all the
works we don't like, but an uninterrupted transit of ideas and of different instincts, a fermentation, a
refinery. In Byzantium, as in ancient Greece, there are so many things that we don't suspect, that we
think are foreign \a)S/J}vj\r/ov 'of other-soul'] because most of us think Greek—alas, still—what we see
of the Academy or Syntagma square. ("Tp£i<; (jip£<; era jt£xp0K0|i|i£va |iovaotripia tt|<; Kajt7ia5oKia<;" 76)7
Because the pictorial art of Cappadocian monks developed on the borders, Seferis
asserts, it is not closed; instead, it "accepts willingly and knows how to process
ideas coming towards it from the four corners of the world" (88). He then claims
that "the whole of Greece is, in many ways, an edge [&Kpr| 'margin', 'corner', 'extrem
ity']," a point to which everything tends, but which remains open and gives back
(88). "Living" thus becomes synonymous with an openness to the foreign and acci
dental that is the opposite of what he finds represented in the neoclassical Acad
emy building or the Greek parliament in Syntagma square: namely, the importa
tion of a foreign Hellenism and the too-neat nationalist appropriation of antiquity,
unquestioninglyjoined to modernity through imitative architecture. What Seferis
wishes to establish is the continuity of non-continuity, of exchange and transfer
8 For an overview of some particularly incendiary translations and the riots they provoked in 1901
and 1903, see Mackridge 247-54, and Gi'ithenke 123-24, especially 124 n. 4; on the New Testament
translation riots, see Carabott; and on the riots that followed a production of the Oresteia in
demotic, see Van Steen.
7 All translations from Modern Greek are my own, unless otherwise noted. On the neoclassical
rebuilding of Athens in the nineteenth century, to which Seferis alludes in his reference to the
Academy and Syntagma square, see Bastea 146-79.

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SEFERIS ANTI-WRITING POUND'S HOMER / 379
mation through the harboring of what might be thought of as "other." For him
Hellenism is not single or static; its "rules" are "modifiable," since Hellenism denotes
a reality shaped by a lived and living language, a language that is influenced an
influences or, as Pound puts it, is "inclusive and not exclusive" (Vayenas, "Vh')0oc"
28; Pound, Selected Letters 347).
Seferis published translations of three of Pound's cantos (1,13, and 30—by the
fifty-one had appeared) in the April-June 1939 issue of the journal Nea Grammata,s
at a time when he was engaged in a heated public debate about Hellenism (see
"Dialogue on Poetry" and "Monologue on Poetry") and the journal itself wa
undergoing an internal ideological crisis that caused Seferis to lament the absenc
of aÂ-riêyyuri (camaraderie, solidarity, like-mindedness) (see Meres C 102). Why
would Seferis choose to translate at this point "the most significant living poet of
the English language,";l who, nonetheless, as all of the "original" excerpts from
The Cantos that Seferis chooses to use in his introductory note would suggest, pri
marily writes in languages other than English? One answer is that both poets were
committed to the idea that, because "no one language is complete," "a master
ought to "continually expan[d] his own tongue" by engaging with other idioms
(Pound, Literary Essays 36). Another is that Pound—much like Seferis—while
apparently invested in defining and categorizing his poetic and especially transl
tional activity, blurs in practice the distinction both between kinds of translation
(interlingual vs. intralingual, for example) and between languages, recognizing
tonalities of difference rather than fixed categories.
2. Antigrafi or Metagrafi: Translating with or against?
Although jakobson was content to subsume the three species of translation

under a single genus, to Seferis the processes of interlingual and intralingual
translation seemed so distinct that they warranted different names. The ones h
chose—provisionally, he claimed—are the titles of his two volumes of collected
translations: metagrafi (intralingual translation) and antigrafi (interlingual tran
lation).1" The word metagrafi comes from the verb metagrafo, which in turn derive
from meta (Ancient Greek "with, among, in-between, in the middle"; Modern
Greek "after") and grafo (write). In Modern Greek metagrafo means correct, rewrite
or transcribe. In Ancient Greek it has two primary meanings; "1. copy, transcribe;
rewrite, alter or correct what one has written, esp. of a public document... tamper
with it; in a trial, alter the record. 2. translate."11 At first glance, Seferis's choice o
the word metagrafi makes sense in its Modern Greek meaning. In the case of th
ancient texts he translates, he does literally write "after" them; furthermore, his
rewriting is a kind of transcription since what changes, in Seferis's view, is not the
8 It appears that Pound eventually read, or at least saw, these translations in 1951. See Seferis
Lorentzatos, Letters 123-24.
" Seferis has slightly altered T.S. Eliot's characterization of Pound in translating it into Greek for the
introductory note to his Cantos translations ("Tpia Kavio," 190). In After Strange Gods Eliot had origi
nally written: "Mr. Pound is probably the most important living poet in our language" (my italics, 42).
10 Irene Loulakaki-Moore notes that some Greek nineteenth-century translators, as well as Seferis's
contemporary Odysseas Elytis, named their translating activity in a similar fashion (11 and 11 n. 35).
11 All definitions of Modern Greek words are taken from Dimitrakos; definitions of Ancient Greek
words are from Liddell-Scott.

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language per se but its form. For example, in Revelation he consistently uses wo
from the original even if they are rarely used in such contexts in Modern Greek
What changes is the morphology of each word (the noun and verb endings,
example) on its path from Ancient Greek to Modern or particular grammat
and syntactical constructions—in short, the structure or form of the lang
Thus, for Seferis the process is more akin to a transcription of speech into writ
a transliteration, or an arrangement of a piece of music for a different instrum
than it is to a wholesale transformation.
Yet Seferis does not tell us all this. To justify the use of metagrafi as (intralingual)
translation, he simply cites two passages, one from Thucydides and one from
Lucian:
Kai avxov KOjiioOEVToq ot AGrjvaioi xa<; jasv CTtiaxoXac /{sraypay/d/usvoi sk tcov Aoaupicov ypani
aveyvcoaav (Thucydides, Historiae 4.50.2; my emphasis)
when he was brought [to Athens] the Athenians translated his letters lrom the Assyrian lan
characters and read them (my translation)
U7t6 yap tou KojiiSrj Attiko<; sivai Kai a7toK8Ka0ap0ai xfjv (ptovrjv sq to aKpipcaxaiov outoc
ovopaia [iCTaTtoifjoai ra Pco|iaia)v Kai jj£i£yypav|/ai tq to 'EXXr|viKdv, ox; Kpoviov fisv ZaToi)pvivov X
OpovTiv tov OpovTcova, Tuaviov 5c tov Ttnavdv Kai aXXa 7uoAAcp yetanoTSpa.
This writer has such a passion for unadulterated Attic, and for refining speech to the last deg
purity, that he metamorphoses the Latin names and translates them into Greek; Saturninus
as Cronius, Fronto must be Phrontis, Titianus Titanius, with queerer transmogrificatio
(Lucian, "The Way to Write History")
Despite Seferis's disclaimer against reading too much into his lexical choic
dell-Scott also cites the same passages in the definition of metagrafo), one
help but notice that the Thucydides passage refers to an interlingual trans
(where the Greeks translate [|j.£iaypdipouv] and then read a letter they
obtained from the Persians). In addition, although in the cited passage L
mocks a writer's excessive Atticism, he was himself a participant in an Att
movement. Lucian's goal is to archaize, while Seferis aims to modernize or
react against the Atticizing tendencies dominating Modern Greek at the tim
evokes the Ancient Greek meaning of metagrafi as translation only to then su
it to a metagrafi in the Modern Greek sense of correction/rewriting. By choos
word with a complicated history to designate his own encounter with that com
cated history, Seferis thus undercuts his own impulse to delimit and name wh
is that he is doing.
The term antigrafi seems simpler in its elaboration and history. It comes
the verb antigrafo, which derives from anti (against, facing; for; instead,
place of; in contrast) and again grafo. Its principal meaning in both Ancien
Modern Greek is "copy, imitate." It can also mean "write against someon
"write in response to someone," but those meanings are rarely used in Mo
Greek. Although Seferis explains his use of metagrafi solely on linguistic-
cal grounds, he justifies his choice of antigrafi conceptually, initially com
the translator to a painter who copies another's masterpiece:
When we translate from a foreign language that we know, more or less, into a language—ou
that is innate to us and that we love more, we do something, it seems to me, similar to the peo
we see in museums, who are concentrated with great zeal, copying—either to train themsel
someone's behest—paintings by various painters. I named this book Antigrafes in that sense. (7
The analogy, however, is misleading. Unlike a painter who, in theory at

