Under a real city, under the brown fog of a winter noon.
Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant unshaven with his pocket full of currants,
S.F. London documents at sight asked me in demotic French to luncheon at the Cannon Street Hotel, followed by a weekend at the Metropole.
So Mr. Eugenides walks into the world's literature, into world literature on the 16th of October in 1922,
with the first publication of T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland.
He emerges from the sour brown fog of London,
but he trails acrid smoke from Asia minor wearing the gods face of a refugee, a person of permanent exile.
He is arguably even a ghost, and I might as well set out at the beginning of this lecture that in England,
folklore ghosts do not appear at midnight, but smack at noon in the middle of the day.
The unreal city. Here is London, but there is another city namechecked in this passage, Smyrna,
that in the catastrophic Great Fire, which had raged from September 13th to the soon to September 22nd of 1922,
so little more than three weeks before the poem's first appearance had become, in some respects, almost literally and real.
Was this dissonance felt by the first readers.
I think it must have been newspaper headlines on both sides of the Atlantic had been dominated by the story and by its aftermath.
Math for weeks, numbers of those lost to the fire, to violence, to desperation at the key,
including death by drowning, to deportations, to the interior, could have been upwards of 100,000.
At some point, over 300,000 people were gathered on the key at Smyrna, and the aftermath of that was its own humanitarian crisis.
So the story dominated Western media for weeks and months afterward.
Hemingway's harrowing short story on the key at Smyrna based on eyewitness accounts, appears as late as 1930.
And I'm going to show you all a bunch of newspaper headlines from that time,
mostly from September of that year, although a few are also from October and they're from all over.
I don't vouch necessarily for any of the numbers. All of this is somewhat disputed.
But to give you a sense of the tenor of the media.
Now known in its modern incarnation as Izmir.
Smyrna most ancient version was founded in the 11th century BCE and is one of
the traditional birthplaces of Homer as an Ottoman city for hundreds of years.
It was known as Infidels Smyrna, for its large population of Christians, Armenian and Greek Orthodox,
a strong Jewish community and a population of 17 foreigners English, French and so on who might have been Protestant, Roman Catholic.
So it's a prosperous, polyglot, cosmopolitan trading centre exporting raisins, figs, wheat, carpet, tobacco.
I love this particular map because it contains a whole line of the wasteland.
I don't know if you can see it Athens, Jerusalem and Alexandria, but you can see where Smyrna, Izmir is situated.
And there's a little island, a couple of islands up that is the island of Lesbos with its main city of Mytilene.
And that will come in a little bit later. So as the Ottoman Empire reeled from defeat after World War One,
Greece was encouraged to pursue territorial ambitions of the great idea of greater Greece.
So this is what those greater ambitions would have looked like.
In 1919, Greek forces landed in Smyrna.
These forces commit some of their own atrocities, including killing unarmed prisoners and throwing them into the harbour.
This triggers a wave of ethnic violence where hundreds of Turkish citizens of the city are killed and maybe 100 Greeks,
and generally sets the stage for things that are going to happen.
But in September of 1922, as the defeated Greek forces retreated and Greek iridescent,
iridescent irredentist, I can't say irredentist irredentist dreams of greater Greece collapsed.
So Greek forces learned firsthand that you can't go back to Constantinople.
A song that I might point out came out in 1953 for the 500th anniversary of the fall of Constantinople.
So tens of thousands start gathering onto the key side there in a panic and are hoping for rescue by sea or evacuation by the sea.
On 13th of September, a fire is begun.
Western eyewitness accounts say, by Turkish forces and Turkish irregulars.
There are also high winds.
So from the edge of the Armenian quarter, this fire quickly engulfs the Greek Christian quarters as well, and the population panics.
There is a pandemonium of looting, rape, murders.
So eventually there are 3 to 400000 people packed at the seaside for days and days and days at a time.
Most frustratingly, there are 21 allied battleships in the harbour.
They stood at anchor, some so close that people tried to reach them by swimming,
but these refused to intervene in any way on the basis of formal neutrality.
So in one of the most chilling details, military bands on board were ordered to play loudly to drown out the screams coming from the key.
This is a detail that Hemingway cannot resist putting into his fictional account,
and he says the worst thing was how they screamed every night at midnight.
I do not know why they started screaming. We were in the harbour and they were at the pier and at midnight every night they started screaming.
I point out that the newspapers were not only concerned with the humanitarian disaster and the civilians who were.
They were also very concerned about what was happening financially.
Smyrna is a major, major port.
And you can see again that the crops this is in September, so the crops of raisins are all, you know, ready to be shipped out.
Crops of raisins, that is currants, Corinthian graves, raisins, figs, barley, wheat, carpets, etc., and tobacco.
So this was also one of the concerns. So moving this crossover I started to think of.
In the run up to the centenary centenary of both events in 2022, I was reviewing books on both topics,
so I was getting books about the Great Fire of Smyrna, including a novel by Oamaru Regis.
I was reviewing books about the 100th anniversary or birthday of the Wasteland, like the wonderful Matthew House book.
But what kind of struck me in my own particular corner of the world I live in Athens was that
the one point of really obvious intersection between these two Centenaries was not mentioned,
is barely mentioned or not mentioned, in fact roundly ignored.
