1 00:00:13,130 --> 00:00:20,840 Under a real city, under the brown fog of a winter noon. 2 00:00:21,650 --> 00:00:28,610 Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant unshaven with his pocket full of currants, 3 00:00:28,970 --> 00:00:42,290 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. 4 00:00:43,900 --> 00:00:54,430 So Mr. Eugenides walks into the world's literature, into world literature on the 16th of October in 1922, 5 00:00:55,030 --> 00:00:59,440 with the first publication of T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland. 6 00:01:00,260 --> 00:01:04,400 He emerges from the sour brown fog of London, 7 00:01:05,000 --> 00:01:13,940 but he trails acrid smoke from Asia minor wearing the gods face of a refugee, a person of permanent exile. 8 00:01:14,330 --> 00:01:21,979 He is arguably even a ghost, and I might as well set out at the beginning of this lecture that in England, 9 00:01:21,980 --> 00:01:30,650 folklore ghosts do not appear at midnight, but smack at noon in the middle of the day. 10 00:01:32,530 --> 00:01:42,220 The unreal city. Here is London, but there is another city namechecked in this passage, Smyrna, 11 00:01:42,910 --> 00:01:53,860 that in the catastrophic Great Fire, which had raged from September 13th to the soon to September 22nd of 1922, 12 00:01:54,040 --> 00:02:04,270 so little more than three weeks before the poem's first appearance had become, in some respects, almost literally and real. 13 00:02:05,380 --> 00:02:08,470 Was this dissonance felt by the first readers. 14 00:02:09,490 --> 00:02:18,670 I think it must have been newspaper headlines on both sides of the Atlantic had been dominated by the story and by its aftermath. 15 00:02:18,850 --> 00:02:26,620 Math for weeks, numbers of those lost to the fire, to violence, to desperation at the key, 16 00:02:26,620 --> 00:02:33,520 including death by drowning, to deportations, to the interior, could have been upwards of 100,000. 17 00:02:34,210 --> 00:02:45,190 At some point, over 300,000 people were gathered on the key at Smyrna, and the aftermath of that was its own humanitarian crisis. 18 00:02:45,430 --> 00:02:50,710 So the story dominated Western media for weeks and months afterward. 19 00:02:51,370 --> 00:02:58,900 Hemingway's harrowing short story on the key at Smyrna based on eyewitness accounts, appears as late as 1930. 20 00:02:59,110 --> 00:03:03,280 And I'm going to show you all a bunch of newspaper headlines from that time, 21 00:03:03,280 --> 00:03:10,389 mostly from September of that year, although a few are also from October and they're from all over. 22 00:03:10,390 --> 00:03:14,530 I don't vouch necessarily for any of the numbers. All of this is somewhat disputed. 23 00:03:15,010 --> 00:03:18,400 But to give you a sense of the tenor of the media. 24 00:03:29,130 --> 00:03:32,430 Now known in its modern incarnation as Izmir. 25 00:03:32,550 --> 00:03:38,550 Smyrna most ancient version was founded in the 11th century BCE and is one of 26 00:03:38,550 --> 00:03:43,600 the traditional birthplaces of Homer as an Ottoman city for hundreds of years. 27 00:03:43,620 --> 00:03:50,430 It was known as Infidels Smyrna, for its large population of Christians, Armenian and Greek Orthodox, 28 00:03:50,790 --> 00:03:59,610 a strong Jewish community and a population of 17 foreigners English, French and so on who might have been Protestant, Roman Catholic. 29 00:04:00,300 --> 00:04:10,620 So it's a prosperous, polyglot, cosmopolitan trading centre exporting raisins, figs, wheat, carpet, tobacco. 30 00:04:10,890 --> 00:04:17,490 I love this particular map because it contains a whole line of the wasteland. 31 00:04:17,520 --> 00:04:28,379 I don't know if you can see it Athens, Jerusalem and Alexandria, but you can see where Smyrna, Izmir is situated. 32 00:04:28,380 --> 00:04:34,770 And there's a little island, a couple of islands up that is the island of Lesbos with its main city of Mytilene. 