would have at her disposal the same materials or resources as did the m

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the original, the translator's linguistic resources are very different from those of
the poet she translates. In order to correspond to Seferis's figure, an antigrafi
would have to be a rhythmic paraphrase of a poem in the same language, and s
a kind of metagrafi or intralingual translation in Jakobson's sense.
The second simile Seferis employs to explain the process of antigrafi seems
implicitly to fill in the gaps left by the first. Because in translating a single poem, one
has to "transfer [|.isTacpepou(i8] a tiny fragment [ajiocniaa|aa, also meaning excerpt]
of a whole world of linguistic expression—or poetic order" (7), the reader's (an
translator's) effort is akin to that of the naturalist who tries to reconstitute an
entire antediluvian beast having found only a single vertebra. Unlike a metagrafi,
where the new writing comes with (meta) or is accompanied by the original on the
facing page (as was Seferis's practice), pointing towards and away from it, an ant
grafi exists on its own. That is, the source culture will be resurrected only so that
it can then be sacrificed for the creation of a new original in the target languag
(cf. Schleiermacher, "Ubersetzens" 218; "Translating" 49). In this sense, the alle
edly slavish antigrafi becomes an anti-grafi, as the older meaning of the word—
writing against or writing in response—is reinstituted; at the same time, it turns
into somewhat of a metagrafi—in that word's sense of tampering with a public
document—since this kind of antigrafi would sully the law of the original. The
term antigrafi, then, in retaining both senses of the preposition an Li—opposite as
"facing/mirroring" and as "against"—encompasses some of the nuances of meta
grafi and so stands midway between other oppositions typically associated with
translation (word-for-word and sense-for-sense, foreignizing and domesticating
interlingual and intralingual). It also defines Seferis's translation of Pound's firs
canto without circumscribing it.
3. Raising the Dead
Pound himself distinguished between translations in terms of purpose and

function rather than source and target languages (see Apter 72-75; Anderson,
Introduction; and Pound, Literary Essays 23-37, 191-200). On the one hand, he
undertook what he called "critical" or "interpretative" translations that were
meant to "show where the treasure lies" in the original by "dig[ging] out and
focus [ing] attention upon matter of interest that would otherwise have passed
without notice" {Literary Essays 200, 191). Pound's versions of medieval Italian poet
Guido Cavalcanti and the troubadour Arnaut Daniel are such translations; both
would ideally be accompanied by the original on the facing page. On the othe
hand, as a translator Pound was also often engaged in "definitely making a new
poem" {Literary Essays 200)—and this is his most enduring legacy in poetic tran
lation practice (see Apter 77-128). An example might be "Homage to Sextu
Propertius," in which, as Peter Liebregts writes, Pound "blurs the distinction
between translation, imitation, and original composition to create a persona
which questions notions of epic poetry, of politics and imperialism" ("The Cla
sics" 177; see also Davie, Ezra Pound 55-61). Canto 1 falls in between the two cate
gories: it is at once a faithful translation of a passage from Book Eleven of the
Odyssey (the so-called nekuia, Odysseus's descent to the underworld) and also the
opening to Pound's own ambitious long poem, inaugurating the journey of voice
and languages that The Cantos would become.

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Because the nekuia was for Pound the epic's oldest section, it warranted, h
argued, a translation into the oldest English verse form — namely, the Ang
Saxon alliterative verse of the similarly themed eighth-century poem "The Sea
farer." Believing that one language can "be made to do what another has done,
but also that "it is not always expeditious to approach the same goal by the sam
alley," Pound thus chose not to replicate Homer's dactylic hexameter or his wor
order and sentence structure, governed as they were by the rules of an inflecte
language (Literary Essays 169).12 Instead, he transmuted Homer's Greek and it
unavailable (at least to English) prosody and syntax into a system and register that
was available to English and, more specifically, into a language that Pound ha
created through translation: the heavily Anglo-Saxon flavored diction and mete
in which he had rendered "The Seafarer" in 1912.13 For as much as Homer would
not be understood by a Modern Greek audience without translation, so the
guage of "The Seafarer" would not be understood by most contemporary speak
of English. A "creative" translation, then, must also be a critical one as the p
translator picks out of his original what will be of most use to his language when
undertakes the translation: in this case, the seafaring trope and a language free of
(because preceding) the Latinate influence in vocabulary and meter that Poun
viewed as a burden on modern poetry in English. At the same time, if Pound
indebted to the Odyssey, using the ritual it records to launch his long poem, he ha
already moved "out of Homer" by canto's end (Cantos 5).
Furthermore, although Latinate elements may not make themselves felt in t
poem, Latin itself is nevertheless its literal basis. As Seferis knew, Pound chose no
to work from the Homeric original, but from Andreas Divus's Renaissance transla
tion of Homer into Latin. As Pound's Odysseus offers blood to the dead to he
them speak but refuses his mother, so the poet-translator avoids not only contem
porary English, his own "mother," but also Homer's Greek, the "original," not sim
ply by translating out of it, but precisely by not doing so. Opting instead for the
medium provided by Divus's Latin crib ("even singable," Pound asserts),
embeds the "oral" epic into a textual network of translation and transmission
demonstrating that, as Liebregts puts it, "any translation is influenced by the her
tage of interpretative perspectives foisted upon the original" (Pound, Litera
Essays 264; Liebregts, "Greek Translation" 138). At the same time, Pound als
embeds his canto in a context of intense linguistic transformation—for it was onl
in Divus's time that the English stress system began to move away from its G
manic roots (and toward Latin) as new metrical forms were developed under t
influence of Italian ones (see Hanson 52ffi). This movement out of the Homer
turned-Anglo-Saxon world and sound is registered in three ways as Canto 1 draws
to a close: thematically, through the eruption of Divus, who is instructed to "
quiet": linguistically, through the snippets of another Renaissance translation
this time of the Homeric hymn to Aphrodite—that remains in Latin; and met
cally, through the introduction of enjambment, strictly forbidden in Anglo-Saxon
12 On the nineteenth-century "hexameter mania" in Homer translations and beyond, agai

which Pound is reacting, see Prins; for a comparison between Victorian metrical translations
Pound's practice, see Apter 61-92.
13 On Pound's particular metrical adjustments to Anglo-Saxon meter for his "Seafarer," see Ap
86-87. See also Stephen Adams, who argues for both an iambic pentameter basis for the first can
meter and additional Greek, though not strictly Homeric, echoes (63-66).

