Mythistorema
by Giorgos Seferis
Summary
Mythistorema gathers twenty four short poems, one for each book of Homer's Odyssey, and sets that ancient story of wandering down inside modern Greece, where the ruins are literal stone and the exile is a real political condition rather than a myth. Seferis published his Greek translation of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land the year after these poems appeared, and he borrows Eliot's method of laying old myth directly over a broken present, though he deliberately withholds the one thing that made Odysseus's own story bearable, the certainty that the wandering will eventually end in a homecoming.
Statues, ships, stones and the sea recur across the sequence until they build into a private vocabulary that a reader has to learn as they go, and the poems move between voices, sometimes a single speaker and sometimes a collective one, the way a novel might shift its point of view chapter to chapter. The final poems turn from a lingering hope of return toward something closer to resignation, ending on travelers admitting the failure of their own long struggle even as they offer what little they have left to those who come after them.
Seferis writes in demotic Greek, the spoken language rather than the older literary form still used by many of his contemporaries, and that choice alone marked a real turning point in modern Greek poetry. It suits a reader with some patience for classical allusion and willing to let images accumulate meaning slowly rather than looking for a poem that explains itself on first reading, and its themes of exile and displacement read as directly personal once a reader knows Seferis lost his own childhood home in Smyrna.
Historical Context & Significance
The Swedish Academy gave Giorgos Seferis the 1963 Nobel Prize in Literature for eminent lyrical writing, inspired by a deep feeling for the Hellenic world of culture, making him the first Greek writer to receive the honor. Mythistorema, published in Greek in 1935, is the collection most credited with establishing the demotic, plainly spoken Greek that Seferis's Nobel citation praises, work written well before his diplomatic career, including service as Greece's ambassador to Britain, gave his later reputation its public weight.
Seferis kept a public silence about Greek politics for years after his own country fell under military rule in 1967, then broke it in 1969 with a radio statement denouncing the junta directly, at real professional risk to a former ambassador of the state he was condemning. When he died in 1971, his funeral turned into a mass demonstration against the same government, and a line from Mythistorema, about waking with a marble head cradled in his hands, was recited at the opening ceremony of the 2004 Athens Olympics, decades later.