33 00:04:34,860 --> 00:04:43,290 And that will come in a little bit later. So as the Ottoman Empire reeled from defeat after World War One, 34 00:04:44,010 --> 00:04:52,440 Greece was encouraged to pursue territorial ambitions of the great idea of greater Greece. 35 00:04:53,220 --> 00:04:58,080 So this is what those greater ambitions would have looked like. 36 00:05:01,200 --> 00:05:04,770 In 1919, Greek forces landed in Smyrna. 37 00:05:05,490 --> 00:05:13,680 These forces commit some of their own atrocities, including killing unarmed prisoners and throwing them into the harbour. 38 00:05:13,710 --> 00:05:22,020 This triggers a wave of ethnic violence where hundreds of Turkish citizens of the city are killed and maybe 100 Greeks, 39 00:05:22,020 --> 00:05:26,760 and generally sets the stage for things that are going to happen. 40 00:05:28,670 --> 00:05:36,890 But in September of 1922, as the defeated Greek forces retreated and Greek iridescent, 41 00:05:36,920 --> 00:05:44,060 iridescent irredentist, I can't say irredentist irredentist dreams of greater Greece collapsed. 42 00:05:44,090 --> 00:05:48,110 So Greek forces learned firsthand that you can't go back to Constantinople. 43 00:05:49,130 --> 00:05:56,090 A song that I might point out came out in 1953 for the 500th anniversary of the fall of Constantinople. 44 00:05:56,990 --> 00:06:09,890 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. 45 00:06:10,430 --> 00:06:14,180 On 13th of September, a fire is begun. 46 00:06:14,600 --> 00:06:19,310 Western eyewitness accounts say, by Turkish forces and Turkish irregulars. 47 00:06:19,610 --> 00:06:21,680 There are also high winds. 48 00:06:22,310 --> 00:06:31,310 So from the edge of the Armenian quarter, this fire quickly engulfs the Greek Christian quarters as well, and the population panics. 49 00:06:31,340 --> 00:06:35,150 There is a pandemonium of looting, rape, murders. 50 00:06:35,810 --> 00:06:44,360 So eventually there are 3 to 400000 people packed at the seaside for days and days and days at a time. 51 00:06:45,230 --> 00:06:52,580 Most frustratingly, there are 21 allied battleships in the harbour. 52 00:06:53,300 --> 00:06:58,640 They stood at anchor, some so close that people tried to reach them by swimming, 53 00:06:59,210 --> 00:07:04,580 but these refused to intervene in any way on the basis of formal neutrality. 54 00:07:04,610 --> 00:07:14,210 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. 55 00:07:14,810 --> 00:07:20,390 This is a detail that Hemingway cannot resist putting into his fictional account, 56 00:07:20,630 --> 00:07:25,010 and he says the worst thing was how they screamed every night at midnight. 57 00:07:25,340 --> 00:07:34,070 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. 58 00:07:37,250 --> 00:07:45,320 I point out that the newspapers were not only concerned with the humanitarian disaster and the civilians who were. 59 00:07:45,470 --> 00:07:49,490 They were also very concerned about what was happening financially. 60 00:07:49,820 --> 00:07:51,799 Smyrna is a major, major port. 61 00:07:51,800 --> 00:07:59,360 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. 62 00:07:59,630 --> 00:08:08,450 Crops of raisins, that is currants, Corinthian graves, raisins, figs, barley, wheat, carpets, etc., and tobacco. 63 00:08:09,080 --> 00:08:18,830 So this was also one of the concerns. So moving this crossover I started to think of. 64 00:08:21,940 --> 00:08:29,110 In the run up to the centenary centenary of both events in 2022, I was reviewing books on both topics, 65 00:08:29,110 --> 00:08:34,990 so I was getting books about the Great Fire of Smyrna, including a novel by Oamaru Regis. 66 00:08:35,740 --> 00:08:41,770 I was reviewing books about the 100th anniversary or birthday of the Wasteland, like the wonderful Matthew House book. 67 00:08:42,280 --> 00:08:48,339 But what kind of struck me in my own particular corner of the world I live in Athens was that 68 00:08:48,340 --> 00:08:56,050 the one point of really obvious intersection between these two Centenaries was not mentioned, 69 00:08:56,080 --> 00:09:00,280 is barely mentioned or not mentioned, in fact roundly ignored. 