And of course there's another centenary of 2022, which was James Joyce's Ulysses, which had another Greek flavour to it.
Even Matthew House's really enlightening and entertaining biography of the poem, which puts the poem in the perspective of the time.
So we've kind of forgotten that feeling of post World War One and post or partly during Spanish Flu and so on that colour,
the kind of doom and gloom feeling of the poem. But even this kind of skirts the topic.
Hollis gives us a brief view of what in 1922 is happening in the Unreal Cities that Eliot Namechecks.
Falling towers. Jerusalem. Athens.
Alexandria. Vienna. London. Unreal Harvest points out that maybe I'll go back to my map.
Hollis points out that in Alexandria, scarred by race riots, martial law was imposed by the British administration in May and Jerusalem.
Mandatory Palestine unrest had marred the fourth anniversary of the Balfour Declaration,
and he says in Athens it was clear now that the war with Turkey and Anatolia was heading for disaster.
That seems like almost an understatement.
The Great Fire is one of the signal events of what is known in Greece or in Greek as the Asia minor catastrophe disaster,
although I think we have to think of a kind of Aristotelian idea of catastrophe as being
that moment in the tragedy where everything turns upside down and goes pear shaped,
that, along with the exchange of populations agreed to and the Treaty of Lisbon changed the course of history and the face of this area of the world.
So 1.2 million Christians of Greek ancestry from Anatolia mostly are forcibly resettled in Greece,
a country whose population was 5 million at that time. So, you know, it's one fifth more again, suddenly in the country of 500,000,
roughly Greek national Muslims forcibly resettled in Turkey and then Anatolia,
an area of the world that had had large populations of Greeks or Greek speakers for millennia, suddenly did not.
It's a deep wound to the Greeks on the Turkish side.
1922 marks the glorious founding, or the beginning of the glorious founding of this new nation state out of the ashes of empire.
Mulling this crossover, I started to think of another person from Smyrna who would interact with the wasteland
in maybe the most intimate way possible by translating it in this case into Greek,
which we might consider the mother tongue of Mr. Eugenides with his abominable French.
It was originally abominable French. This is Pound's.
Changes to the poem. Pound is the one who makes the quite brilliant change from abominable French to demotic French.
George Seferis. Oh, here's waves of refugees in Athens, in tents with the temple of faces.
Mulling this cross over, I started to think of another person who's George Safaris.
So George, the pair affairs was born, Yorgos Safari Addis in Smyrna in the Ottoman Empire in February of 1900.
In 1914, his family fled to Athens, where he did his secondary school education.
They were essentially in exile. In 1918, he became a student in Paris.
He would, in fact, never return to Smyrna or to Izmir during his life.
During his childhood, Smyrna represented the school year.
Lessons Reign A French governess, His deepest nostalgia was reserved not for the city of Smyrna, but for a nearby seaside village or LA.
I think it is called now Villa, and his place was the Port Scala of Villa.
Uh. Where is the.
And this is what he writes to his translator, Rex Warner, about these memories of the summer in Villa in Skala.
The place where my family used to spend the summer holidays in those happy days.
A very small village, 100 souls or so was named Skala.
Our house was on the seafront. From the windows I could see the islands and the sea, which was splendid.
On my right hand, I had the island of Saint John, linked with the mainland by a jetty where we used to walk in the afternoon.
It was used for quarantines of the ships going to Smyrna.
And in times of contagious diseases, one might think of the Spanish flu.
Many ships were anchored off the island in September.
Skala was used as a port of export for dried raisins produced by the mainland.
And we have those currants and raisins again, which we might consider that Elliott doesn't have just accidentally in this person's pocket.
If you're coming from the point of view of this part of the world,
there are the Greek government nearly collapses twice because of the current crisis, because of a glut in the current market in 1893 and 1908.
So currents kind of represent the threat of economic collapse.
So there are these dried raisins produced by the mainland from the back window of our house.
One could have a nice view of the vineyards stretching up to the hills of the main town of the neighbourhood.
30,000 stalls in my time. Splendid, lads.
Almost all of them indulged in the hobby of smuggling tobacco.
Spoke wonderful vernacular Greek. So they spoke a wonderful demotic.
Like all idyllic childhoods, it seemed a paradise that would last forever.
And then one day it was gone. If we skip.
To. 1924.
We will find Steward's Affairs, his first visit to London.
One of the great things about George's affairs and biography is because he's born in 1900, I know what age he is at any point.
So he's he's 24. He has his first visit to.
England's. He arrives in August of 1924 in Brighton.
He's supposed to be learning English. He tries to teach himself English from a bilingual French, English, Shakespeare, and doesn't do very well.
He practices his English by speaking to his landlady's cat.
Again, he does not progress. In October, he describes he moves to London and he describes his first piece, Super of a Fog.
He's just stunned by this fog. And again, this is 1924.
So this is a fog that is full of horrible, cold particulate, slimy chemical things.
And, you know, not maybe like the fog today. He describes this super of a fog in a letter.
He felt like they were living at the bottom of the sea.
He suspects that the fog is somehow generated by the trombones of the Salvation Army.
And he writes a very charming poem.
What I'd like to you to think about I'm going to read a translation.
