Book of Exercises II by George Seferis

Book of Exercises II

By George Seferis

Translated by Jennifer R. Kellogg

World Poetry 2024

When faced with the task of translating Homer’s Greek, the poet Ezra Pound was quick to bemoan certain frailties of the English language. Specifically, he lamented the lack of a first-class solution to the problem of reproducing what he called Homer’s “magnificent onomatopoeia.” Forget “boom” and “pow.” In the Iliad, when the sea does its thing and surges up the shore, it’s beneath sonically perfect words like poluphloisboio (loud-roaring) and thalasses (seas) that the pebbles rush and tumble.

Such problems have been plaguing translators for centuries and hounding every conceivable language barrier. But certain words struggle more than others to cover the distance. And certain kinds of writing make greater demands. Virtually by definition, it’s poets who present the greatest number of difficulties—questions of meter and rhyme will do that—which is probably why every time a poem does cross the bridge to another language, more or less unscathed (perhaps even improved in its own idiosyncratic way), an angel gets its wings.

Lately, more than a handful have been winging overhead, and the cause is a kind of debut. The source material is old enough—Greek poet George Seferis’ posthumous poetry collection, Book of Exercises II (1976)—but the book’s first English edition, out now from World Poetry, is the handiwork of first-time translator Jennifer R. Kellogg, whose rendition isn’t only a model of clarity and grace, but a welcome opportunity to investigate the wonderful work of a neglected master. Despite winning a Nobel in 1963 (his nation’s first), English editions of Seferis’ work have languished for decades in absurdly limited form—a single volume of poems, sometimes “Collected,” sometimes “Complete.” What’s for certain is a lack of representation for the work collected in this volume. Only three of its pieces appear in the most recent, revised edition of the Collected Poems.

Which can’t help but make you wonder: Are these nothing but the b-sides of a long and energetic career? Possibly. Even so, these are poems that tend to punch above their weight. Curiously, the power of that punch never appears to be a question of length. While the book’s longest poems stretch to two or three pages, the shortest ones frequently manage to work their magic in all of two lines. Consider a poem called “April.”

Even though April has arrived with palms and lilacs,

I still don’t hear anything. You would think it had snowed all night.

Such a poem (the first line’s spontaneous sense of expectation subverted by the second—and what has happened to silence the speaker’s surroundings?) makes appreciation easy. What isn’t said, and what doesn’t hurt knowing, is that the poem was written about a week after the outbreak of the Greek Civil War in 1946. And while “April” is perfectly capable of pleasing all on its own, another two-liner, “Philoctetes,” written at the close of that war, makes an admittedly needier case for context.

A wounded body. The country is wounded.

A time of wounding—

It’s hardly a representative piece, but its presence indicates a challenge common to other poems in the collection, which will sometimes mystify. They deal in references not readily absorbed by English reader’s today. The book’s Introduction provides headway in the form of a brief biography, and its treatment of the historical events that informed the poet’s work serve to aid an intuitive understanding of the poems. As for the more insistently coded pieces, a Notes section at the back of the book supplies ample glosses from Kellogg’s hand. Some readers may be put off by the extra work required, but the book does its best to assist them in clearing these hurdles. And even when deeper meaning resists the best efforts of a first reading, the use of language itself—inventive, assured, intensely personal—is almost always a joy to read by its own light.

Seferis was born in 1900 and died in 1971. Spanning the period between 1931 and his death, the poems in Book of Exercises II frequently draw from the vast reservoir of events he witnessed and people he met, and are coextensive with the life of a career diplomat in the Greek Foreign Service. Some of the poems were written at home in Greece, but most were composed on the road, on planes and trains, in hotels and embassies, in countries like Egypt, Crete, and South Africa, as well as England and Albania, where he held more permanent posts. There were long stretches of exile—sometimes self-imposed by the nature of his work, other times thrust upon him by the exigencies of war. Yet poetry was never some idle pastime to fill the margins of a professional life. Pervading all throughout this book is the sense that, like Kafka, the writer in Seferis survived in spite of all that bureaucratic ballast, not because of it.

Unavoidably, many of the poems pertain to the political activity of the day. In “Letter to Rex Warner,” Seferis recounts his first encounter with the noted English classicist, which happened to coincide with Warner’s visit to Greece at the onset of the aforementioned civil war.

When we met in the soccer field

that had experienced brazen slaughter

you were talking about hunting wild geese

in the Despotate of the Hermaphrodites.

I was returning from a marble stadium

where the wounded marathon runner

who volunteered for the war

saw slingshots sailing through blood.

This is how I attuned myself to you and we became friends.

We went to a country so badly

ruined by war that even the children’s dolls were crippled.

The light was so quick and strong

it chewed through everything and turned it to bones.

We strolled among

bicycles and paper airplanes;

although we noticed the colors

our conversation strayed toward that unhealed terror.

The poem continues for another several stanzas, but these two are sufficient to convey Seferis’ unswerving command over imagery. He could be devastating (“even the children’s dolls were crippled”)—he almost always wrote from a place of longing—but he could also capture the quiet, the serene, the provisional paradise of an interregnum. In a poem called “Argo,” always the wanderer, he asserts that “[t]he faces of boats inhabit my life—

some of them see with one eye, like the Cyclops,

motionless upon the sea’s mirror,

others move like sleepwalkers, dangerously.

Still others were taken by the sleep of the deep

wood, ropes, sails, chains, and all.

In the cool little garden house,

among the cottonwood and eucalyptus trees,

close to the rusty windmill,

close to the yellow fountain with one lonely carp,

in the cool little house with the aroma of reeds,

I found a boat’s compass.

It revealed the atmospheric angels

who occupy the noonday silence.

Other poems take risks with form, such as the handful of “Calligraphies” he wrote in the early 1940s. Like Apollinaire’s calligrammes before them, Seferis employs the typography of the poem to chart the meaning of its content. Kellogg doesn’t attempt to make her translations rain phonemes on the page, or flash with the thunderbolts of jagged stanzas, but it’s amusing to see, in the facing-page Greek, how Seferis made words do double duty as pictures.

Roughly a hundred poems tumble through these pages. Kellogg has done something more than justice to their variousness. Not every day does an expert poet receive such a fine treatment. Jump at the chance to experience it.

Eric Bies is a high school English teacher based in Southern California.