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poetry. Unlike both its ur-version (see Pound, Poems and Translations 327-30) an
the Odyssey's eleventh book, Canto 1 resists closure and leaves Elpenor unburied
"so that:" (to quote the canto's last words) the poem can continue—with Aphr
dite "Bearing the golden bough of Argicida," the slayer of Argives, of Greeks, o
this Homer—into Latium and into Pound's own half-Romance tradition, which
the poet is determined to reground.
In Seferis's terms, Canto 1 is ostensibly an antigrafi in the sense of writing
against. By translating the birth of Greek (and Western) literature into the birth
of the English metrical tradition, while at the same time trying to discover an
appropriate idiom for Homer, Pound kills off the Greek beast and tries to "recon
stitute" it by making it acquire functions or effects in his target language that are
equivalent or related to the "original" writing. Yet to do so, Pound does not simply
translate it into the English he speaks, but into an English that is the product of an
intralingual translation from Old English into something closer to modern Eng
lish. That is, Pound is able to achieve his interlingual translation only through the
intralingual one that he embeds within it. Fully aware of what Pound is doing,
Seferis writes in the lengthy introduction to his translation:
I saw that I had to translate a piece [k"0|j|jcm] of Homer for the third time', [first came the] translation of
the Greek text into Latin; then the translation of Divus's translation into English (and I should note
that Pound knows Ancient Greek); and finally my translation of Pound's translation. These successive
layers [jipoaxcoasti; 'alluvions'] of translating moved me. Still, I had to deal with an issue that illumi
nated rather strangely the problem of translating poetry. If I believed without reservation in the clas
sical [KXaoaiKf|] theory that calls for the translator to try to transmit to his audience the emotions
that the audience of the original must have experienced [8oKi|xdêt], I should have run back to
Homer and translated him. I nevertheless chose the opposite path. Translating Pound's text, I forgot
Homer as much as I could. If I were translating Homer, I would do it very differently. (192)
What Seferis finds appealing in Pound's text is, to extend his geological metaphor,
the slow and almost fortuitous deposition and emergence of land out of the bot
tom of one river (language), as it receives and is fertilized by the currents and soil
of another (river, language). New land is created or land is added onto land, out of
dirt, and will eventually be taken in by the river again. The alluvion, moreover,
usually happens at a delta, where the river meets the sea; the interaction and
exchange occurs at a liminal area, an edge, an atcpr)—a metaphor that Seferis uses
for Greece itself. In such a liminal area Seferis's own translation stands between
an allegedly renounced intralingual translation (metagrafi) of Homer and a pro
fessed interlingual translation (antigrafi) of Pound.
On the one hand, making an antigrafi out of what might have been a metagrafi
(of Homer), Seferis inverts Pound's procedure, since, by using the idiom of his "Sea
farer," Pound had made a metagrafi out of an antigrafi. On the other, Seferis's
choice to translate a text that defies easy definition, compounded by the fact that
the terms metagrafi and antigrafi seem to bleed into one another even when he tries
to distinguish them, suggests that Seferis is testing not merely the charge that Greek
can bear but also the very process of linguistic circumscription. Despite being influ
enced by Pound's translation theory and practice, Seferis produces a text that
reflects his own understanding of translation as anti-writing in all its senses: a copy,
a mirror, a response, and an antithesis. Rather than embed one kind of translation
in another and produce (as Pound does, at least in this case) a coherent, unified
text, Seferis offers us different mirrors, on a large and small scale, of Pound's and
Homer's texts, blurring their edges and producing a very dissonant translation.

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4. Translating Odysseus's Bad Roots
By choosing to translate Pound's version of the Odyssey, Seferis implies that he i

not ready to settle his accounts with mother Greece (he will not translate Ody
seus's embrace of his mother, Anticlea—present in Homer but absent in Pound—
until thirty years later in a lecture on Dante). There are two opposing forces
work in Seferis's translation: his prosody, which imitates Pound's, apparently unex
peditiously approaching "the same goal by the same alley," and his vocabulary,
which, in contrast to Pound's consistent recourse to archaisms (see Davie, Poet a
Sculptor 12-13, and Apter 25-28, 109), is drawn from a very demotic register o
Modern Greek. That is, on the one hand, Seferis produces a translation of Poun
that respects the integrity of his lines and syntactical units—an antigrafi in th
sense of "copy," or, to use Pound's term, a "critical" translation. On the othe
hand—and much as Pound through his use of Anglo-Saxon conjoins the questio
of classical receptions with that of the English poetic tradition—Seferis has an
entirely different, "Greek," conversation with Pound's own originals (Homer an
Divus) and their literary tradition. He thus reconstitutes the English beast through
means available to Modern Greek and engages in a discussion with his own tra
tion that is parallel but not identical to Pound's with his. But if in Pound the "criti
cal" and the "creative" translational impulse come together, in Seferis they remain,
as I hope to demonstrate below, deliberately disjoined.
I begin with Seferis's translation on the lexical level, his antigrafi as writing in
response to or against Pound. The Greek poet consistently uses highly demoti
variants of standard words like "ap|ir|V£V|/e" instead of "8p(xf)v£v|/s" (line 19), "ps|.
and "Tivsjia" instead of "pst)|ia" and "7tvEU(.ta" (lines 18, 47), "Kot|j.avs" instead of
"icdvav£" (line 20),14 or phrases typically found in folk songs like "Pyalvst
GT'a\(/r]Xd" (line 15). More often than not, these translate Pound's archaisms
"ap(j.rjv£v|/e" stands in for "aforesaid," "Kapavs" for the inversion "did they." Whe
Odysseus, surprised at finding Elpenor in Hades, asks him how he got there
Seferis translates Pound's "afoot" by "7ie^05p6|i0<;":
Cam'st thou afoot, outstripping seamen? (line 48)
ri££o8p6fioi; r|p0E<; <;£7t8pvcbvTaq louq Oaâaaivouq (Seferis, line 49)
£(p0r)<; i<bv syo) oi)V vrji fietaxivfl (Odyssey, line 58)
Since Homer's "Tcsôq" (on foot) is a word still used in Modern Greek, Seferis'
adjective "jr£ô5po|ao<;" is an intentionally odd choice with a definite dialectic
tint—a word perhaps borrowed from a poem by the ardent demoticist Kostis P
mas.15 At the same time, like Pound's "afoot," it is a differently stressed variant of
common word (jieôSponot;, meaning paved walkway) and so retains the sam
degree of difference from the more common term, albeit in a different direction.
What for Pound is a slight archaism, for Seferis becomes a (relative) modernis
even if the word dates to a time before the Renaissance, it is not as old as Homer.
Another such example would be the translation of Pound's archaizing neologis
" Seferis changed some of these words back to their more standard equivalents in the versio
printed in Antigrafes (59, 58).
I:' I am referring to the 1910 short poem "Lxov Ttoirjifj ttou eyivs KpuiKOt; [iou" ("To the poet wh
became my critic"). Seferis identified Palamas as the only major "Greek" Greek poet, "the true ki
[dpxovioK;] of the Greek language," in contradistinction to the bilingual Solomos, Calvos, a
Cavafy ("npoôyoi; yta jria £ic5oor| xcov 'n8(bv,M Dokimes A 203 [1941]). See also his essay on Palama
written upon the older poet's death in 1943, in Dokimes A, 214-27.

