I /i 0 0 A i V, w f Collected Poems 1924-1955, by George Seferis; translated and edited by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Princeton Univ. Press. $10. by Michael Madigan The translations of Keeley and Sherrard are unavoidably not the poems of George Seferis, the poems that were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1963. For, while Seferis has given his "generous interest and cooperation" to the transla- tors, the tone of the original poems is, as Robert Lowell suggests, "something' that will always more or less escape. transference to another language and cultural movement." Yet the editors' poems do have a tone and are written in "alive English." They have not at- tempted strict metric translations, have excluded those poems which they thought impossible to translate, and have re- legated to an appendix those poems whose rhymic and verbal configurations do not admit a "close formal approxima- tion" in English. Keeley and Sherrard are poets, not taxidermists. Their poems are, happily, not stuffed birds. Although we cannot be sure - unless we speak fluent modern Greek - that all the editors' translations capture the essence of the Greek poems, we can be confident that under Seferis' guidance theE4 many, if not most, of the translations do justice to the originals. In Seferis' case many seems to be almost as valuable as most. For the poet tells us in a letter to his friend George Katsimbalis in 1949 that his. poetry is simply one poem: "I am a monstrous and obstinate sort of a man, who for the last twenty years, has gone on saying the same things over and over again - things that are not even my own." In Sherrard's book on modern Greek poetry, The Marble Threshing Floor, he goes to great pains to prove that modern Greek poets - at least four of the five major figures he studies - are mythic poets, unlike most post-Renaissance poets. They are uncon- cerned with the individual and separate self and see themselves as messengers between the supernatural and the natural world. The modern Greek poets, so Sher- TOM jrreek rard tells us, have raised their con- sciousness from observation to vision, from the outward present to the inward present. Seferis' first book of poems, Turning Point (1931), a book of love po- ems, seems on first reading to belie Sherrard's hypothesis - at least in Seferis' case. After a casual reading of the col- lected poems, one could mistakenly cry, "Seferis' complex mythic vision did not come from the gods, but from a few sour love affairs which the editors are trying to hide." This was my first re- sponse and one which I thought was val- idated by a quick reading of several of Seferis' prose essays and letters. In 1938, seven years after the publica- tion of Turning Point, Seferis spoke to an audiance of students at the Univer- sity of Athens. He commented on "how An honest nt life would be if all (literary critics) de- voted their attention simple and solely to finding out the poetic essence of my poem." This essence of his poem or poems is I think capsulized by the poet in a rather cryptic letter he wrote George Katsimbalis in 1949 explaining his poem "Thrush:" Just think of these cords which unite man with the elements of nature, this tragedy that is in nature and in man at the same time, this inti- macy. Suppose the light were sud- denly to become Orestes? It is so easy, just think: if the light of the day and the blood of man were one and the same thing! How far can one stretch this feeling? 'Just an- thropomorphism,' people say; and they pass on. I do not think it is as simple as that. If anthropomorphism created the Odyssey, how far can we look into the Odyssey? We could go very far; but I shall stop here. We arrive at the light. And the light cannot be explained... but let me first recall the last words of Anti- cleia to her son: The soul, like a dream, flutters away and is gone. But quickly turn your desire to the light and keep all this in your mind. The most interesting thing about this letter - which seemed to support first Continued on page twelve --0 --n a masturbatory THE NIGHT OF THE WEEPING CHILDREN a -A sil --I people and reveals a deep concern for the sufferings of both victim and per- secutor alike. All her work is in her native language, German. The first com- plete translation into English of her main writings is now finally available, and it remains faithful to both the text and the spirit of the German original. The themes presented in the contents of the bilingual American edition may remind us of Emily Dickinson "In the Habitations of Death," "And No One Knows How to Go On," "Journey into a Dustless Realm." Rich metaphors and free rhythm flood the mind of the will- ing and patient reader, leading him in- to a realm of mood and imagery sel- dom touched by routine daily living. At this point the comparison with the New England poet ends. Nelly Sachs tries neither to impose any philosophy nor to present a re-run of her own ex- periences. Instead she creates around her reader a mental atmosphere over which she stays in complete control. 