poetic reality no2: Translation Travels: Modern Greek Poems in 1926 London

Theodore Ph. Stephanides and George C. Katsimbalis selected and rendered into English a selection of Greek poems published in 1926 London by Hazell, Watson & Viney. The anthology consisted of 60 poems by 33 poets and, since the poems were not individually dated, forty years of poetry were distilled into one moment and one place, 1926 London. The poets included in the anthology were George Argyropoulos, George Athanas, Homer Bekès, Emilia Dafni, George Delis, George Drosinis, Arghyris Eftaliotis, John Gryparis, Kostas Hadjopoulos, Constantine Karyotakis, Constantine Kavafis, Kostas Krystallis, Athanasios Kyriazis, Miltiades Malakasis, Gerasimos Markoras, Lorenzos Mavilis, Andrew Michalopoulos, Myrtiotissa (Mrs. Drakopoulos), Paul Nirvanas, Kostas Ouranis, Kostes Palamas, Alexander Pallis, Zacharias Papantoniou, Nicholas Petimezas, John Polemis, Lambros Porphyras, Louis Scarpas, Stelios Seferiades, Theodore Stephanides, Panos Tangopoulos, Kostas Varnalis, Peter Vlastos, John Cl. Zervos. Compiled with the goal of familiarizing an English-speaking audience with Modern Greek poetry, Modern Greek Poems offered a selection of contemporary poets ‘belonging to the period beginning from 1886 to the present day’ through a a translation of poems purported to be ‘at least equal to the best examples of contemporary European literature’. The goal was to assess their uniqueness within the remits of the rest of Europe.

Some of the writers included in the 1926 volume, namely Drosinis, Eftaliotis and Palamas, had seen some of their prose translated by Aristides Phoutrides and Demetra Vaka in Modern Greek Stories, published in New York in 1920.[i] In 1928, Angelos Sikelianos’ The Delphic Word was published in New York, as translated by Alma Reed, and a selection of the work of Sotiris Skipis, Patterns from a Grecian Loom, translated by John Harwood Bacon, was published in London. Skipis was introduced as a ‘Neo-Greek’ poet. The Greek National Anthem by Dionysios Solomos had already been translated in 1918 by Rudyard Kipling and 1929 saw the London publication of Erotokritos, the early seventeenth-century romance by Vitzentzos Kornaros, translated by John Mavrogordato. Both Kornaros and Solomos had influenced greatly modern Greek poetic tradition. It would be twenty years after 1926 before poems by Sikelianos and Seferis were published in a single volume translated by Lawrence Durrell and published in Rhodes – in the interim two more collections by Sikelianos will appear in 1939 and 1944 – and twenty-five before The Poems of C.P. Cavafy, translated by John Mavrogordato, appeared in 1951 London.

Modern Greek Poems was dedicated to Kostes Palamas (1859-1943), poet and critic, author of, among many others, Fatherlands (1886), Life Immovable (1904), The Twelve Lays of the Gypsy (1907) and The King’s Flute (1910). The inscription inside the collection read ‘Kostes Palamas: Greatest Poet of Modern Greece’. Aristides Phoutrides had previously translated Palamas’ Life Immovable in two parts and the play Royal Blossom or Trisevyene in 1919, 1921 and 1923, respectively, and Theodore Stephanides had co-operated with George Katsimbalis in 1925 for another volume on Palamas, namely, Poems, which included the poems “The Chains” and “The Palm Tree”. The 1926 anthology was seen as a sequel to these translations answering the need for Greek poets to be translated into English. Katsimbalis was later to establish together with George Seferis, George Theotokas and Andonis Karandonis the Greek Modernist periodical Nea Grammata, while he was himself immortalized as one of the ‘Cocks of Attica’ in Henry Miller’s The Colossus of Maroussi (1941).