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"bloody bever" as the very demotic "ai(iaxep6 jiioto," meaning bloody drink (inst
of the standard "ou|icn:r|p6 71010"):
Stand from the fosse, leave me my bloody bever (line 62)
Τραβήξου απ'τον τράφο, άφησε το αιματερό πιοτό μου (Seferis, line 63)
άλλ' άποχάζεο βόθρου,
αίματος οφρα πίω (Odyssey, lines 95-96)
Given that ancient or archaizing Greek in the modern Greek context would
associated with excess formalism and artificiality, moving towards it would
the opposite connotations from Pound's reclaiming of the Anglo-Saxon root
English, which, because it ostensibly seeks to circumvent a staid, formalizing Lat
nate influence, is registered as a turn towards the "primitive." This, then, w
seem to be the response to, or (oppositional) anti-writing of, English (and
Homeric Greek) by the Modern Greek poet: unwilling and unable to go ba
wards in time to convey the particularities of Pound's style, Seferis moves horiz
tally, towards oral or dialectal variants of standard demotic Greek.
The problem with such an approach, however, becomes clear upon closer c
parison of Seferis's lines with Homer's. Seferis's sequence of sounds in this
replicates Homer's almost exactly: his "atfxaiepoi;" echoes "ai|iaTO<; ocppa," while
nonstandard "juoto" (in place of "71010") recalls the Homeric "71101." This Homer
resonance could be dismissed as a coincidence, but if one keeps an eye on t
Homeric text while reading Seferis, one can easily see, or rather hear, that i
tionally or not the older Greek poet has not been forgotten. For example, E
nor's appearance and his subsequent plea to Odysseus also take place in the M
ern Greek developments of the Homeric words even as Seferis closely transl
Pound's text:
But thou, O King, I bid remember me, unwept, unburied,

Heap up mine arms, be tomb by sea-bord, and inscribed:
A man of no fortune, and with a name to come, (lines 54-57)
Μα εσύ, Βασιλιά, παρακαλώ θυμήσου με, άκλαυτον, άθαφτο,
Σώριασε τ'άρματά μου, φτιάξε μου τάφο στην ακρογιαλιά, και γράψε:
Ενας άμοιρος άνθρωπος και μ'όνομα μελλούμενο. (Seferis, lines 55—58)
ένθα σ'έπειτα, άναξ, κέλομαι μνήσασθαι έμεΐο—
μή μ'άκλαυτον άθαπτον ιών όπιθεν καταλείπειν
σήμά τέ μοι χεΰαι πολιής επί θινί θαλάσσης,

άνδρός δυστήνοιο, και έσσομένοισι πυθέσθαι (Odyssey, lines 71-76)
Although Seferis translates Pound's text almost word-for-word, the words he uses
remain those of the Odyssey: "jiupaKu/.co" (I bid) is an etymological descendant of
"KC/.op.ai" as "0imr|ooi)" (remember) is of ")ivf]aaa0au" while "dtc/.auTOv" (unwep
as well as "dOaTtxov" (unburied) are unchanged—to avoid the hiatus, "uk/jidto
even retains the final v, which is usually dropped in Modern Greek. What Da
Ricks calls the "unlimited depth" of the continuity of Greek—the fact that "in th
least allusive, most colloquial poem of today one can identify a good many nou
especially, which have remained identical in form and meaning, if not always
associations, since the time of Homer" (13)16—makes it challenging for any, e
lateral, movement within the modern language to not also be a vertical one.
16 Ricks further contrasts this "unlimited depth" to the "limited breadth" of the continuity of G
since these "same" nouns or words would occur in a phonological and syntactical context that is ra
cally different (13).

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Crucially, however, Seferis tends to concentrate these Homeric linguistic all

sions in passages that deal with backwards movements or, even more explicitly
with memory. In addition, then, to serving as explicit but textually motivated allu
sions, they also invite us to reflect on what it means to say that the words are the
"same." The first time Seferis scrambles Pound's lines, and the only time he splits
one into two, is when, "The ocean flowing backward," Odysseus's ship reaches t
"Kimmerian lands" of the underworld:
Nor with stars stretched, nor looking back from heaven

Swartest night stretched over wretched men there.
The ocean flowing backward, came we then to the place
Aforesaid by Circe, (lines 15-18)
Μήτε όταν βγαίνει στ'αψηλά κοντά οτ'αστέρια
Μήτε όταν σκύβει να γυρίσει πίσω από τον ουρανό
Νύχτα ολόμαυρη τεντωμένη εκεί πάνω στους άμοιρους ανθρώπους
Πίσω το ρέμα του ωκεανού, κι' ήρθαμε τότε
Στον τόπο που μας αρμήνεψε η Κίρκη (Seferis, lines 15-19, my emphasis)
οϋθ' οπότ' άν στείχησι προς ούρανόν άστερόεντα,
ούθ' οτ' άν άψ επί γαιαν άπ' ούρανόθεν προτράπηται,
άλλ' επί νύξ όλοή τέταται δειλοισι βροτοΐσι
.. . αύτοι 6' αύτε παρά ρόον Ώκεανοΐο
ήομεν, όφρ' έςχώρον άφικόμεθ' όν φράσε Κίρκη (Odyssey, lines 17-21)
Although Seferis could have used participial clauses like Pound's, he break
American poet's first line ("Nor with stars . . . ") into two and translates it
phrastically with verb phrases (literally: "nor when he [the sun] rises up ab
near the stars / nor when he bends to turn back from the sky"). If we loo
Homer, we see that in this case Pound may not be Seferis's facing page: ther
we find two lines for Pound's one, many of the "same" words (italicized ab
and a similar grammatical construction. However, in his Homeric transcrip
Seferis does not use the Modern Greek version of Homer's ou0' . . . ou0' (nor
nor) construction, which would be ouxs . . . oijxe, but its more demotic vers
often encountered in folk songs, namely |ifjx£ ... |if|X£, as if to concur with scho
and critics of his time that the oral Greek folk tradition, in which he now
such old words, is in some sense the continuation of the Homeric one. Only in h
third line, which corresponds to Pound's second, does Seferis translate Pou
participle "stretched" with a participle: "x£vxco|i£vr|," it too a descendant o
Odyssey s verb "xExaxcu." Seferis is still closer to a crib, or a metagrafi, of Hom
than to a rendering of Pound when he places "o/.6pai>pi|" (for "swartest") after
noun it modifies and not before. He thus creates a line that is neither as faithful to
Pound's nor as standard with respect to Modern Greek word order as it is sonically
connected to Homer: "Nuxxa o^6|j.oa>pr| x£vxc0|i£vr|" for "vt)^ oôf] xexaiai."
As we approach the moment in the text when the ocean flows backward, Seferis
retrieves more and more from Homer. At the same time, Pound's translation itself
acquires a performative aspect: His "aforesaid" condenses in sound two Homeric
words in the line it is translating, x®P°v a(j9iK6|i£0' ov (ppaos (we arrived to the place
that [Circe] said), so that what Circe foresaw—the arrival to a place of necessary
backwards movement—is coming to pass in this very translation, since the textual
place reached is indeed that aforesaid, fore-sounded by Homer's Circe. But it is
Pound who has framed this directionally to begin with. The Odyssey s "7tapa poov
QiceavoTo" is usually translated as "beside/along the stream of the ocean"; Homer's

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line is even the example for this particular meaning of the preposition rapa in
Liddell-Scott (s.v. II.1). Divus, too, has "apud fluxum" (at/by the flow). Reading
this as a "backwards" oceanic movement. Pound both emphasizes that this jour
ney to the underworld is against the natural order and metatextually marks his
place in time with respect to the Homeric poem. Seferis in turn follows Pound's
sense with his "juaco" (back), but not his sound. That is, he replicates the meaning
of Pound's performative lines by sonically echoing the Homeric phrase that Pound
misreads, in a sense reconstituting the English beast by other means: Fliocfl to pejia
tod ©Ksavou—7tapa poov 'Qkgckvoio. Seferis's word for "flowing" is, however, not the
direct descendant of the Homeric "poov" (namely, "pof|"), but its demotic cognate,
"psjia"; leaving Pound's and Homer's/'s behind, it is this word that resounds in
Seferis's two verbs: "i]p0a|as" (we came) and the very demotic variant "ap[tr|ve\|/e"
(counseled, for "aforesaid"). Following Pound in aligning the moment of descent
to the underworld with a backwards linguistic movement, while at the same time
developing a demotic idiom out of the Homeric/Poundian one, Seferis suggests
that a return to Homer and to what may remain of his language in Modern Greek
is not a matter of easy identification and retrieval or something to be done for its
own sake, but rather a complex, sometimes unavoidable but necessary mediated
and multidirectional encounter to be undertaken in the course of a larger journey.
Homeric Greek is not Seferis's only linguistic intertext, however. In his continu
ous juxtaposition of old and new, he uses Italian-origin words, partly for the sake
of their demotic tint, but also guided by Pound's own intertexts: Andreas Divus
and the Cretan Georgius Dartona who appears at the canto's end—both Renais
sance translators from Greek into Latin. Already in line 2 Seferis showcases the
linguistic amalgamation that will be characteristic of his translation:
Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and
We set up mast and sail on that swart ship (lines 2-3)
Κυλήσαμε την καρένα στη θάλασσα τη θεοτική
Σηκώσαμε τ'άλμπουρο και το πανί στο μελανό τούτο καράβι (Seferis, lines 2-3)
νήα μέν άρ πάμπρωτον έρύσσαμεν εις άλα διαν,
εν δ'ίστόν τιθέμεσθα και ιστία νηΐ μελαίνη (Odyssey 2-3)
Pound's Germanic "swart" becomes Homeric again (neXouvr|-|i£Xav6), but this