0 the Chimneys contains no poems which can stand effectively apart from the text, and even the play Eli is better understood by being included with the poems. The reader has little choice but to read the work through as a whole. The beginning poems are dominated by bitterness and suffering. We find our- selves in the Nazi concentration camps, "the habitations of death." Our visit ends in dust, ashes and smoke, but our journey continues. Miss Sachs does not dwell on long lamentations but neither does she allow anyone to forget such scenes 'as in the poem "0 the night of the weeping children." In this manner an acceptance of suffering for its own sake is revealed as an evolving con- cept, which becomes clearer with later poems. Suffering is only the framework of an atmosphere, in whose creation each poem plays its own special role. We go on to find ourselves among the stars and planets, on a beach, with old men, or in oblivion. We can hear for one moment the music of the spheres and in the next a "landscape of screams." Meanwhile our thoughts follow along with a sequence of mystical images and weird pictures, into which are woven several recurring metaphors. This phe- nomenon can be explained by Goethe's concept of metamorphosis, which ex- cludes any idea of defined steps or units of change. The full nature of the se- quence is not revealed by any single poem. In reading Nelly Sachs' poetry, one must assume a spiritual outlook, which can be found in both the poems and the mystery play Eli. This play resem- bles the medieval church plays and also the more modern German mystery plays of Rudolf Steiner and Albert Stef- fen. The reader with no German lan- guage background will find the style and word usage at first challenging, but not impossible. The important ,element of Miss Sachs' work is the achievement of a different approach to the nature of humanity. We are raised up over the boundaries of good and evil, birth and death, into a cosmic realm, from which we look back down on earth, a "tear among the plan- ets." In this manner Nelly Sachs helps us discover our own souls, not with a message but rather through genuine ex- perience. Perhaps this discovery will constitute an important step toward the new beginning. Mr. Hagens is a student at the College of Wooster. Stop-time, by Frank Conroy. Vik- ing Press. $5.95. by David Johnson It's an honest novel. Perhaps that's where the difficulty lies. A familiar opin- ion about first novels, be it myth or fact, is that they must necessarily be auto- biographical. So closely does Conroy ad- here to that dictum that he uses his own name in the narrative, told from the first person. We see young, rebellious, persecuted Frank Conroy, alienated from his "oh, so cruel" society, hardly a in- novative theme. A relative of the young anti-heroes in the Salinger, Amis, and Benedictus novels, Conroy's protagonist uses the same type of pithy, adolescent wisdom to comment on the vicious adult world around him. But it is not a Holden Caul- field, Lucky Jim, or big boy now we are watching here. Conroy is using the world, or more precisely his readers, as a sort of vast psycho-analytical audience. From the couch of his Jaguar motor car ("Fifty to sixty miles an hour through the empty streets of South London. No lights. Slamming in the gears, accelerat- ing on every turn, winding the big en- gine, my brain finally clean and white, washed out by the danger and the roar of the wind."), he tells us flashback fashion of the tragic little life that pro- vokes his mind-popping fast driving. We are confronted with the inevitable private school scene where our hero comes face to face with injustice and authority. The fat boy of the class, who is, how shall we say, "different," is beaten up by the entire junior class. Conroy participates, the boy is taken to the hospital, and Conroy comments, "Although Ligget's beating is part of my life (past, present, and future coexist in the unconcious says Freud) and although I've worried about it off and on for years, all I can say about it is that brutality happens easily. I learned almost nothing from beating up Ligget." Yet he considers the incident worthy of considerable space. The rest of the novel is fairly predict- able. We are told of Conroy's experi- ences as his family moves from New York to Florida and back. We follow him through schools, jobs, sex, and trauma, under such stimulating chapter heads as "Shit", "Losing My Cherry", and "The Coldness of Public Places". There is even one entitled "Elsinore" where our hero studies abroad. Could he in- tend a connection? Necessity in this type of novel of course requires a troubled family life. Daddy is in an insane asylum. Mommy has a handsome lover, handsome lover has multitudinous complexes, and sister rounds out the quintet by having a com- plete emotional collapse at the con- clusion of the book. This appears to be th central springboard for Conroy's work. He asks how anyone could possibly suffer what he has suffered and go on living. such ing p reach At i retur "A: A. long ligh ly pas: righ Iw His saved this s turba damn terrib after After for p more Confe Wom same is m litera Whi like I There novel worth touch mentc wher fathei is not On is an ing h man emba Press front psyc Mr. dram This d as tr For bi whi No W for b Mea W gl s - i Now di 0 The Chimneys: Selected Poems and the Verse Play, Eli, by Nelly Sachs. Farrar Strauss Giroux. $7.50. by Herbert 0. Hagens The need for a new beginning in our world is perhaps felt most deeply by the youth of modern Germany. Here in America the security of a continuous past has somewhat sheltered our post- war generation from this experience. However we too are questioning the con- text of our lives and are discovering the scarcity of more relevant and sig- nificant answers. Nelly Sachs tells us we are living in a "night of nights," but she goes on to observe in one of her poems: Still no love between the plan- ets/but a secret understanding already quivers. In 1940 Nelly Sachs, a Jew, escaped to Sweden from the fate which caught many of her relatives in Germany. Through poetry and drama she identi- fies herself with the tragedy of her 4 . CHICAGO LITERARY REVIEW . December, 1967 December, 1967 " CHICAG 0