My own translation of this poem is that he had not at this point in theory, encountered Eliot at all.
But I'd like you to listen out for things that sound very logic, whether that's Prufrock or the wasteland fog.
Say it with a ukulele. Say it with a ukulele, whines some gramophone.
Say what to her, for Christ's sake. I'm used to being alone.
The shabby, genteel, poor give mouth organs to squeeze and cry yet again on the angels.
And the angels are the disease. The angels unfurl their wings, but below a stale fog gushes.
Thank God. Or else they'd snare our wretched souls like thrushes.
It's a cold fish sort of life. You live like this?
Yeah. So. So many are the drowned on the sea floor down below the.
The trees seem like coral from which all colours drain.
And the cart's like sunken ships only whose holes remain.
Say it with the ukulele. Words. Words. Words again.
Where is your chapel, love? I'm tired of this domain.
If only life were straight, then we could live it right.
But fate has got us cornered and the corner is too tight.
And just what corner? Who knows? Lamp, lights.
Lamp. A wreath of mists and speechless. Frosts.
We clench our souls in our teeth Shall we find constellation day Garbed with nights we find all is night All is
night We go by feeling blind Say it with a ukulele How the fire lights would glance off the gleam of her red nails.
I remember her and her cough. I think what we're bound to notice first is that the title and the epigraph are in English,
which I can't really indicate in a translation because that is also in English.
I think the the sort of effect is that Greek does not have a word.
That is adequate to fog considering his experience of fog in London.
You know, not OMA Italy, not Catalonia, or even near Fosse, which is in Athens.
The name that we give to our smog is adequate to this English phenomenon.
The second, of course, is the epigraph in English, somewhat arcane to the passage of time,
but it's the title of a popular song, and it's probably meant as two points.
As to the following lyrics. Modern girls are tired of dreary love poems.
You must give them something new. Say it with a ukulele.
I have made the mistake of tracking this down on YouTube so you don't have to.
It's a very, very annoying, you know. So some of the things we might think of that are psionic or that there are points of overlap,
maybe fog, a popular instruments, we think of the ukulele or the pleasant whine of a mandolin.
There is a song on a gramophone. There are souls in a fog.
There is direct but unattributed dialogue to souls or to shady figures.
There is that done to us? So many I had not thought.
Death had undone so many. There are thrushes.
We might not think of thrush as a very important word in Eliot, but the thrush is very important.
There is the shipwreck underwater ness. That kind of four full fathoms, five thy father lies, you know, things being turned into coral.
There is a lighting of the lamps and there is the suggestion of a modern girl, a kind of flapper who might be a typist and who wears red nail polish.
The poem also shares with Eliot an urban to Larry and spleen, in fact, maybe particularly to the seven old men.
I'm not going to torture you with my demotic. Abominable non French, but I will read in translation.
Teeming swarming city and swarming city. City full of dreams where spectres in broad day accost the passer by.
And it later mentions a dirty yellow fog inundated all space.
But I'm I'm particularly interested in this very Greek or maybe a gene reaction to encountering this northern kind of darkness.
And here it's to the Odyssey I turn. Sarfaraz was doing a lot of a systematic reading of the Odyssey as a student in Paris,
and it comes back again and again when we think about mist and darkness and a mention of souls, maybe even the mention of the sea.
This leads us to the Nokia of the Odyssey in Book 11, which is apt in many ways.
I will say that my husband, who is Greek, when he first came to boarding school in England as a very young man,
he had had an English government governess in Athens who was constantly making tea and filling the kitchen with steam from the tea kettle.
And when he landed in London with all of the cloud cover and so forth, he had this vague notion not that the trombones were causing the fog,
but that everyone in England was boiling tea and it was causing this darkness.
So we might consider a little bit that passage in The Odyssey, where Odysseus has to sail off to talk to the souls.
You know, we think of the Aeneid, we think of Dante.
You actually go down to a physical place to talk to the souls of the dead.
But in the Odyssey, he sails to a faraway place.
And the ghosts are kind of convinced to come up to the surface and talk to him all day long.
This is from The Odyssey. Her sails were full as she held her course over the sea.
But when the sun went down and darkness was over all the earth, we got into the deep waters of the the river Oceanus The river ocean.
Where lies the demons and city of the Samaritans who live in shrouded in mist and darkness,
which the rays of the sun never pierce, neither at his rising, nor as he goes down again out of the heavens.
But the poor wretches live in one long melancholy night.
Later, the souls emerge from Erebus, which name is etymologically linked to the darkness,
and Odysseus communes with the dead, starting with a Theban seer who has been a man and a woman.
Teresa is. For a Greek or someone from the Aegean.
This portal to the land of the dead lies at the ends of the earth, probably to the north and ultimate Thor.
You have to sail out of the Mediterranean and onto the ocean to get there.
It is dark all of the time. The sun cannot pierce the fog.
And interestingly, although the place itself is an entrance to Airbus, you, the passer by, can accost Spectres in the middle of the day.
It seems to be oddly a well-populated place.
Maybe it is even teeming with the people and presumably its own language and even a proper city, a polis, Paris or London.
There is a second point of contact of overlap in the poem Fog with the Odyssey.