Palamas, also the Secretary of the University of Athens, was the mouthpiece of Greece’s political woes since his first collection in 1886 and the singer of Athens, the ‘violet-crowned’ (Fatherlands, 1886). In his introduction to Life Immovable, Phoutrides remembers seeing the poet ‘more than once walk in the streets of Athens and among the plane trees of Zappeion by the banks of Ilissus’. He also remembers the poet tagged as anti-national for being one of the voices in favour of demoticism, in the Greek language question that erupted with the 1901 ‘Gospel Riots’ caused by a translation of the New Testament into the people’s tongue by Alexandros Pallis. In his review of Phoutrides’ translation of Life Immovable, W.B. Ebersole focused on Palamas’ support of the vernacular, along with Yannis Psicharis, author of the first complete grammar of the people’s idiom, and Alexandros Pallis, the translator of the Iliad and the New Testament, in a struggle that ‘reached its height and broke into violence in 1901, when eight university students were killed and sixty wounded’; it was this indigenous tradition of translation, the reviewer seemed to comment, that partly opened for Palamas the way to becoming ‘A New World-Poet’ as his translator called him.[ii] Even though Phoutrides’ rendition of Life Immovable was criticized by another reviewer as ‘stale and pseudo-Elizabethan’ and the poetry itself as ‘too poetical for these days of gas masks and Einstein Theories’[iii], the existence of these translations into English, and, consequently, of the 1926 volume here discussed, were significant acts if we take into account the need of Greek letters, and Greece, to hold a secure position in the ‘creative ferment of Europe’. It was with these words that novelist George Theotokas urged his fellow Modernists into action in his 1929 essay ‘Free Spirit’, a document considered the manifesto of Greek modernity.

It is noteworthy that with the exception of two poems by C.P. Cavafy appearing sporadically, Palamas’ work dominates the world of English translation until 1941 since Cavafy’s first posthumous volume of collected poetry appeared in 1935 and was first translated in 1951 by John Mavrogordato. In addition, George Seferis, perhaps the main representative of Greek Modernism associated with the Thirties Generation, included Palamas, together with Andreas Kalvos, Dionysios Solomos, and Cavafy, in the list of forebears to what he called ‘Hellenic Hellenism’, that is, the distinctive elements that could mark the Greek literary production as truly Hellenic.[iv] In 1926 then, that is, while Cavafy’s influence was brewing – ‘The God Abandons Antony’ appeared in The Athenaeum in 1919, in E.M. Forster’s Alexandria: A History and a Guide in 1922, Pharos and Pharillion in 1923, and ‘Ithaca’ in Eliot’s The Criterion in 1924[v] – the appearance of Modern Greek Poems in London was testing the cosmopolitanism of poetic language.

Many of the poets included in the 1926 volume were translators themselves, members of the demotic movement and part of Palamas’ wider circle. There were several with links to Constantinople and others who had studied and/or lived abroad in Europe for many years, while most studied and worked in Athens. A mapping of some of their itineraries is indicative of the wide circulation of ideas that these writers absorbed and encouraged.

Homer Bekès was born in Constantinople and moved to Athens after the end of the war. George Delis was born in Rumania, studied in Vienna and lived in Athens since 1908. Athens-born George Drosinis was the main editor of several literary magazines of the capital, among them Estia which he transformed into a newspaper in 1894. Arghyris Eftaliotis (Cleanthes Michailides, died 1923) was born in Lesbos, worked in Constantinople, Manchester and Liverpool, and travelled to Bombay and Paris, where he met Psycharis. John Gryparis was born in the island of Sifnos but spent his school years in Constantinople where he later worked and edited for two years the literary magazine Φιλολογική Ηχώ (1896-97) which included work by Palamas, Psycharis, Eftaliotis and so became a tool in the hands of demoticists. In 1898 he co-founded, together with Kostas Hadjopoulos, Yannis Kampysis and Paul Nirvanas, the literary magazine Η Τέχνη, which was innovative and influenced greatly the renewal of Greek letters even though it circulated for only one year; he worked in the Ministry of Culture since 1923 and in 1930 he was to become the director of the National Theatre for six years. He translated Greek tragedies as well as work by Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, Heinrich Heine, Émile Zola, Knut Hamsun and Percy Shelley. Kostas Hadjopoulos (died 1920) was born in Agrinio and lived for many years in Athens. In 1900 he left for Dresden, to study literature and philosophy, and Munich, where he translated into Greek the Communist Manifesto. He returned to Greece in 1914. He translated Goethe’s Faust and Iphigenia in Tauris, as well as work from William Shakespeare, Henrik Ibsen, Nikolai Gogol, August Strindberg, Franz Grillpartzer, Gerhart Hauptmann, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and others. Miltiades Malakases was born in Missolonghi but lived most of his adult life in Athens. In 1899 he published his first poetry collection which he dedicated to Jean Moreas whom he had met in Athens two years previously and whose circle he joined in Paris where he stayed from 1909 until 1915. Gerasimos Markoras (died 1911) was born in the Ionian island of Kephalonia and studied in Corfu and Italy. In 1852 he met Dionysios Solomos and Iakovos Polylas, the later editor of Solomos’ work, and in 1853 he started his translations of Schiller and Homer. Lorentzos Mavilis (died 1912), famous for his sonnets, was born in Ithaka, studied under Polylas in Corfu and later in Athens and in Germany, where he studied Classics and learnt Italian, English, French and Spanish and received his doctorate from the University of Erlangen.The anthology also includes a poem (‘I Stand Before the North Wind’) by Stelios Seferiades, father to George Seferis, who was born in Smyrna (now Izmir) in 1873, studied law in France, translated Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex in the demotic language in 1907, served as Professor of International Law at Athens University since 1919 and was a longstanding advisor of Eleftherios Venizelos.[vi]