70 00:09:00,280 --> 00:09:09,010 And of course there's another centenary of 2022, which was James Joyce's Ulysses, which had another Greek flavour to it. 71 00:09:09,940 --> 00:09:18,579 Even Matthew House's really enlightening and entertaining biography of the poem, which puts the poem in the perspective of the time. 72 00:09:18,580 --> 00:09:28,210 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, 73 00:09:28,590 --> 00:09:33,610 the kind of doom and gloom feeling of the poem. But even this kind of skirts the topic. 74 00:09:33,620 --> 00:09:42,580 Hollis gives us a brief view of what in 1922 is happening in the Unreal Cities that Eliot Namechecks. 75 00:09:42,970 --> 00:09:46,420 Falling towers. Jerusalem. Athens. 76 00:09:46,420 --> 00:09:54,610 Alexandria. Vienna. London. Unreal Harvest points out that maybe I'll go back to my map. 77 00:09:55,540 --> 00:10:03,459 Hollis points out that in Alexandria, scarred by race riots, martial law was imposed by the British administration in May and Jerusalem. 78 00:10:03,460 --> 00:10:08,830 Mandatory Palestine unrest had marred the fourth anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, 79 00:10:08,830 --> 00:10:16,510 and he says in Athens it was clear now that the war with Turkey and Anatolia was heading for disaster. 80 00:10:17,110 --> 00:10:19,540 That seems like almost an understatement. 81 00:10:19,810 --> 00:10:27,100 The Great Fire is one of the signal events of what is known in Greece or in Greek as the Asia minor catastrophe disaster, 82 00:10:27,100 --> 00:10:31,839 although I think we have to think of a kind of Aristotelian idea of catastrophe as being 83 00:10:31,840 --> 00:10:37,030 that moment in the tragedy where everything turns upside down and goes pear shaped, 84 00:10:37,450 --> 00:10:46,870 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. 85 00:10:46,880 --> 00:10:54,520 So 1.2 million Christians of Greek ancestry from Anatolia mostly are forcibly resettled in Greece, 86 00:10:54,850 --> 00:11:04,030 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, 87 00:11:04,030 --> 00:11:09,340 roughly Greek national Muslims forcibly resettled in Turkey and then Anatolia, 88 00:11:10,090 --> 00:11:16,800 an area of the world that had had large populations of Greeks or Greek speakers for millennia, suddenly did not. 89 00:11:16,810 --> 00:11:19,730 It's a deep wound to the Greeks on the Turkish side. 90 00:11:19,750 --> 00:11:28,090 1922 marks the glorious founding, or the beginning of the glorious founding of this new nation state out of the ashes of empire. 91 00:11:35,230 --> 00:11:42,040 Mulling this crossover, I started to think of another person from Smyrna who would interact with the wasteland 92 00:11:42,280 --> 00:11:48,489 in maybe the most intimate way possible by translating it in this case into Greek, 93 00:11:48,490 --> 00:11:54,820 which we might consider the mother tongue of Mr. Eugenides with his abominable French. 94 00:11:55,060 --> 00:11:59,590 It was originally abominable French. This is Pound's. 95 00:12:00,910 --> 00:12:08,950 Changes to the poem. Pound is the one who makes the quite brilliant change from abominable French to demotic French. 96 00:12:10,780 --> 00:12:18,940 George Seferis. Oh, here's waves of refugees in Athens, in tents with the temple of faces. 97 00:12:22,720 --> 00:12:26,020 Mulling this cross over, I started to think of another person who's George Safaris. 98 00:12:26,440 --> 00:12:33,520 So George, the pair affairs was born, Yorgos Safari Addis in Smyrna in the Ottoman Empire in February of 1900. 99 00:12:34,300 --> 00:12:40,720 In 1914, his family fled to Athens, where he did his secondary school education. 100 00:12:40,750 --> 00:12:45,820 They were essentially in exile. In 1918, he became a student in Paris. 101 00:12:46,180 --> 00:12:51,460 He would, in fact, never return to Smyrna or to Izmir during his life. 102 00:12:52,880 --> 00:12:57,620 During his childhood, Smyrna represented the school year. 103 00:12:58,160 --> 00:13:10,840 Lessons Reign A French governess, His deepest nostalgia was reserved not for the city of Smyrna, but for a nearby seaside village or LA. 104 00:13:10,850 --> 00:13:17,360 I think it is called now Villa, and his place was the Port Scala of Villa. 