literal usage of "fteâvo" (black) is not frequent in Modern Greek. By rendering
"swart" through a word with equivalent familiarity and frequency in Modern
Greek, Seferis uses Pound to return to Homer. As he pulls his text backwards,
however, he also pushes it forward: "«A|i7toijpo" (mast), recently come into Greek
from Italian, is chosen instead of the Homeric "ioti'o," which is still in use in Mod
ern Greek. The word points not only to a different historical period but also to an
entirely different aspect of the Greek language: not conservative continuity but
exchange, the exchange that produced EpcozoKpirog (Erotokritos) a seventeenth
century romance Seferis admired (see "Erotokritos"), or the exchange that made
Greece's national poet, Dionysios Solomos, sound Italian to Seferis's ears even, or
especially, in his "best" parts, where his language is "lucidly and flawlessly demotic"
(Meres D 364). "Kapsva," translating Pound's "keel" in the previous line, has a
similar linguistic history, as well as the additional advantage of sounding almost
the same as a word that Homer uses many times in the course of Book 11: "K&pr|va"
(skull), Pound's "death's heads" (line 24). Ronnie Apter has argued that Pound
"discovered that byjuxtaposing words with different historical associations, words

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from dictions of different times, or words closely associated with certain literary
forms, he could summon to mind their cultural contexts," using connotations "
imply the interrelations between the past and present" (23, 24). Though this is not
as prominent in the first canto as it is, for example, in Pound's "Homage to Sextus
Propertius," it is exactly what the Greek poet is doing in his translation. Seferis is
thus engaged in a Poundian translation of a poem in which Pound himself ha
chosen another route—-yet another instance of Seferian anti-writing.
Seferis establishes a state of paronomastic in-betweenness in his translation b
consistently inserting double-origin and double-meaning words; in this way, h
is also able to replicate the effect of some of Pound's less familiar archaisms
When the dead appear, Pound describes them as
Battle spoil, bearing yet dreory arms (line 33)
Trig £x0VTa(^ ctKO^tr) T'apjiaia (iaiconeva (Seferis, line 34)
av8pe<; aprj'upaioi peppotcojisva xsuxe' ex0VTe^ (Odyssey, line 41)
Seferis translates "dreory" correctly as "fxaico^sva" (bloody) and replicates Pound's

old-new dissonance with "okuau." In the same way that Pound's "dreory" may m
lead us into thinking he means (and has misspelled) "dreary," Seferis's "aKUâ"
also deceptive. Read as the Modern Greek feminine noun meaning "female dog
the word makes little sense in this context. Seferis is of course using the word
the plural of a neutral noun (okuôv) taken from Ancient Greek and denotin
anything removed from the slain enemy. Though oku/.ov exists in Modern Greek,
it is very rarely encountered as a noun, and appears only slightly more frequently
a verb (cncuXguco). Seferis thus replicates Pound's old/new effect according to the
resources of Greek, going back to the classics and forward to demoticism in order
to create a (false?) etymological connection between cncuXov and aKt>A,o<; (dog
Seferis also reproduces, if not Pound's pun on "arms" as weapons and body part
at least the word's doubleness through his "dp|iaxa." The noun means both wea
ons (from the Latin arma that also brings us Pound's "arms") and chariots (fro
the classical Greek dpjra, a light two-wheel (or horse) carriage). Apîa, then, is
least double, perhaps developing independently in two tongues; opting f
"apfraxa," Seferis highlights this interrelation between various source and targ
languages, enacting the impossibility of their rigid separation or evaluation.17
The most significant of this series of double words is "piûco" (fate), because
choosing it Seferis goes against both Pound and Homer.
And Anticlea came, whom I beat off, and then Tiresias Theban,
Holding his golden wand, knew me, and spoke first:
"A second time? why? man of ill star,
"Facing the sunless dead and this joyless region?
"Stand from the fosse, leave me my bloody bever
"For soothsay." (lines 58-63; my emphasis)
Ήρθε κι' η Αντίκλεια και την έδιωξα, κι' ύστερα ο Τειρεσίας ο Θηβαίος,
Κρατώντας το χρυσό ραβδί, με γνώρισε και μίλησε πρώτος:
«Ήρθες ξανά; Γιατί; Κακορίζικε άνθρωπε,
«Μέσα στους ανήλιαγους νεκρούς, στην άχαρη τούτη χώρα;
«Τραβήξου απ'τον τράφο, άφησε το αιματερό πιοτό μου
«Για να μαντέψω». (Seferis, lines 59-64)
17 On the peculiarities of "ctpjact," see Mackridge, Language 29.

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ηλθε δ' έπί ψυχή Θηβαίου Τειρεσίαο

χρύσεον σκήπτρον έχων, έμέ δ' έγνω και προσέειπεν:
τίπτ" αύτ', ώ δύστηνε, λιπών φάος ήελίοιο
ήλυθες, όφρα ϊδη νέκυας και άτερπέα χώρον;
άλλ' άποχάζεο βόθρου, απισχε δε φάσγανον οξύ,
αϊματος όφρα πίω καί τοι νημερτέα εϊπω. (Odyssey, lines 91-96)
In Homer, the soothsayer Tiresias brings Odysseus and Elpenor together b

addressing the former as "8oorr|VE" (line 93), which is the same word Elpenor w
inscribed on his grave. Pound s reference to Elpenor's "ill fate" (line 50), combine
with his Tiresias's description of Odysseus as "man of ill star" (line 60), has
same effect. Seferis, however, has more explicitly identified Elpenor with Pound
"wretched" dead (line 16) since both are "aiioipoi avGpcojrot" (wretched/fat
men) (lines 17, 57). In response to Pound's "man of ill star," Seferis sugges
"KaKopiîKs": man with a bad pitJiKO (fate), but also pitp. (root). Seferis again cho
to render Pound's archaic formality with a colloquial, demotic word. Interestingl
the roots of piuk'6 are themselves fateful or accidental; the word is either a reen
into Greek from the Italian risiko (fate) (itself originally coming from Ancient—
and now Modern—Greek piâ) or simply the continuation and development of
Greek plâ. One's fate, it seems, may be determined by one's roots, and yet t
roots cannot be traced with certainty. It is, moreover, the roots, the mother and
mother tongue, that Odysseus, Pound, and Seferis "beat off" (in Homer, tho
even Odysseus's rejection of his mother is less firm and more elaborate, six
long [84-90] instead of a half-line), though they speak and exercise it, in ord
open themselves up to a different kind of fate, a bad fate or a bad rooting
favors displacement and uprooting and re-rooting. It is no accident that when A
clea appears for the second time in Pound she prompts one of the fathers of
text, Andreas Divus, to speak up and claim his progeny; the encounter between h
and Odysseus, if it occurs, remains a secret. Her advice to her son in the Odyssey
to search for the light (life, the new), while not forgetting the dead or ghosts.
way, that is also the project of both The Cantos and Seferis, who writing in resp
to and against Pound, reconstitutes his English beast according to the mandates o
Greek and uses the American poet to perform a different kind of linguistic arch
ology, one that would uncover not a single buried layer—akin to Anglo-Saxon
English—but multiple points of originating exchange.
5. Anti-Writing Meter
If Seferis's translation on the lexical level is an anti-writing in the expan

sense—a rewriting, a metagrafi, sullying the law of two originals for the sak
producing a unique but mixed and shifting poetic voice—metrically, it rever
anti-writing in the limited sense of copying. In his introduction to Antigrafes Sef
admits to having committed himself to following the original poets' punctua
and line construction—to following the poetic breath, as Hugh Kenner pu
with respect to Pound's own poetic procedures (see section 6 below). In the c
of Seferis's Canto 1, however, such a strategy results in a somewhat stilted poem
the Greek poet keeps Pound's metrical form. This is a tension that Seferis's t
lation intentionally and explicitly enacts: despite his lexical choices, his Po
ian/Anglicizing prosody prevents his version of the Odyssey from resembl