It's a very spectral point, but I am going to point it out per It's that mention of souls and fogs and thrushes,
the songbirds, the migratory songbirds of the thrushes.
If I think about thrushes with Homer, my minds will go to Book 22 of The Odyssey, where Telemachus has to kill,
or maybe once to kill the maid servants who've been in cahoots or whatever with the suitors, and he's going to hang them.
And they are compared to long winged thrushes who are trapped in the bush.
So that for me is a very vague, slight mixture of allusions.
Perhaps in Greek it is that fog itself conjures up through the necromancy of rhyme.
Thrushes or meatless and modern Greek frogs cyclase in modern Greek thrushes.
The ancient Greek, the modern Greek for thrush is secular.
The ancient Greek for thrush is keightley.
They are the exactly the same word may be pronounced a little bit differently over the millennia.
Possibly an Italianate kind of church came into that quickly and became secular.
So there is that sense to me, very slight that the thrushes also have an odyssey in.
Aspect to them. So when does surveyors actually encounter?
Elliott. He encounters Eliot in 1932.
And we know pretty much exactly when this happens.
We have a full account of, in theory, his first meeting with Elliot.
So we fast forward to 1932 London.
It's the middle of winter, a few days ahead of Christmas Eve.
Sarfaraz is now a diplomat with the Greek consulate on Gower Street a few blocks away from the British Museum.
Seeing Unreal City out from under the fog of a winter noon, Mr. Sarfaraz, the Smyrna diplomat, steps into a bookstore on Oxford Street.
We know about this because he writes in a letter to a foreign friend about how he encounters Elliott.
I remember the time, he says. It now seems so long ago when I was making my first faltering discover of London,
which I thought of as a gigantic sea port and of the English language, whose music sounded so much more fluid than that of our own tongue.
Also, the shock I experienced at the sour taste of death in the fog and the increased,
intensified circulation of fear in the arteries of the great city.
It's 1932. Things are not looking great on the world stage.
I had no friends in England then. My only acquaintances were the crowds in the street and the museums.
I often had to rush out of my house to see again a fragment of the Greek marbles, especially for some reasons, for reasons I won't dwell on.
The one of the Elizabeths. Some days before Christmas of 1931, I visited a bookshop in Oxford Street to look for some Christmas cards,
and for the first time, among the colourful engravings, I took a poem by Eliot in my hands.
It was Marina from the series of of aerial poems, and you can see their Christmas poems.
It might make sense for this to be on a Christmas display in a bookstore.
And what did I read? What sees what shores, what grey rocks and what islands, What water lapping the bow and scent of pine.
From that time onwards, this lovely bow which forges slowly ahead,
has impressed itself on my mind as one of the most striking features of Eliot's poetry.
What? In case this may seem strange to you.
Yes. You must bear in mind that for many of us, the bowels of ships have a special place in the imagery of our childhood,
as perhaps the sheets of footballs or the photos of deceased relatives have for other people.
Anyhow, I went back home with Marina and a small volume of poems bound in mauve material, the one that ends with the Hollow Man, if I'm not mistaken.
The proverb from Petronius Sevilla de Feliz made me glance at the wasteland.
He talks about what intrigues him about Eliot is his dramatic sense.
And then he says, to put it in simpler words.
Apart from the image of the Mediterranean marina, the poetry of Eliot offered me something much deeper,
something which was inevitably moving to a Greek the elements of tragedy.
He also mentions that he's thrilled to discover that Eliot shares with him a passage, a passion for Jewel LaForge.
I was reading in those days both Homer and the wildest avant garde journals.
That's when I came to know the Forward's work.
And he says he's very grateful to the unknown Shopgirl, who offered me the poems I mentioned instead of Ash Wednesday.
So various mentions the plight of the ship and Marina. But let us explore for a moment.
He has been reading Shakespeare. Perhaps he has a sense of where Marina is from.
The poem put into his hands describes a scene out of Pericles, Prince of Tyre, a a play that Shakespeare has a hand in,
a play about a shipwrecked Phoenician sailor who believes his daughter Marina, who is names that way because she was born in the waves to be dead.
He takes to wandering the seas. And then on Mytilene, the main city on the island of Lesbos, very near to modern Turkey and very close to Izmir,
is presented with a maiden who is undefiled but working at a brothel.
But luckily, just in time, he recognises her as his own daughter.
Incest is averted and everyone is happily reunited.
It's a very, very complicated plot.
But we must imagine Spheeris homesick, nostalgic, walking out of the brown fog, a ghost of himself, opening the poem,
like opening a window onto the dazzling water, rocks and ships of the gene of his idyllic childhood.
The boom even speaks to him in the voice of a loving father.
What? See what shores, what grey rocks and what islands, what water lapping the bow and scent of pine and wood thrush singing through the fog.
What images return and those images will return.
Oh, my daughter. So we imagine the sun drenched recognition.
And then there's the secondary, one of the wasteland.
Even more powerful once he gets his new books home to Hampstead, where he's next to his neighbour Keats,
already basking in that sparkling again in the middle of winter.
He turns to the wasteland. So, you know, for English readers of the Wasteland, there's a lot to process here.
Okay, we have a mysterious title. We have an unattributed quotation in Latin within which there is Greek.