In addition, towards the end of the anthology we find four poems by Andrew Michalopoulos (who was to broadcast English news commentaries from Athens in 1940-41 and to serve as Minister of Information in London, Washington and Cairo in 1941-43 and as special adviser on American affairs to the Royal Greek Embassy in Washington from 1950 to 1967), another four by Stephanides (himself born in India to Greek parents, spent most of his life working as a medical doctor in Corfu and Salonica, and was friend and mentor of naturalist Gerald Durrell) and one by Louis Scarpas which were written originally in the English language. As Seferis stressed in his several prologues to his translation of Eliot’s The Waste Land, it was the demoticists and writers such as Solomos and Kalvos, who opened themselves to foreign influence and thus made it possible for the writers of the Thirties to be less biased when looking at tradition; ‘the whole of Greek history,’ Seferis noted, ‘is made out of travels, meetings, new roots and dialogues in faraway places, always sealed with that peculiar but instantly recognisable stamp called Hellenism.’[vii]

However, Seferis’ Hellenism as the product of a dialogue with other cultures and languages is not foregrounded in the anthology, since the poems are made to fit the translators’ homogeneous mould. Cavafy is represented only with ‘Ithaca’ and his diasporic roots, as is also the case with poet Peter Vlastos who was born in Calcutta and spent most of his life in Liverpool, are not acknowledged. In addition, the beginning of Cavafy’s ‘Ithaca’ shows the language the translators preferred: ‘When thou shalt journey forth for Ithaca / Make wish to find thy road a lengthy one, / Full of adventures and of discovery full.’ W.H. Auden noted in his introduction to a 1961 edition of Cavafy’s poems that his unique tone of voice could make it ‘as easy, or as difficult, for a person from an alien culture to appreciate as for one of the cultural groups to which the poet happens to belong’. The 1911 ‘Ithaca’ has a long tradition in translation and in July 1924 it had appeared in Eliot’s The Criterion in George Valassopoulos’ version: ‘When you start on the way to Ithaca, / Wish that the way be long, / Full of adventure, full of knowledge.’ In their version, Stephanides and Katsimbalis digressed to a state where even that poet’s voice could be fixed securely into the past. As a reviewer of the book suggested, the renderings displayed a ‘real command of varied English’ yet there was ‘too frequent use of “ye,” and that often (from the standpoint of old English) incorrectly’.

By attempting to preserve the metre and form of the originals, the elements of modern Greece reborn, that the poems were set to disseminate, appeared still as fragments shored against ruins. As a consequence, modern Greeks remained, as poet Nanos Valaoritis has put it, the ‘unwanted ghosts of history’ with the first poet who condensed this melancholy in a poem being Seferis in his Mythistorema (1935) where these moderns are no more real than ancient statues.[viii] This was one of the inadequacies of the translators’ work. In their attempt to streamline their translations to their audience’s linguistic medium, they did everything in reverse using old English to present an image of homogeneity to the west. Rather than taking advantage of their primary material, itself a polyglot artifice that could stage ‘an alien reading experience’ (Venuti, 210), they appropriated the work of Greek poets blindingly aiming at bringing back ‘a cultural other as the same’. As Lawrence Venuti has argued, this is indeed the aim of translation which nevertheless ‘always risks a wholesale domestication of the foreign text, often in highly self-conscious projects, where translation serves an imperialist appropriation of foreign cultures for domestic agendas, cultural, economic, political.’[ix]

