On the Outside Looking in: Greek Literature in the English-speaking World

Abstract

On the Outside Looking in: Greek Literature in theEnglish-Speaking World Dimitri Mitropoulos In November 1996 I visited New York on assignment and found myself at Simon & Schuster’s offices researching a story on current trends in U.S. publishing. The waiting room outside the executive suite was adorned with photographs of famous writers published by the company. To my surprise, sandwiched between Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald was Nikos Kazantzakis. Kazantzakis appears to be the Greek practitioner of fiction best known outside of Greece, judging from titles published, reprints, and movies (Martin Scorcese’s The Last Temptation of Christ being the latest). 1 Yet, the presence of his photograph on the seventeenth floor of 1230 Avenue of the Americas in Rockefeller Center can be deceptive, for it says little about the standing of contemporary Greek literature in the English-speaking world. A few blocks downtown from Simon & Schuster, on my same visit, I interviewed Bill Buford, literary and fiction editor of the New Yorker and former editor of Granta magazine. At some point I inquired about his interest in fiction not written in English. Inevitably, the conversation came to contemporary Greek literature. “Any Greek writers you might be interested in?” I asked. “No,” he answered, professing total ignorance on the subject. Later, a stroll around Manhattan bookshops illustrated his reply: their shelves offered little, if any, enlightenment on present-day Greek fiction. 2 Indeed, Greek literature’s reception in the English-speaking world appears to have been poor in the last few years (Mitropoulos 1995a). Of course, alongside Kazantzakis stands C. P. Cavafy as another exception: his journey in the hearts and minds of readers and scholars appears not to have reached Ithaca yet judging from an upsurge of his popularity in [End Page 187] the United States in 1994 after the poem bearing that title was read at Jackie Onassis’s memorial service (Mitropoulos 1994b). Greek writing is better off in other language environments, especially in France. 3 But its eclipse in the United Kingdom and the United States is all the more painful since English is the lingua franca of our age. Things did look more promising in 1979 when the poet Odysseas Elytis was awarded the Nobel prize in literature. His achievement came only fourteen years after another poet, George Seferis, became Greece’s first Nobel laureate. Given that Greece is a small country and that the number of Greek speakers does not exceed approximately fifteen million, the awards were reason for national pride and were felt to assure worldwide recognition for contemporary Greek literature. Yet the last fifteen years, it seems, have marked a reversal of fortune for Greek letters. Did the writers and poets succeeding the Generation of the ‘30s, whose achievements the Nobel prizes crowned, fail to live up to its legacy? To limit the discussion to a Balkan context, no living Greek writer today claims the international renown of the Turk Orhan Pamuk or the Albanian Ishmail Kadare. Even worse, the Nobel laureates themselves have not fared so well either. It is telling that neither of them made Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon, published in 1994. The obvious question is: Why? To borrow the terminology of the age: Is it a content or a distribution problem? It would perhaps be useful to start seeking the answers by looking closely at the career of a Greek man of letters who did achieve recognition in the English-speaking world: George Seferis. One ought to begin by pointing out that Seferis, an outstanding poet, shared the prevailing cultural concerns of his time and possessed a cosmopolitan outlook as far as literature is concerned. His poetic style bears the influence of French Symbolism and Anglo-American modernism (Vayenas 1979:105–185). Well-read in both movements, he tried to introduce key texts in Greece through his own translations (of Paul Valéry’s “La soirée avec Monsieur Teste,” for example or—more famously perhaps—of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land). A major part of his poetry was thematically constructed around the Hellenic—the civilization of ancient Greece—, then universally esteemed. Seferis explored the interaction between the classical tradition (be it the...