There is the 1922 which is not going to mean anything to us.
Maybe, but might mean something to a Greek reader. Severest Latin was quite good.
He had studied Latin to study the law, and it's quite straightforward.
I don't think he has any problem reading it, you know, for. Indeed, Akuma, I myself saw the sibyl with my own eyes hanging in a jar.
We had that wonderful lecture yesterday about the symbol hanging in the jar.
And when the boys would ask her, Sibyl, what do you want?
She would respond, I want to die. So come on here.
Naples, originally a Greek colony, part of Magna gratia.
Hence the reason the boys in the story addressed the age of Sibyl in Greek.
But what stops him? And he tells us what stops him is similar to Feliz.
There is in fact,
zero distance between this ancient question and modern demotic Greek Only the infinitive in the answer is ancient rather than contemporary.
So having opened this window onto the Aegean in one point, he is asked tenderly in the next, What do you want in the language of his childhood?
Imagine if, as you read further into this poem, which appeared in October of 1922,
you meet a fellow Dennison, admittedly scruffy and louche of your lost city, some pages later,
and in the voice of a poet who's a fellow devotee of your favourite French poet,
it is hard to imagine the electric shock of this discovery, this and ignorance.
This a salvific recognition.
The effect is pretty much immediate, especially of Marina.
And for seafarers. Marina and the Wasteland are forever entangled.
Whether it's this moment in the shop, he entangles them in his mind, and that now works for me.
Also, the marina seems to be a kind of answer of hope to the desert of the wasteland, and in many ways it's felt almost immediately.
He writes in Christmas about a line of foreign verse that has to do with Odysseus and so forth, and the light of the Aegean.
In his essay on Cavafy and Eliot, because he does also associate these two poets.
The pivot of recognition will again be the historical inflection point of the date of 1922.
So there's a secondary kind of recognition that happens much, much later about Eliot's and about Cavafy.
So Ferris quotes this Cavafy epigraph.
Those who fought for the action league.
So the Akin League were basically the Greeks who were fighting against the Romans.
Valiant are you who fought and fell in glory, fearless of those who are everywhere victorious.
If they us and Chris allows were at fault, you are blameless.
When the Greeks want to boast, they will say of you, Our nations turn out such men as these so marvellous Will you be your praise?
Written in Alexandria by Anna Qian in the seventh year of Ptolemy Ptolemy letters.
So Severus writes, You know, this is a brilliant poem. The first six lines sound like same oddities, but what is the point of the Tailpiece?
The coda written in Alexandrian by Akin in the seventh year of Ptolemy year?
Years passed, he says. Then one night in blacked out Alexandria, a few days after the battle of Crete, I remembered this epigram.
George Cypresses at that time a diplomat with the Greek government in exile because the Nazis have taken over Greece.
The poem was tragically actual. Perhaps because of this and perhaps because I was in the city of the Ptolemies
suddenly and for the first time I appreciated that the poem was written in 1922,
on the eve of the catastrophe in Asia. Minor and almost without thinking.
I reread these lines as written in Alexandria by Amaechi in the year our race was destroyed.
Cavafy poem is ostensibly about 146 B.C. the Battle of Corinth, where Greece becomes forever under the thumb of the Romans.
Corinth is sacked, the men are slain, the women and children are sent into slavery.
The two generals who failed go off somewhere and commit suicide.
This becomes associated with 1922. And the Greek leaders who were in charge of that do get taken to Athens and executed.
The trial of the six. He then points out that the wasteland of Elliot was also written in 1922,
between the end of the First World War and the beginning of the years preceding the next war.
To simplify a great deal. It can be described as an epic of the decline of the world in which we are still living, Sarfaraz adds.
Let us now look at a passage from the first part of the poem.
It describes an encounter between the poet or Theresa as Elliot sort of says that Iris uses the principal personage of the poem,
but Sarfaraz takes it kind of one further.
The speaker is always Tyree sees the eye of the poem, is always terraces, and that bit where one I knew in the city of London early in the morning.
This is against the ferries. Quoting unreal city under the brown fog of a winter dawn, a crowd flowed over London Bridge.
So many I had not thought death had done so many.
Whoops, that's not the right one. Then I saw one I knew and stopped him crying.
Stetson, you who are with me in the ships at my Miley you hypocrite lecture months one frere There's my abominable French.
Who is this Stetson? So Ferris asks.
He was the poet or Theresa tells us once with him at Miley on the occasion of the destruction of the Carthaginian fleet in 26 B.C.,
and we shall meet him again in the third part of the poem under the name of Mr. Eugenides.
And in part four, Flee was the Phoenician. Much here is of interest in Ferris's interpretation.
There is the connection between 146 B.C. and 1922.
And when Cavafy says in 1901 46 B.C., when others are everywhere victorious, the Romans are victorious,
not just against the Greeks in 146 B.C., but against the Carthaginians in the third Punic Punic War.
And they are destroyed. The Carthaginians are as a as a.
Nation. So. We have this conflation of 146 B.C. in 1922, but now it appears as 2 to 60 B.C. effortlessly to the litany of historical catastrophes.
An Anglophone reader like myself who has looked up the battle of my league will perhaps think of it as a Roman victory.