Despite its shortcomings, Modern Greek Poems was an attempt at presenting the ‘rebirth of Modern Greece’ through its poets ‘whose only obstacle to wider fame was the language in which they wrote, a language known only to a few million Greeks in the whole world’. Until the early translations of Palamas’ and Cavafy’s work, English readers were used to receiving information on the Greek ‘charming folk songs and dances’; Poetry of Modern Greece, translated by Florence McPherson, appeared in 1884, Greek Lays, Idylls, Legends: A Selection from Recent and Contemporary Poets, translated by E.M. Edmonds, followed in 1886, and Greek Folk Poesy, translated by Lucy M.J. Garnett, in 1896. A book by G.F. Abbott on Songs of Modern Greece, which divided poems as epic and romantic, the latter including poems under the loose definition of ‘songs dealing with imaginary subjects’, was published in 1900 by Cambridge University Press. ‘The book is indispensable to all intelligent travellers in Greece,’ one read in The Times (The Times, 27 December 1900) This comment allows us to appreciate the approximate value of the 1926 anthology in the English book market; this collection of poems, like the others before it, were not only transferring a piece of modern Greek culture abroad but were to become in the hands of English-speaking readers a travel-guide around Greece, an indispensable appendix to a foreigner’s peregrinations around the country. In 1928, a book on Modern Greece by William Miller advised the classical student ‘not characterize modern Greek as a corrupt patois or blame it for not being the language of Plato or Thucydides when […] he does not expect his contemporaries in Piccadilly or Oxford to speak like Bacon or Shakespeare, to say nothing of Chaucer.’ Modern Greek Poems were therefore the closest one could get to decoding modern Greece to a 1920s audience.

‘The poems by miscellaneous writers will be found full of charm by those who know something of modern Greece’, a reviewer wrote in 1926; ‘They conjure up memories of her smiling seas, her sailing-craft and fisher-folk, her gorgeous sunsets, her hills and olive-groves. In them is much of the eternal “melancholy of the Greeks,” with death taking premature toll of what seems fairest and most promising; but there are occasional reminders of Greek joy in music, dance and song.’[x] The eternal ‘melancholy of the Greeks’ that the reviewer notes sounds like common currency for the English reader; in Some Aspects of the Greek Genius (1893) S.H. Butcher had noted that ‘a peculiar vein of constitutional sadness’ belonged to the ‘Greek temperament’ already found in Homer whose Iliad was burdened by the early death of Achilles.[xi]  In Homer, he continued, illusion and disillusion did not succeed one another but ‘with the freshness of youthful life and its boundless capacity of action is combined the quiet and calm gaze of long experience’ so that Greek poetry is stuck from the outset with ‘the blindness of a being who seeing sees not’(143). In the ‘modern world’, when ‘the contradiction between boundless aspiration and limited powers is apt to paralyze high efforts’, Butcher seemed to suggest that the ‘genuine Hellene’ of classical antiquity, who was touched with ‘profound pity for the wretchedness of man’ and used irony to puncture fancied knowledge, can have something to teach us (175). Modern Greek Poems aimed at creating a referent for modern Greece constructing at the same time Greece as a reference point for a period struggling with the loss of a secure sense of belonging. Cavafy’s ‘Ithaka’, a retelling of the story of Odysseus and his visible goal – a home of sorts – was a poem that tapped into the fear of losing one’s sense of identity, of individuality. The Parthenon, often referred to in the anthology, served the same purpose. Once again, as in the previous century, Greece was propped as the place that could become the space of projected dreams from the West; only this time it was the ruins of the present that were in the centre of it, a ‘modern’ Parthenon.

In particular, this slim volume combined the Greece of the Parthenon, the country that inspired Byron (‘Byron’, M. Malakasis), with a country whose poetry revealed a preoccupation with concerns familiar to an English audience. D.H. Lawrence’s journey ‘down in the flood of remembrance’ through the sound of a piano in ‘Piano’ (1918) or Thomas Hardy’s dancing in the dream of an ancient floor in ‘The Self-Unseeing’ (1902) could find an equivalent in the co-existence of past and present in Ioannis Polemis’ ‘The Old Violin’ (1909), where the music of an old violin brings back the throbbing of youth, and ‘Alone’, where memories of the voice of one’s beloved surface and are lost again.

What if cares have furrowed deep my brow along,
What if years have eddied, what if years have rolled?
Lo! my love grows purer, sweeter and more strong
As my locks gleam whiter, as I grow more old.
(‘The Old Violin’)

But then arose before my sight
The cottage where our love was born;
The oaken shutters barred the light
And opened not to greet the morn.