2.85.230.41 on Sun, 10 Jan 2021 02:44:40 UTC
something belonging to the local tradition, and in this way he maintains a

of the foreignness not only of Pound 's text, but also, through Pound, of Home
For the most part, Seferis's lines are end-stopped, isolated syntactic units;
line is divided by a strong caesura, its two parts bound by alliteration. While pu
stress meter, in which speech stress and verse stress coincide, is "natural" t
appropriate for, English insofar as it is a Germanic language, it is not to Modern
Ancient) Greek. According to the nineteenth-century linguist and novelist Y
Psycharis (Jean Psichari), Modern Greek meter is 0i)A.â(3io|a6q: that is, it is bas
on the syllable and not the foot with its regularly alternating stresses.18 Moreo
alliteration in Greek is, according to one metrical handbook, only rarely ple
able (for instance, when soft consonants like y and / are repeated), while all
ing k's in particular strike that metricist's ear as irksome (Saralis 124-25). Undou
edly, then, he would have found the beginning of Seferis's translation jarring:
And then went down to the ship,
Set keel to breaker, forth on the godly sea, and
we set up mast and sail on that swart ship,
bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also
heavy with weeping, and winds from sternward
bore us out onward with bellying canvas,
Circe's this craft, the trim-coifed goddess, (lines 1-7)
Και τότε κατηφορήσαμε στο καράβι.
Κυλήσαμε την καρένα στη θάλασσα τη θεοτική
Σηκώσαμε τ'άλμπουρο και το πανί στο μελανό τούτο καράβι,
Και το φορτώσαμε μ'αρνιά, φορτώσαμε μαζί και τα κορμιά μας
Βαριά από δάκρια, κι' οι αγέρηδες ολόπρυμα
Μας πήραν πέρα μακριά με το πρισμένο καραβόπανο,
Της Κίρκης τούτη η τέχνη, της καλοχτένιστης θεάς. (lines 1-7)
Pound's paratactic constructions, which contribute to the terseness and poun

vividness of his poem, weigh down Seferis's Greek, producing a heavy and m
onous rhythm that, moreover, leaves us uncertain about the semantic sent
stress—crucial for the organization of prosody in Greek since alliteration, u
rhyme, does not provide enough guidance (Botinis 147-48). Seferis, transl
Pound and avowing to forget Homer, choosing not to change the meter acco
to the rhythmical particularities of Greek, stays with his first analogy for antig
namely, painting—as though the resources for the two languages were si
and as if he were performing a metagrafi (which, of course, in a sense he is). T
Seferis's translation does not work on the ear as well as Pound's poem is per
due less to Seferis's lack of skill than to the Greek language, which cannot live
to this test.
But could Seferis have done otherwise? What is the Greek that could trans
port or translate Pound's "oldest" English, itself standing in for the oldest Greek?
Seferis claims he has forgotten Homer; however, even if he had not forgotten, H
er's quantitative dactylic hexameter would not have been available anyway si
Modern Greek prosody is not organized around vocalic quantities. The failure
Seferis's parataxis is thus highlighted by the success of Homer's, which is accomp
18 See Psycharis's letter of August 10, 1899, addressed to his friend and poet Argyris Eftaliotis
Kriaras, AvOoXoyio Wvxaprj, 371). For an introduction to Modern Greek metrics, see Saralis, Spata
(especially the essay "H Neo£>Ar|VtKf| MexpiKfj," 1-32), Staurou, and Garantoudis, who, writing m
more recently, explicitly moves away from attempts (by Saralis and Spatalas, for example) to l
and confirm the origins of Modern Greek verse types in Ancient Greek versification and metrics.

2.85.230.41 on Sun, 10 Jan 2021 02:44:40 UTC
nied by a regular meter that worked for (his) Greek. If Pound's meter stages th
birth of English poetry, Seferis's stages if not the death, at least the challenge of
Ancient Greek prosody: What could be more estranging, after all, than being
unable to go back to what you think of as your own "source," the oldest Greek, in
order to render the oldest English? Seferis claims he would translate Homer differ
ently, but he never does.
As I have already intimated, Seferis's demotic vocabulary alludes to a particular
tradition of translating Homer into Modern Greek, a tradition in which, unlike in
Seferis's translation, a particular meter prevailed. A number of late nineteenth
and early twentieth-century Greek translators of Homer had rendered the ora
epics into what was considered their functional equivalent, namely the iambic fi
teen-syllable verse typical of medieval and later oral Greek poetry. From the first
translation of a Homeric poem into demotic Greek by the scholar and editor Iak
vos Polylas, whose Odyssey appeared in installments between 1875 and 1881; to the
translations by poets Alexandras Pallis (who began publishing the Iliad in 1892
and completed his edition in 1904) and Argyris Eftaliotis (who translated the
Odyssey between 1914 and 1923 and published it in 1946); to the most recent (fo
Seferis) Odyssey by Zisimos Sideris (1916-30), the fifteen-syllable iambic line wa
the only meter for Homer. Meanwhile, the translators' idiom had evolved from
Polylas's grammatical "concessions to the learned language" through Pallis'
"uncompromisingly demotic translation" to even closer approximations of folk
song diction in Eftaliotis and Sideris (Mackridge, Language 244).19 Though he
gestures to this tradition through his demotic vocabulary, by remaining close t
Pound's meter Seferis reacts against its inclination to assimilate Homer into Mod
ern Greek. The strangeness of his translation's meter is a reflection on (and of
the inability to definitively place Homer in the Greek tradition—and therefore to
re-place, to translate him.
Seferis's Canto 1 translation thus puts to the test the tendency to re-domesticate
a text and a language a Greek would think his or her own despite their transfor
mations across time and space. This tendency is tried by the other translationa
alluvions presented here by Seferis, and by Divus or Pound, who have also, and
perhaps more ingeniously, claimed Homer as their own or as their origin. Through
blending, mixing, and marrying, Seferis explores the dynamics of linguistic "pr
priete," approaching what may be designated as his own language and linguistic
tradition even as he shows that it is not completely or only his own and demon
strates that drawing a straight line between what can be called one's own and th
"foreign" is not always (if it is ever) possible. What follows Seferis's version of
Pound's "So that:" ("'Etai ?iour6v:") — the sentence fragment that famously con
cludes the first canto—syntactically and even on the same page in the Nea Gram
mata version of Seferis's translation is the phrase "o Kung jtpoxcbpr|ce" (Kung
moved on/forward), which translates Pound's "Kung walked." We thus move hi
torically from the eighth century BCE to the end of the sixth, though we are not
now on the cusp of Greece's Golden Age but instead in China. The way in which
Confucius moves forward in Seferis's translation of Canto 13, moreover, is that of
successful parataxis: every other line starts with an "and" (kou / ki'):
19 Seferis's father, Stelios Seferiadis, also translated Sophocles' Electro, and Oedipus Rex in rhymed
iambic fifteen-syllable verse. Both translations were published in 1936, only a few years before
Seferis's Pound.

