Content area
Full Text
George Kalogeris is not, of course, the first translator to produce an English version of the last, and perhaps the most difficult, of Seferis's books of poems: that was Walter Kaiser, quick off the mark, with Harvard University Press in 1969. But to return to the fray shows some boldness, and not only because these are by any standards-the hurdle is set at Montale-height-difficult poems. The task is attended by obstacles beyond those real resistances inherent in the material to be translated; beyond, too, the reticence that tends to be imposed on the translator by the poet's being a near-contemporary. Seferis died in 1971, his vigilant widow, Maro, (at 102!) as recently as 2000.
The most difficult challenge is a gratifying one: the established presence of Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard's authoritative translation of Seferis's collected poems, painstakingly revised over decades up to 1995. Rex Warner before and John Stathatos after have produced excellent versions of a number of poems, but the consistency of Keeley and Sherrard's idiom through the oeuvre has impressed itself on a worldwide Anglophone audience, and it is their Seferis-say, in Derek Mahon's "A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford"-which is current with other poets. In no spirit of repudiation, but with some dexterity and elaboration, George Kalogeris takes this bull by the horns, as we can see if we compare his version of the opening words of Seferis's poem "On a Sliver of Winter Light" (as Kalogeris renders it) with Keeley and Sherrard's familiar rendering. First Keeley and Sherrard:
Leaves like rusty tin
for the desolate mind that has seen the end
the barest glimmerings.
Leaves aswirl with gulls
frenzied by winter.
The way the heart finds release
the dancers turned into trees,
into a huge forest of trees stripped bare.
And now Kalogeris:
Leaves like tin turning to rust
for the mind that reflects on its own demise,
yet still hangs on by the faintest gleam.
Leaves and gulls swirling up like a flock
driven wild by wintertime.
As if the racing heart might find release
after all that pounding, without
transforming the flagrant dance through the trees
into a massive forest of naked limbs.
It is clear that Kalogeris's commitment is to a slant-wise mode, a certain slant of...