I stopped as if some mighty peak
Across my path had reared its head,
For memory had ceased to speak
And longing cannot weak the dead!
(‘Alone’)

In addition, the poems transferred images of ruined, forgotten places which, though ‘mute’, could still convey ‘a last and lingering prayer’ (Louis Scarpas’ ‘The Ruined Church’), images that could speak about and to 1920s shell-shocked Europe. The fragmented memories presented in Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), this seminal interwar poem, were the product of times of insecurity when the sense of home and belonging was changing as the survivors of the war were entering the depression era. One ‘tiny handful’ of ‘Grecian soil’, ‘from whose stones was built / The Parthenon, the fairest temple ‘neath the sun’ (‘Grecian Soil’, G. Drosinis) could then become the absolute symbol of an ‘ancient home’, a ‘first-known nest’ (‘The King-Eagle’, K. Krystallis) lost and longed for and the Parthenon itself the unreal and fantastic apparition of ‘beauty  / That far off doth seem’ (From ‘Iambs and Anapaests’, K. Palamas). The poems in the anthology keep returning to peaceful images when the journey ‘homeward’ was possible (‘Sunset, K. Krystallis), to growth interrupted by a sudden death ‘swooping like a hawk of fear’ (‘The Dead Maiden’s Lament’, G. Markoras) and to the forgetfulness of life’s pain in death (‘Lethe’, L. Mavilis). In addition, their general tone resembles a drone full of grieving, fear and despair (‘I Would that I Were by the Shore’, A. Eftaliotis, ‘The Old Violin’, J. Polemis, ‘The Réveillé of the Dead’, J. Gryparis, ‘Melancholy’, M. Malakasis, ‘I Saw the Fates…’, G. Delis, ‘The Doomed’, K. Varnalis, ‘Puppets’, C.G. Karyotakis), feelings pertinent to England after WWI.

Rupert Brooke’s lines in ‘The Soldier’ (1914), equating his dead body with English earth in a foreign land, could find an equivalent in George Drosinis’ nostalgia for his country in ‘Grecian Soil’ (1885), written when he was studying History of Art in Leipzig. Even though the circumstances of the two poems differ, the sound of ‘on my chilling bosom I shall feel thee near’ of Drosinis’ verse would echo for a post-war audience the experience of the soldiers in the First World War encapsulated in Brooke’s patriotic lines ‘If I should die, think only this of me: / That there’s some corner of a foreign field / That is forever England.’ Similarly, Wilfred Owen’s popular war poem ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ (1917), with its terrifying question ‘What passing-bells for these who die as cattle? / -Only the monstrous anger of the guns’, could find its nightmarish echo in Kostas Karyotakis’ ‘Puppets’ (1924) which describes people as empty shells for whom the only proof of existence comes when trampled by others: ‘Alone he knows that we exist who o’er / Our bosom tramples as he strives to pass.’

And if it be fated – cruel fate and dread –
That thy strand, my Country, I should see no more,
On my chilling bosom I shall feel thee near,
I shall kiss thee dying, distant by thy shore.
Aye, if o’er the ocean I be laid to rest,
Lo! a foreign grave-yard’s bitterness ‘twill foil
If I clasp in slumber to my frozen breast
Just one tiny handful of thy Grecian soil.
(‘Grecian Soil’)

As if we ne’er had come into this world,
As if the path from void we ne’er had found,
Shades hem us in with ne’er a gleam unfurled,
Men are we but to shades that drift around.
(‘Puppets’)

Finally, the extracts from Palamas’ ‘A Hundred Voices’ (from the 1904 collection Life Immovable) in the anthology anticipate the vision of the artist as expressing a collective consciousness in his song of the ephemeral and eternal beauty in W.B. Yeats’ ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ (1926): ‘Whatever is begotten, born, and dies. / Caught in that sensual music all neglect / Monuments of unageing intellect.’

O blood that boils and throbs, that sears and flows
Like flame or dew in man or blossom bright,
O blood divinely purified and shared
By Life, the artisan of skill and might,
What pyramids and what eternities
Can overshadow ’mid the boundless skies
The grandeur of the instant that is born,
Becomes a rose, a Helen, and then dies?
(From ‘A Hundred Voices’)

In Modern Greek Poems, Palamas’ lines ‘A sculptor carved a lily on the stone; / Now all is gone, the lily has remained’ fused with Argyropoulos’ ‘Seek what awaits thee, not the past again; / Roll ever roll with Life’s revolving sphere’ and the constant contest between memory and lethe, with humanity in the middle of it, continued amongst the ruins of the First World War.

