From Asine to Engomi AVI SHARON Engomi The field was a flat expanse; in the distance the sickle motion of arms digging. The clouds in the sky endless curves, here and there a trumpet, golden, rose: sunset. Soft, rain-washed winds swirled amid scattered weeds and briars; it must have rained beyond on the mountains now tinged with color. And I walked toward the people working, men and women swinging picks in trenches. An ancient city: walls, streets and houses stood out like the petrified muscles of the Cyclops, anatomy of spent strength under the eye of the archaeologist, anaesthetist, or surgeon. Phantoms and fabric, luxury and lips, all buried away, and the veil of pain spread wide to reveal the tomb, naked and indifferent. And I looked up at the people working, their shoulders straining, their arms pounding the dead silence with a quick, heavy rhythm, as if destiny’s wheel were circling amid the ruins. Suddenly I was walking, but I did not walk I looked at birds in flight, but they had turned to stone I looked at the sky in heaven, but it was clouded in wonder I looked at the bodies struggling, but each stood still and there, in their midst, a face ascending the light: Dark hair spilled across her neck, eyebrows quivered like a swallow’s wings, the nostrils arion 20.2 fall 2012 arched above the lips, and the body rising naked from the tangle of arms with the unripe breasts of the virgin, a motionless dance. I lowered my eyes and gazed around: girls were kneading without touching the dough women were spinning cloth, but the spindles did not turn lambs were drinking, but their tongues fell still over the green water that seemed to sleep while the plowman stood frozen with staff in hand. And I looked again at the body ascending: people gathered like ants and struck her with spears but did not wound her. Then her belly shone like the moon and I thought the sky the womb that brought her forth and claimed her again, mother and child. Her feet stayed marble still and vanished: an assumption. The world became again as it was, our world of time and earth. The smell of mastic began to stir on the ancient slopes of memory. Breasts among the leaves, wet lips, and suddenly it all went dry along the stretch of field, in the stone’s despair, the strength worn down, in this empty place with scattered weeds and briars where a snake slid heedless by, where they take their time in dying. —George Seferis (trans. Avi Sharon) from asine to engomi 50 from asine to engomi: george seferis in conversation with the past “engomi” is the final poem in George Seferis’ LogBook III (1956), a collection inspired by several visits to the island of Cyprus and dedicated to the place and its inhabitants. The poet travelled to this Greek outpost for the first time in 1953, and as Lawrence Durrell commented in a letter to Henry Miller, he was “ravished by it.” In his introduction to Logbook III, Seferis explains that on Cyprus he suffered “the revelation of a Hellenic world.” The collection’s original title, now its epigraph (“Cyprus where it was decreed . . . ”), is taken from Euripides’ Helen (893), where the young Teucer, after his brother Ajax’s suicide at Troy, announces his mandate to establish on Cyprus a second Salamis, reinventing his former island home. For Seferis, it was decreed that he find on Cyprus a truer Hellenism, richer and more authentic than any he had experienced on mainland Greece. It could be argued that modern Greek poets suffer more than most others from a rather intense and complex literary inheritance —the classical Greek past. Some stake an easy claim to this ancient bequest. Seferis, however, was more skeptical of his access to the tradition, and felt pressed to “examine more essentially what we are and what worth we truly possess.” For Seferis, this self-examination often involved his taking a stand on the great monuments of classical antiquity, his finding “the right attitude toward the ancient tradition.” But his was not the ancient tradition so...
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Jul 23, 2012
Robyn R Iredale + 2
Open Access