The first time Rome gets the better of the seafaring Venetian related people, the Carthaginians in a naval battle.
I think we're kind of taught to look from the side of the Romans, not the side of the Carthaginians.
But the Greek reader knows better. Stetson is a ghost.
The Romans are everywhere victorious. And he and the speaker are on the side of the losers.
Stetson is one of those things people think a lot about.
Like, who is Stetson? Why is this word here? For me, it's the most American moments of the poem in more ways than one.
Here's Elliott in a Stetson. Is there something of a missourian?
A tip of the hat here. The Western hat, in combination with another battle of Carthage that won at Carthage, Missouri, during the Civil War.
So I think for someone from Missouri, also mentioning Carthage may have this context as well.
So Severe reads the poem from a very Greek perspective, the figures walking out of the Fog, An Odyssey,
and Nakia made obvious by the presence of Teresa as Mr. Eugenides is a phantom associated with the one eyed merchant,
the drowned Sailor, but also with Stetson.
So what happens then when he does get around to translating?
So in April, I think of 20 1933, he starts translating the wasteland in his letter to a foreign friend, of course, is April.
When he starts in his letter to a foreign friend, he talks about his relationship with Eliot.
The fact is, I attempted to translate the wasteland into Greek for two reasons.
First, because I had no other means of expressing the emotion which Elliott had given me.
And secondly, because I wanted to test the resistance of my own language.
I think we think of translations as being on a spectrum from foreign izing on one extreme to native izing on the other extreme.
So the translator either is trying to bring home this is a really weird poem
in a language that is not mine with cultural references that are not mine.
That's one experience reading the poem, or I'm going to completely translate, transfer and transplant this poem into my own language.
Obviously, Sarfaraz is going to go for that.
He is native izing the translation or homogenising the translation to such an extreme degree that it really is its own poem in Greek,
and it's a very important poem in Greek. He is not the first translator to do the wasteland that belongs to Papa Sonnets in 1933.
But it's maybe the most important translation. I have some comparisons with a much more recent translation that is very foreign izing.
That is, it's making it sound like an English poem. Harris Love You enlisted one for the centenary of the poem in a bilingual edition.
So you've got the English one facing pages. Love Your Nose is an Oxford educated Greek poet.
His English is perfect. His Greek is perfect.
He also has the advantage of 100 years of scholarship on the wasteland, whereas Sarfaraz is entirely self-taught.
He's an autodidact when it comes to English.
He when he's translating, translating Eliot's notes goes down all of those rabbit holes, reads those works, which he then also translates into Greek.
And his notes are Eliot's notes, plus his own notes to the Greek reader about Eliot's notes.
We can see even right from the covers, the extremes.
So Love You knows it's T.S. Eliot.
You know, tea is tea or it's toff sigma.
Eliot, The wasteland is hard to translate. He translates it as the generative earth, the unvarying earth.
And it's a bilingual translation. But look at Sophia's rate, from the first letter, he is completely harmonised.
T.S. Eliot because T.S. Eliot, that stands for Thomas, which is Tomas, which is a feeder, not a top.
So from the very first letter, Eliot has been completely native ized.
We have not. We have the wasteland is the deserted land.
And then if you look at the first pages of the poem, this is also clear.
We have, you know, maybe what the English reader would expect.
But Sarfaraz is makes a big point of putting 1922, which is going to have a completely different effect on the Greek reader right up there.
And he doesn't bother to give you a notes on this. He's like, you know, here is some unmitigated, unmediated Latin and Greek.
We could do worse than go directly to the passage that we've been looking at.
Unreal City under the brown fog of a winter named Mr. Eugenides, the Spartan merchant unshaven with his pocketful of currants.
You see, this is comes right after those wonderful bird sounds when Eliot is talking about progeny and Philip miller,
A.C. and the metamorphosis of the Nightingale and the Swallow and the Hoopoe.
We have this bird says we're going to get to the bird sounds. But right away, there's a problem in Greek with unreal.
That's not an easy thing to translate. What Sarfaraz does is he makes it non existent.
An existent, almost undone city.
The city, which is not if we want to go house mania and on that we might expect for city palace you know probably in modern Greek.
But instead we have politeia which is closer to a polity or city state.
So it has more of the sense of a government.
I my personal theory on this is he's gone down Eliot's rabbit holes and he's found out that we're going to look at the City of God,
which is De Cuvee Tati, and he's kind of translating that sense of city as poverty into the Greek.
When we get to Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant Smyrna is put forward in the line and is an adjective rather than the city itself.
And that seems to be to put amenities and stuff and your needs and stuffiness at the end of the line and to make a kind of rhymed couplet out of it,
which if you look in the English, it kind of is in English also where you have merchant rhyming with current his
there's we don't need to say currants because we know that raisins is meaning that.
C i f London. I think Eliot says something complicated about that, but my understanding is it means cost, insurance, freight.
And this is in the voice of a London Greek merchant.
So instead of saying Seif, you just said Seif Seif Londra.
So Londra is a very colloquial, kind of quaint, old fashioned way of seeing London in Cyprus's notes.
He says long DNA, which is the more formal way. But here it's Chief Londra documents on site.
There's not really a way to do demotic French in Greek.