105 00:13:18,290 --> 00:13:21,380 Uh. Where is the. 106 00:13:23,710 --> 00:13:31,900 And this is what he writes to his translator, Rex Warner, about these memories of the summer in Villa in Skala. 107 00:13:32,850 --> 00:13:37,550 The place where my family used to spend the summer holidays in those happy days. 108 00:13:37,890 --> 00:13:41,580 A very small village, 100 souls or so was named Skala. 109 00:13:41,910 --> 00:13:48,420 Our house was on the seafront. From the windows I could see the islands and the sea, which was splendid. 110 00:13:48,870 --> 00:13:54,870 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. 111 00:13:55,230 --> 00:13:58,350 It was used for quarantines of the ships going to Smyrna. 112 00:13:58,350 --> 00:14:01,830 And in times of contagious diseases, one might think of the Spanish flu. 113 00:14:02,190 --> 00:14:05,660 Many ships were anchored off the island in September. 114 00:14:05,670 --> 00:14:11,340 Skala was used as a port of export for dried raisins produced by the mainland. 115 00:14:11,640 --> 00:14:19,200 And we have those currants and raisins again, which we might consider that Elliott doesn't have just accidentally in this person's pocket. 116 00:14:19,830 --> 00:14:22,650 If you're coming from the point of view of this part of the world, 117 00:14:23,430 --> 00:14:32,490 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. 118 00:14:32,760 --> 00:14:37,350 So currents kind of represent the threat of economic collapse. 119 00:14:38,640 --> 00:14:43,800 So there are these dried raisins produced by the mainland from the back window of our house. 120 00:14:44,130 --> 00:14:50,370 One could have a nice view of the vineyards stretching up to the hills of the main town of the neighbourhood. 121 00:14:50,850 --> 00:14:54,900 30,000 stalls in my time. Splendid, lads. 122 00:14:55,170 --> 00:14:58,950 Almost all of them indulged in the hobby of smuggling tobacco. 123 00:14:59,220 --> 00:15:04,890 Spoke wonderful vernacular Greek. So they spoke a wonderful demotic. 124 00:15:05,430 --> 00:15:10,080 Like all idyllic childhoods, it seemed a paradise that would last forever. 125 00:15:10,320 --> 00:15:19,420 And then one day it was gone. If we skip. 126 00:15:20,780 --> 00:15:24,110 To. 1924. 127 00:15:24,620 --> 00:15:29,470 We will find Steward's Affairs, his first visit to London. 128 00:15:29,480 --> 00:15:36,290 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. 129 00:15:36,920 --> 00:15:42,920 So he's he's 24. He has his first visit to. 130 00:15:44,040 --> 00:15:51,590 England's. He arrives in August of 1924 in Brighton. 131 00:15:51,610 --> 00:16:01,090 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. 132 00:16:01,120 --> 00:16:04,870 He practices his English by speaking to his landlady's cat. 133 00:16:05,990 --> 00:16:15,260 Again, he does not progress. In October, he describes he moves to London and he describes his first piece, Super of a Fog. 134 00:16:16,170 --> 00:16:20,290 He's just stunned by this fog. And again, this is 1924. 135 00:16:20,300 --> 00:16:25,970 So this is a fog that is full of horrible, cold particulate, slimy chemical things. 136 00:16:25,970 --> 00:16:32,590 And, you know, not maybe like the fog today. He describes this super of a fog in a letter. 137 00:16:32,600 --> 00:16:35,960 He felt like they were living at the bottom of the sea. 138 00:16:36,680 --> 00:16:42,440 He suspects that the fog is somehow generated by the trombones of the Salvation Army. 139 00:16:44,330 --> 00:16:47,540 And he writes a very charming poem. 140 00:16:48,410 --> 00:16:51,370 What I'd like to you to think about I'm going to read a translation. 141 00:16:51,390 --> 00:16:56,810 My own translation of this poem is that he had not at this point in theory, encountered Eliot at all. 142 00:16:57,050 --> 00:17:05,810 But I'd like you to listen out for things that sound very logic, whether that's Prufrock or the wasteland fog. 143 00:17:05,930 --> 00:17:13,420 Say it with a ukulele. Say it with a ukulele, whines some gramophone. 