A Greek Quintet: Poems by Cavafy, Sikelianos, Seferis, Elytis And Gatsos

by Philip Sherrard (Translator), Edmund Keeley (Translator)

Book by

Genres: Poetry, Literature

206 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2000

About the author

Philip Sherrard was educated at Cambridge and London and taught at the universities of both Oxford and London, but he made Greece his permanent home. A pioneer of modern Greek studies and translator, with Edmund Keeley, of Greece's major modern poets, he wrote many books on Greek, philosophical and literary themes. He was also the translator and editor (with G.E.H. Palmer and Bishop Kallistos Ware) of the Philokalia, a collection of texts in five volumes by the spiritual masters of the Orthodox Christian tradition.

A profound, commited and imaginative thinker, his theological and metaphysical writings embrace a wide range of subjects, from the study of the spiritualizing potential of sexual love to the restoration of a sacred cosmology which he saw as the only way to escape from the spiritual and ecological dereliction of the modern world.

Reviews

[Abby]

Cavafy:
Let me offer you a piece of advice,
disguised as history, always cloaked
in a complete sentence.
Then I will turn from the window,
full of wistful nostalgia for the time when,
as a youth, everyone wanted me.

Sikelianos:
I will set the scene, I will describe the light and time of day,
for I have been outside to see the sun and sea.
These small moments of my life with virgin strangers and male goats
bring me to tears with their poignancy.

Seferis:
Repetition is my favorite wine except perhaps the sentence
that goes on and on forever or at least until the stanza ends
in an unexpected fig tree, and I will use the word naked. But repetition
is my favorite wine and I will keep it going until you believe you’re drunk
though it is only the sweetness of the everyday
in a way you did not think to put it,
had I not given you the wine of repetition.

Elytis:
So many naked girls are in this book!
Yet it cannot be just me; all Greeks confuse their girls with trees
And why not when we are infused with the variable weather
And why not when, though infused with wartime like the smell of mint,
I cannot seem to keep my happiness at bay.

Gatsos:
I seem to be an outlier here both in the dubiousness of my elephants and the length of my lines,
But there is no rule against elephants, not even if they sail away
In the mad gust of pan pipes and more trees, more naked women probably,
Climbing the tepid mountains which are most likely tangerine-colored metaphysics though you would never know,
Until you have forgotten it’s a poem, that’s right, it’s a poem that I am offering
To you, a strangely charming gift you will never understand until it hatches sporks and stars.

[GeekChick · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a good anthology of the top Greek poets. Cavafy is probably the most well-known, but Seferis is my favorite.