Konstantina Georganta

 

[i] Other authors of that volume included Andreas Karkavitsas, George Vizyenos, George Xenopoulos, Iakovos Polylas, Thrasos Kastanakes, and Alexandros Papadiamantes.

[ii] W.B. Ebersole, ‘Review of Kostes Palamas: Life Immovable by Aristides E. Phoutrides’, The Classical Journal, 16:6 (March, 1921), pp. 381-3 (p. 381).

[iii] Emanuel Carnevali, ‘Three Poets of Three Nations’, Poetry: A Magazine of Verse (October, 1920), pp. 49-51.

[iv] George Seferis, “Διάλογος Πάνω στην Ποίηση” (“Dialogue on Poetry”) (1938), in Essays, First Volume, 1936-1947, 101.

[v] Forster, Pharos and Pharillion, 56; C.P. Cavafy, “Ithaca”, The Criterion, II/8 (July 1924), 431-32; Poems by C.P. Cavafy, trans. John Mavrogordato, London: Chatto and Windus, 1951.

[vi] Thomas Skouteris, ‘The Vocabulary of Progress in Interwar International Law: An Intellectual Portrait of Stelios Seferiades’, The European Journal of International Law, 16:5 (2006), 823-856.

[vii] In the prologue to the second edition of Θ.Σ. Έλιοτ, Η Έρημη Χώρα (T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land), written in April 1949, 10-11, Seferis wrote: “αντιρρήσεις που κηρύχνουν πως τα δημιουργήματα του δυτικού πολιτισμού είναι καρποί άκρου ξεπεσμού και πως είναι αρνητής των παραδόσεων του Γένους όποιος δοκιμάζει να μιλήσει για τέτοια καμώματα. Ανάγκη λοιπόν να δικαιολογηθώ για την εισαγωγή αυτής της ξένης πραμάτειας”, “Αλήθεια, έχω τη γνώμη πως χάρη στον αγώνα και την αντοχή της προπερασμένης γενιάς των μεγάλων δημοτικιστών μπορούμε σήμερα να κοιτάξουμε και να ρωτηθούμε, με λιγότερη μονομέρεια, τι απομένει ζωντανό και τι πέθανε σ’ ολόκληρη την παράδοσή μας”, “Ο δημοτικισμός ήταν ένα ξέσπασμα και μια άσκηση ζωής· μια άσκηση πίστης στην παρούσα δύναμη του Έθνους· ήταν ακόμη το πρώτο σχολειό που μας δίδαξε ν’ αντικρύζουμε τον ξένο χωρίς συμπλέγματα κατωτερότητας .… Συνειδητά ή υποσυνείδητα ήξεραν πως ολόκληρη η ελληνική ιστορία είναι φτιαγμένη από ταξίδια, γνωριμίες, ριζώματα και διαλόγους σε μακρινούς τόπους, που καταλήγουν πάντα σ’ ένα συμπέρασμα σγραγισμένο μ’ αυτή την ιδιότυπη σφραγίδα που την ανα γνωρίζουμε αμέσως και που λέγεται ελληνισμός.”

[viii] Nanos Valaoritis, ‘Η αδιανόητη μελαγχολία του πλήθους’ (‘The inconceivable melancholy of the crowd’), Athens Voice, 354 (06.07.2011), http://www.athensvoice.gr/the-paper/article/article/354/η-αδιανόητη-μελαγχολία-του-πλήθους. See also Vassiliki Kolocotroni, ‘Still Life: Modernism’s Turn to Greece’, Journal of Modern Literature, 35:2 (Winter 2012), 1-24.

[ix] Lawrence Venuti, ‘Translation as cultural politics: Regimes of domestication in English’, Textual Practice, 7:2 (1993), 209.

[x] ‘Poems by Kostes Palamas by Kostes Palamas; Theodore Ph. Stephanides; George C. Katsimbalis; Modern Greek Poems by Theodore Ph. Stephanides; George C. Katsimbalis’, The Journal of Hellenic Studies, 46 (1926), 287.

[xi] S.H. Butcher, Some Aspects of the Greek Genius, London: Macmillan, 1893, 136.

Note: The three drawings included in this article are by Artemis Schwebel and can be found at: http://artemis-schwebel.com/ITHAKA/ithaka/ithakas.html