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Ο Κουγκ προχώρησε
πλάι στο δυναστικό ναό
Και μέσα στο δάσος των κέδρων

κι' ύστερα βγήκε στο κάτω ποτάμι
Κι' είταν [sic] μαζί του ο Κϊέου Τσι
κι' ο σιγανομίλητος Τϊαν
Και «είμαστε άγνωστοι», είπε ο Κουγκ,
Κι' είπεν ο Τϊαν, με το χέρι στις χορδές του λαγούτου,

Καθώς οι χαμηλές νότες ακούγονταν ακόμη
αφού το χέρι του είχε αφίσει [sic] τις χορδές,
Κι' ο ήχος ανέβαινε σαν το καπνό, κάτω απ'τα φύλλα,
Κι' αυτός εκοίταζε τον ήχο ν'ανεβαίνει. ("Τρία Κάντο" 196-97)
Kung walked
by the dynastic temple
and into the cedar grove
and then out by the lower river,
And with him Khieu, Tchi
And Tian the low speaking
And "we are unknown," said Kung,
And Tseu-lou said, "I would put the defences in order,"

And Khieu said, "If I were lord of a province
I would put it in better order than this is."
And Tchi said, "I would prefer a small mountain temple,
And Tian said, with his hand on the strings of his lute
The low sounds continuing
after his hand left the strings,
And the sound went up like smoke, under the leaves,
And he looked after the sound. (Cantos 58)
This canto flows well in Modern Greek since Confucius gives to Seferis what the
Homeric Canto 1 could not: the more frequent presence of enjambment and the
absence of consistent, and encumbering, alliteration. Indeed, Seferis alliterates
here when Pound does not, a tendency that suggests he does it when it works best
for his version of the poem. Seferis cites heavily from this canto in his translator's
introduction in Nea Grammata, as if offering these Confucian maxims as instruc
tions for reading what follows. He ends his essay with—and signs his name right
under—a citation from Canto 13, which, he writes, "it would be fruitful for any
critic to contemplate":
"They have all answered correctly,
That is to say, each in his nature" (Cantos 58)
'"OA.01 aitoKpi0r|Kav ocoaid,
AriX.a5r|, Kara tti (puori tou o KaOevaq" ("Tpia tCdvio" 196)
We are supposed to hear, I think, in this Confucian maxim the answer to the ques
tion of how to appropriate Homer or Greekness correctly.
Seferis, however, also implicitly suggests that there is a prerequisite for even
engaging with such a question: not national or political importance, but "charac
ter." To recall Seferis's penultimate Poundian/Confucian quote in his introduction:
Άμα δεν έχεις χαραχτήρα
δε θα μπορείς να παίξεις τούτο τ'όργανο
Μήτε τη μουσική που συντροφεύει τις Ωδές ("Τρία Κάντο" 193, 197)

2.85.230.41 on Sun, 10 Jan 2021 02:44:40 UTC
SEFERIS ANTI-WRITING POUND S HOMER / 393
Without character you will

be unable to play on that instrument
Or to execute the music fit for the Odes. (Cantos 60)20
Seferis's "character" is not the customary /apaKxripai;, but the more demo
spoken "ya\w:/Tnpac," which through the repetition of the letter "/_ emphasizes
literal meaning of the word: engraver, or engraved mark. The Poundian lin
transmission that Seferis chooses to translate in 1939 ends with precisely su
declamation. Although it depicts an evil and corrupt materialistic world—pre
ably similar to the one Seferis felt he was living in in 1939 and that he had depic
a year before in a poem titled "Exile's Return" (see below)—Canto 30 ends
note of hope regarding cultural preservation, not on the basis of high-mind
rhetoric, but of materiality. Pound presents the prehistory of typography, in w
he gives each man his due, putting Divus and Homer in their proper place. N
Aldus, but Francesco da Bologna, "a die-cutter for Greek fonts and Hebrew
C'/a/jct/r^yia £?tXr|viKd ki' sppattKa oxoixela") turns out to have been responsib
for keeping alive the Ancient Greek (written) tongue (Cantos 148; "Tpia Kav
199, line 53, my emphasis). That is, we are reminded, through Seferis's choic
texts and quotations, that the questions about Homer, about Greekness, or ab
the "right" poetic language—any seemingly abstract questions—would not ev
be asked were it not for a particular and perhaps accidental chain of transmission
poetic and material, or for a particular and therefore necessarily limited recordin
of history that does not preclude, but indeed invites and even demands, oth
recordings, other wrestlings, other translations, and many languages.
6. Returns
Much as Pound had prepared his language to receive Homer by rehea

Hugh Kenner's words, "the gestures of tongue and expulsions of brea
mimed, about A.D. 850, the emotions of exile" (333) in Old English ("T
farer") and in Chinese ("Exile's Letter"), so Seferis had prepared his lang
Pound. In 1935 he had introduced Pound to the Greek audience with a translation
of "Exile's Letter" ('Tp&nfia Hevixsnevou") published in one of the first issues of
Nea Grammata, the same journal in which his canto translation would appear four
years later. It is an evocative title in Greek, echoing the many songs revolving
around the "exile's return" (yopicTuoc tod £f;vra:p.svoD) in the Greek folk-song tradi
tion. Yet the "Exile's Letter" is, pointedly, not an exile's return. In Pound's poem
there is nothing like a home to which to return; the letter-writer is exiled from his
friends, from a sense of an intimate community rather than a place—and a com
munity, moreover, of fellow travellers. This community is also not quite a meta
physical home; it is always localized, though mobile, and the poem is filled with
lengthy descriptions of different landscapes. Seferis's version follows Pound's long
lines closely and is written, on the whole, in a very demotic register.
Having explored through Pound the emotion of exile, Seferis tries out a man
ner of return in Canto 1, but first he does so in a poem of his own, called this time
Seferis returns to these Confucian maxims a number of times in his later writings: for example,
in a November 1942 letter to Nanis Panagiotopoulos (Seferis-Panagiotopoulos, Letters 103) and in
1962 as an epigraph for his 1941 essay "Prologue to an Edition of [Calvos's] Odes" (DokimesA 179).

2.85.230.41 on Sun, 10 Jan 2021 02:44:40 UTC
"Exile's Return" ("O rupic|j.6<; xou EEViT£(i£V0u"). This poem is in a sense a continu
ation of Pound's: rewriting Greek folk songs, Seferis explores the negative return,
in which there is no home to return to, and describes the slow sinking of the now
unfamiliar world under the weight of scythe-bearing "dpixaia" (chariots, tank
but also weapons), a word which, as noted, pointedly reappears in the canto tra
lation.-'1 The poem's last two lines, followed by the date, "Spring '38," suggest that
the cancelling out of nostos is both a personal and historical circumstance, som
thing that their mixed idiom brings into relief (Maronitis 42):
Πια δεν ακούω τσιμουδιά
βούλιαξε κι ο στερνός μου φίλος
παράξενο πώς χαμηλώνουν
όλα τριγύρω κάθε τόσο
εδώ διαβαίνουν και θερίζουν
χιλιάδες άρματα δρεπανηφόρα.
Αθήνα, άνοιξη '38
Now I can't hear a sound.
My last friend has sunk too.