I mean, it'll sound very weird to say his demotic French and Greek.
So he kind of maybe not realising what Pound has done goes back to abominable French.
His cheap, low rent French Cannon Street Hotel is just put exactly as it would be spoken by a Greek.
So it's just transliterated and then metropol in Greek.
Again, anything that is English in the poem will be put into Greek letters.
[INAUDIBLE] leave French as French, [INAUDIBLE] leave Latin as Latin, Dutch as Dutch.
But anything that is English will end up being in Greek letters.
Metropol suggests in Greek, the metropolis, the mother city, and maybe also the metropolitan,
the archbishop, whom we might think being so close to Smyrna, was hanged on the key.
This is Venus's version.
He does something else with Unreal and various other you know, he makes it a little closer to what maybe the English sounds like.
And they're both doing the bird sounds. Let's get to the bird sounds, because this is actually one of my favourite bits.
So in English, we have Twit, Twit, twit. Chug, chug, chug.
Oh, this has it worked out. Sorry, This is the spacing is wrong.
I hope you all be able to sort it out. This is my own fault with slide twit to it.
To it. Chug, chug, chug, chug. So rudely forced teru Eliot.
So love. You know this is going to make it very foreign izing.
That is to sound as much like English as possible. Simply does as well as he can.
Greek does not have that short I so it's actually sounds more English is.
Tweet, tweet tweet tweet. There is no Jay sound in Greek so that makes jug a problem.
Still, he does the best that he can. Tab Z2 has a duck, duck, duck, duck tag.
It's very weird looking and Greek, I think I'm not a native speaker, but it looks weird to me.
He leaves Tara in Latin letters.
Sarfaraz does something altogether different. So Sarfaraz has been very beautiful.
He says when he starts translating the wasteland that he spends 7 hours a day on it for months, he goes after it like a student.
He tracks down every reference that Eliot mentions, and he tracks down references that Elliott doesn't even really mention.
So he goes, and he finds out that the source is from a play by John Lilly, where there's a song What bird sings,
so sings yet so does Whale Otis the Ravish Nightingale Chug, chug, chug, chug Teru she cries and still her woes at midnight rise.
So then he thinks, okay, this is a play. Do I have a play?
I can go to four Bird sounds in Greek.
That would be the birds in Aristophanes.
And he goes, He finds this wonderful bird sounds.
So for one thing, we have something very close all ready to tweet, tweet, tweet, twit, twit.
I'm not trying to scan this. I'm just trying to make it sound like bird sounds.
Jo Jo, Jo, Jo. Jo Jo Things.
We have in the Aristophanes.
So shot, shot, shot is basically almost exactly the same thing.
But he has a problem. What to do with Chug, chug, chug.
The nightingale in Aristophanes sings this beautiful, elegant Greek poem doesn't make a bird sound.
So he goes looking for a bird sound and he finds it in the clamour of the swans wings.
This clamour being a kind of joyful, festive shout yack on.
And he translates that into yak, yak, yak, yak, yak and leaves tell you in the original.
When we get to what the Thunder said, we are going to have a few more sounds that we have to cope with in our grief.
I'm including this passage from the cicada onwards, because even though we have not the cicada singing,
a negative in poetry lets you have your cake and eat it too.
And the cicada is the only element of the egg in summer that Marina has neglected to include.
The cicada will return to us at the end.
Elliot THRUSH is a North American hermit thrush whose song he says in his notes, quoting Chapman's Handbook of Birds of Eastern North America.
Its water dripping song is justly celebrated.
So we have here not the cicada and dry grass singing, but sound of water over a rock where the hermit thrush sings in the pine trees.
We have the thrush in the pine trees yet again. Drip, drip, drip, drop, drop, drop, drop.
But there is no water loving us.
We will see. Tries to get the hermit thrush in there.
The the sickler estimates the era might thrush as if it's kind of a nightingale via Keats and again
simply transliterated as the the ornament a poetic English sound which looks really weird in Greek.
There you have to use a new and a tough to make it hard disowned.
Drip, drip, drip. Drop, Drop, drop, drop.
What is foursquare us to do here? Well, first thing, he doesn't make it a hermit thrush.
That's a North American bird that's not very native izing.
Let's just put it back as a thrush and then it can be in a g interest or a mediterranean thrush.
But what does he do with the sound? He doesn't.
It looks like it might be something found out of Aristophanes, but as far as I can tell, this is completely original.
It is Ferris, he says. Bricks, rocks.
Bricks, rocks, rocks, rocks.
A sound, I think, which is wonderfully evocative of the dripping of water.
It doesn't really mean anything in Greek, but it is etymological extremely suggestive of water.
LEXIS In ancient Greek means a wetting. Means it is raining.
He also in modern Greek. Is the rain rocky again?
It is raining. So this is a wonderful drenching sound.
Bricks, rocks, rocks, rocks, rocks.
My favourite moment in his translation. We are rounding the corner lines made of sheep and the darkling thrush.
Sickler sickly. So right away, one of the things that happens with Severance and Elliott is that his critics say he sounds too much like Elliott.
And Sarfaraz takes is a response from Valerie that a lion is made of assimilated lambs.
