The metaphor of literary transmission as a sea voyage was fruitful in antiquity and remains suggestive in this exploration of more recent encounters between British and Greek poetry. Paschalis Nikolaou takes his cue from Pytheas, a merchant and geographer from Marseille, who in the fourth century BC became the first Greek to visit and write about the British Isles. Nikolaou takes up the story from the 1960s, charting a complex re-alignment of Greek and English-language literary traditions: ‘a sustained imaginative desire for the two cultures to connect and to validate each other’.
Modern Greek poetry has made most headway with English readers by way of anthologies; Keeley and Sherrard's slim Penguin Four Greek Poets (1966), for example, was influential out of all proportion to its size, introducing a whole generation to the idea of Greece as the home of a living literary culture. The Prologue to The Return of Pytheas offers a useful survey of some of the most important anthologies, while later chapters demonstrate the vital role of periodicals such as Modern Poetry in Translation. (A full account of the reception of Modern Greek poetry in anglophone countries is still to be written.)
The first of the book's four chapters is also its most detailed treatment of an individual poet: Christopher Logue. Nikolaou prepares the ground with an account of the ways literary Modernism replaced representation with performance and gave pride of place to translation as a literary activity. (Ezra Pound is rightly seen as a key figure.) The experience of reading Homer through Logue is immersive and Nikolaou's approach is very much that of a close and attentive reader. He shows how Logue's own political affinities and personal experiences (of war, imprisonment and activism) generate a special sympathy with and connection with the Iliad—neither moralising nor denying the visceral appeal of violence. In such personal, even autobiographical, glimpses, we realise that life writing is always latent in the act of translation. Moving outwards to a broader context, Nikolaou traces the presence in Logue's Iliad of other texts and translations and other battlefields, historical or modern; he finds not so much a series of anachronisms as ‘a select bibliography of war’. He also stresses the importance of the dissemination and reception of Logue's versions: the radio broadcasts and public readings which might be seen as the modern equivalent of an oral tradition. Where the original Iliad had one context, translation means the creation of new and multiple contexts.
Chapter Two explores ‘Translating as Part of the Poetry’ in Ted Hughes, Josephine Balmer and Alice Oswald. Balmer's The Word for Sorrow grows out of and beyond the process of translating Ovid's Tristia thanks to a chance encounter with a Latin dictionary belonging to a man who had fought at Gallipoli. Gallipoli and Tomis mirror each other in Balmer's text, which sets versions of Ovid alongside original poems exploring the history of the dictionary used in her translation. For Balmer, a leading practitioner and scholar of the translation of classical poetry, translation becomes part of the poem's narrative. Nikolaou also shows how ‘impulses of self-expression and metaphors for translation come together’ in Alice Oswald's Memorial and Falling Awake. Like Hughes (who has been an important influence) Oswald approaches classical texts through nature, folk tale and myth. Images from English nature poetry furnish her versions of Homeric similes, as the anonymous people in the Iliad's peacetime vignettes contrast with the individual warriors who are named and commemorated. Again, performance is at the heart of translation; in the modern quest for the equivalent of orality, Oswald's recitals of Memorial require a feat of memory and an engagement with the audience that transcend the fixed, printed text.
Pytheas makes a return voyage in Chapter Three in the encounters with modern Greece of some contemporary English-language poets. The first section is devoted to Richard Berengarten, of whom Nikolaou has made a special study. Berengarten draws on a variety of Greek heritages—Jewish, Hellenic, Romaic—and Greek poets; he incorporates translated fragments of Gatsos, Seferis and Ritsos and enters into dialogue with Elytis. A section on Nasos Vayenas follows, focusing on his intertextual games with Eliot's Waste Land and its Borges-inspired fictional re-translation by a fictional character. A survey of poets responding to Greece in the twenty-first century includes Sebastian Barker, Evan Jones, Vesna Goldsworthy and Alice Kavounas. Some of these have Greek ancestry and write out of a sense of ‘in-betweenness’; their individual experiences are compelling, but the resulting poetry sometimes disappoints, perhaps because it lacks a distinctive voice or convincing prosody. A notable exception is the writing of Kelvin Corcoran, in which ‘classical and modern existences are visible and concentrated’. Corcoran's For the Greek Spring (2013) is formally interesting as well as emotionally engaged, drawing on a medley of forms and modes, from travel journal to collage, lyric and monologue. Pytheas himself has a speaking part, speculating on the predicament of present-day Greece.
Cavafy, or his shade, has his own chapter (Chapter Four), with a useful summary of Cavafy's reception in English. In the section on recent poetry inspired by or written in response to Cavafy, Josephine Balmer is again a striking presence. Also worth of note is David Ricks's witty and haunting poem ‘Cavafy's Stationery’.
Nikolaou's Afterward or ‘Periplous’ looks to a future in which the poetic self will be increasingly multilingual (or even ‘translingual’) and the two literary traditions will continue to inform each other. It is encouraging that older models of literary reception, with their stress on anxiety and appropriation, are giving way to such encounters and exchanges.