Strange how every once in a while
everything is leveled down [sinks further down].
Here a thousand scythe-bearing chariots go past.
and mow everything down.
Athens, Spring '38 {Collected Poems; trans, slightly modified)
Adjectives like "5p£7iavr](p6po!;" (scythe-bearing) were precisely the kinds of Anci

Greek words revived in the katharevousa—and so seem especially out of plac
this largely demotic poem—while apiâxa encapsulates the language questio
itself. In Dimitris Maronitis's reading, the exile's consoling friend, and by extens
the Athens of 1938, attempts to hide the impending war and mass murder in wh
he is complicit by "disingenuously speaking the traditional language" of dem
songs, while guilty of deadly imperialist machinations that are revealed only at t
end of the poem through his archaizing and nationalist rhetoric—according
which, yes, a line can be drawn to the past; the language is still the same (43). Th
poem thus linguistically brings to the fore the complicity of two, appare
opposed, claims made for the "soul" of Greece. The phrase "SpEJtaviypopu apuaxa
moreover—and this is something that neither Maronitis nor David Ricks mention
when discussing the poem—is something of an Ancient Greek stock phrase,
most relevantly by Xenophon (Anabasis 1.7.10) when describing the Persians'
tary superiority over the Greeks (and later by Diodorus Siculus [17.53] to describ
Dareios's army; see also Liddell-Scott s.v.). In a sense the exile's homeland, Gr
perhaps, is being sunk by the weight of its "own" past, its "own" triumphs (agai
the Persians), and its "own" stock language, whether ancient or demotic.
Vangelis Calotychos has detected in Seferis's writing a familiar modernist trop
the search for "a home away from home in the shelter of poetry," accompanied
the belief that "this distance from home . . . allowed [him] to theorize and expos
the culture's hidden potentialities" (189. 15). Three years before the publica
of his Pound translations, Seferis had written in his journal that there is nothin
See Maronitis's in-depth analysis of the poem and its multiple origins in "O yupianoi
§EviT£p£vot)," where he emphasizes Seferis's appropriation and distortion not so much of an
voice, but of the Greek folk-song tradition. David Ricks, in contrast, draws out the poem's Ho
resonances, which, he convincingly argues, coexist with the folklore elements highlight
Maronitis (147-57). Neither critic refers to the Poundian context discussed here.

2.85.230.41 on Sun, 10 Jan 2021 02:44:40 UTC
more bitter than "to feel nostalgic for your place [toko] , living in your
[T07t0c]" (Meres C 33). How to get back to Greece while being in Greece is what
behind Seferis's choice to translate Pound's first canto in the late 1930s. Yet, as I
have argued, his translation is not yet another attempt to establish a culture-based
"transcendental ethos of Hellenism." Seferis translates the canto not as a home
coming, but as precisely not, a homecoming. Odysseus, claims Seferis in a 1
essay, meditates on "the strange thing people call home [arcm]"; he ends up
ing it, Seferis continues, "as a live man, or as a spectrum [(pdaâ—the Greek wor
also contains "specter"] of man" ("A Staging for Thrush" 34).22 Already in
Homer re-turns home spectrally, in the spectrum of translators—through Poun
but also through Andreas Divus, Georgius Dartona in Canto 1, Confuci
Canto 13, or Francesco da Bologna in Canto 30—and finds a home somewh
between the two extremes of antigrafi and metagrafi that negotiate what i
what can be called one's own. Rather than erasing cultural, linguistic, and nation
specificities for the sake of an abstract Hellenism, Seferis is interested in tr
and highlighting accidents of history, competing linguistic currents, instanc
failure and disappropriation, "loose and frazzled threads" (to reuse Ra
Nagele's turn of phrase). On the one hand, he transposes to the linguistic
the issue of reinterpreting the classics, of their metagrafi for Greeks given
weight of their transformations in the West, and, on the other, he translates Po
as a mode of resisting the domestication and nationalist ideological appropri
of the Greek language and Greek tradition.
The Canto 1 translation does not demonstrate Seferis's failure to find an e
alent for Pound's poem (cf. Loulakaki-Moore 88) or for the Odyssey, rather, it d
onstrates his resistance to this notion of equivalence, even the kind that Pou
in this case promoting. Wrhat purports to be not an equivalent, but a metrical c
and thus a failure, an abandonment of creative translation or of Pound's vision for
translation in general and in this poem in particular, is actually something much
more than that: an act of anti-writing, responding to and sullying the law of two
"originals" that are through this process shown to be less than original, or at least
less law-giving. Seferis thus produces a unique and time-conscious response to
them, while still shying away from re-rooting or re-appropriating the foreign —
Homer included—into Greek soil. Writing against, that is, also turns out to be a
writing through and with the other's characters (a meta-grafi) as Seferis remains
faithful to the lines his poetic interlocutors carve. He suggests that every interlin
gual translation is also at heart an intralingual one since it operates on the target
language, and that every intralingual translation cannot but be interlingual too
precisely because "language is inclusive and not exclusive," so that within any
period of time a "single" language will have changed through interaction and
exchange with other language (s) that it hosts or is hosted by. Seferis thus brings to
the fore what every translation surreptitiously does: it addresses or engages a prob
lem in what it thinks of as its own world through the other, while tracing out and
over the other's written characters.
Claremont McKenna College
22 Loulakaki-Moore has noted some similarities between Seferis's Canto 1 translation and the
third part of "Kix^Tf (104-05).

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Stergiopoulou, K. - Pound, Seferis

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Stergiopoulou, K. - Pound, Seferis

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Between the Lines: Seferis Anti-Writing Pound's Homer

Author(s): KATERINA STERGIOPOULOU

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24694580

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Between the Lines:

1 On the constant necessity of translation even within what might be construed as a

Comparative Literature 66:4

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1. On (Not) Knowing Greek: Towards a Greek Hellenism

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their patrimony.6 At the same time, katharevousa necessitated a daily translation

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2. Antigrafi or Metagrafi: Translating with or against?

Although jakobson was content to subsume the three species of translation

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The analogy, however, is misleading. Unlike a painter who, in theory at

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3. Raising the Dead

Pound himself distinguished between translations in terms of purpose and

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12 On the nineteenth-century "hexameter mania" in Homer translations and beyond, agai

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4. Translating Odysseus's Bad Roots

By choosing to translate Pound's version of the Odyssey, Seferis implies that he i

£(p0r)<; i<bv syo) oi)V vrji fietaxivfl (Odyssey, line 58)

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But thou, O King, I bid remember me, unwept, unburied,

σήμά τέ μοι χεΰαι πολιής επί θινί θαλάσσης,

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Crucially, however, Seferis tends to concentrate these Homeric linguistic all

Nor with stars stretched, nor looking back from heaven

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Pound's Germanic "swart" becomes Homeric again (neXouvr|-|i£Xav6), but this

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Seferis translates "dreory" correctly as "fxaico^sva" (bloody) and replicates Pound's

17 On the peculiarities of "ctpjact," see Mackridge, Language 29.

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ηλθε δ' έπί ψυχή Θηβαίου Τειρεσίαο

In Homer, the soothsayer Tiresias brings Odysseus and Elpenor together b

If Seferis's translation on the lexical level is an anti-writing in the expan

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something belonging to the local tradition, and in this way he maintains a

Pound's paratactic constructions, which contribute to the terseness and poun

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Και μέσα στο δάσος των κέδρων

Κι' είπεν ο Τϊαν, με το χέρι στις χορδές του λαγούτου,

And Tseu-lou said, "I would put the defences in order,"

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Without character you will

Much as Pound had prepared his language to receive Homer by rehea

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My last friend has sunk too.

Adjectives like "5p£7iavr](p6po!;" (scythe-bearing) were precisely the kinds of Anci

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Claremont McKenna College

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Palamas, Kostis. Ajzavza. Vol. 7. Athens: Govostis, 1972. Print.

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Seferis, Giorgos. Antigrafes. Athens: Ikaros, 196S. Print.

. Meres. Vols. A, B, C, D. Athens: Ikaros, 1975-1990. 7 vols.