Other would be Billy Elliot doesn't strike one as mutton. Sometimes the flock seems less assimilated than at other times.
A quick glance at Stratis The lazy notes on the Dead Sea stretches the Latinos is an alter ego of George Seferis is very Elliott.
We have Elliott to come to Larry in Jerusalem.
The ungoverned. This is the Keeley Sherrard translations Jerusalem ungoverned city Jerusalem city of refugees.
Sometimes you see at noon the scattered black leaves, the migratory birds that are passing overhead as often in Greek folksong.
Migratory birds are associated explicitly with refugees and with exile.
This is from his visit in July of 1942.
A very dark time in the war, a visit to Jerusalem and mandatory Palestine.
Whilst safaris is with the Greek government in exile in Cairo, and safaris numbers himself among these refugees.
And you can see also this. This is the place, gentlemen, in all caps.
That's an English in the poem. And it looks a lot like. Hurry up, please.
It's time in the poem. I mean, there's so many things. It really feels like a pastiche of Eliot.
But he does come around to something that is truly assimilated and that is safaris, although it has a lot of Eliot in it.
And that is his five part called THRUSH.
Notice here, though, it is quickly not sickler.
It is the ancient word for thrush, not the modern words.
And it is not the bird, but the name of a ship.
Which we will find out in the poem. In fact, there are lots of words in the poem, but there are no thrushes in the poem.
And yet there is this title which strongly suggests the thrush.
The poem begins with a section called The House by the Sea.
The houses I had, they took away from me.
The times happen to be un propitious. War, destruction, exile.
Sometimes the hunter hits the migratory birds.
Sometimes he doesn't hit them. Hunting was good at my time.
Many felt the pellet. The rest circle aimlessly or go mad in the shelters.
So the strong association of refugee life with the plight of migratory birds who are constantly subject to hunters and to traps.
This first section also Namechecks Cities. Smyrna.
Rhodes. Syracuse. Alexandria. There is a second section sensuous help for one of his companions where we listen to a phonograph and on
the gramophone there is a quotation of made up popular song which has the perfume of pine and birdsong.
Though again, no thrushes are mentioned in this poem, explicitly described as titled as thrush.
The third section describes the fantastic underwater wreck.
So this is a transport that is sunk in World War two named the THRUSH,
and he is on the island in Paris looking at this underwater ship, this shipwrecked Mediterranean shipwreck,
the mast broken sway at odd angles, deep underwater like tentacles or the memory of dreams,
marking the whole vague mouth of some huge dead sea monster and extinguished in the water.
Calm spread all around. The shipwreck description is immediately followed by a Nakia, a communication with the dead.
But it is not an Eliot communication with the dead. There is no yellow fog.
It's not Homer. Exactly. It's not Dante. It is very seafarers.
And gradually, in turn, other voices followed.
Whispers thin and too thirsty, emerging from the other side of the sun, the dark side.
You might say they longed for a drop of blood to drink. Familiar voices.
But I couldn't distinguish one from the other. And the voice of the old man reached me.
I felt it quietly falling in the heart of days, now motionless.
And here is the voice of the old man. And if you condemn me to drink poison, I thank you.
Your law will be my love. How can I go wandering from one foreign country to another?
A rolling stone? I prefer death.
This man, of course, is not Theresa or Stetson.
It's not Mr. Eugenides. It's Socrates who preferred suicide to exile.
It's a sentiment, no doubt, that a weary exile or a refugee is familiar with and even sympathetic to.
The poem. Which is Datelines.
1946 It is after World War Two, but it is the beginning of the Greek Civil War.
The poem ends with a section called Simply Lite Force.
One of the most powerful Greek words that sufferers recognises as coming directly and undiminished from Homer.
And he writes about the force in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech.
First is a section that's brightly lit with dark shadows,
their images that could be from Poros or scholar of boys diving from both sprits into the Aegean.
The classical references, which include references to Thebes, are not the tyree's use of leaves from the wasteland, but two references to Civil war.
Two a tier Achilles and Polymet sees the brothers who fight in the seven against Thebes, and to poor Antigone, who is caught up.
There is the chirping of birds and pine trees and thrumming cicadas.
Those insects Socrates, considered as belonging to the muses.
These are images that have returned from Marina and the Wasteland.
But the music here is entirely Greek. The TV smart of the birds, the thrum of the sea, and finally a host of TS K's.
Xs and Xs as he lets us hear the cicadas just at the moment they cease.
I will just point out that he wrote this in this house.
This beautiful red house by the sea. And porous.
And he says that this Pompei and Red House gave to me for the first time in many years the feeling of a solid building rather than a temporary tent.
So this is the voice of a constant exile refugee.
The poem ends and you find yourself in a large house with many windows open, running from room to room, not knowing where to look out first.
And again, this is very similar to what you would have seen out of the window in Scala, this Aegean blue and the boughs of the ships.
You don't know where to look first because the pine trees will vanish and the mirrored mountains and the chirping of birds,
the sea will drain dry, shattered glass from north and south.
Your eyes will empty of daylight the way the cicadas suddenly all together fall silent.
That is how the poem ends. Although in Greek it ends with the cicadas posts stomach an examining cock ola Maisie to see.
Yeah. And that's where I will end up.