144 00:17:14,170 --> 00:17:17,740 Say what to her, for Christ's sake. I'm used to being alone. 145 00:17:18,490 --> 00:17:24,940 The shabby, genteel, poor give mouth organs to squeeze and cry yet again on the angels. 146 00:17:25,300 --> 00:17:33,220 And the angels are the disease. The angels unfurl their wings, but below a stale fog gushes. 147 00:17:33,610 --> 00:17:38,800 Thank God. Or else they'd snare our wretched souls like thrushes. 148 00:17:39,400 --> 00:17:43,530 It's a cold fish sort of life. You live like this? 149 00:17:43,890 --> 00:17:50,670 Yeah. So. So many are the drowned on the sea floor down below the. 150 00:17:50,970 --> 00:17:55,560 The trees seem like coral from which all colours drain. 151 00:17:55,800 --> 00:18:00,480 And the cart's like sunken ships only whose holes remain. 152 00:18:00,810 --> 00:18:04,620 Say it with the ukulele. Words. Words. Words again. 153 00:18:04,890 --> 00:18:08,070 Where is your chapel, love? I'm tired of this domain. 154 00:18:08,400 --> 00:18:11,940 If only life were straight, then we could live it right. 155 00:18:12,210 --> 00:18:15,750 But fate has got us cornered and the corner is too tight. 156 00:18:16,140 --> 00:18:19,770 And just what corner? Who knows? Lamp, lights. 157 00:18:19,770 --> 00:18:22,920 Lamp. A wreath of mists and speechless. Frosts. 158 00:18:23,220 --> 00:18:32,970 We clench our souls in our teeth Shall we find constellation day Garbed with nights we find all is night All is 159 00:18:32,970 --> 00:18:43,080 night We go by feeling blind Say it with a ukulele How the fire lights would glance off the gleam of her red nails. 160 00:18:43,440 --> 00:18:54,300 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, 161 00:18:55,290 --> 00:18:59,370 which I can't really indicate in a translation because that is also in English. 162 00:19:00,780 --> 00:19:06,360 I think the the sort of effect is that Greek does not have a word. 163 00:19:07,330 --> 00:19:13,030 That is adequate to fog considering his experience of fog in London. 164 00:19:14,830 --> 00:19:21,190 You know, not OMA Italy, not Catalonia, or even near Fosse, which is in Athens. 165 00:19:21,190 --> 00:19:26,050 The name that we give to our smog is adequate to this English phenomenon. 166 00:19:26,650 --> 00:19:31,930 The second, of course, is the epigraph in English, somewhat arcane to the passage of time, 167 00:19:31,930 --> 00:19:35,860 but it's the title of a popular song, and it's probably meant as two points. 168 00:19:35,860 --> 00:19:41,080 As to the following lyrics. Modern girls are tired of dreary love poems. 169 00:19:41,380 --> 00:19:45,070 You must give them something new. Say it with a ukulele. 170 00:19:46,210 --> 00:19:49,830 I have made the mistake of tracking this down on YouTube so you don't have to. 171 00:19:49,840 --> 00:19:59,150 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, 172 00:19:59,160 --> 00:20:06,420 maybe fog, a popular instruments, we think of the ukulele or the pleasant whine of a mandolin. 173 00:20:06,780 --> 00:20:11,460 There is a song on a gramophone. There are souls in a fog. 174 00:20:11,940 --> 00:20:16,650 There is direct but unattributed dialogue to souls or to shady figures. 175 00:20:17,100 --> 00:20:20,680 There is that done to us? So many I had not thought. 176 00:20:20,700 --> 00:20:24,360 Death had undone so many. There are thrushes. 177 00:20:25,080 --> 00:20:30,990 We might not think of thrush as a very important word in Eliot, but the thrush is very important. 178 00:20:31,410 --> 00:20:39,420 There is the shipwreck underwater ness. That kind of four full fathoms, five thy father lies, you know, things being turned into coral. 179 00:20:40,440 --> 00:20:50,940 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. 180 00:20:51,540 --> 00:21:00,270 The poem also shares with Eliot an urban to Larry and spleen, in fact, maybe particularly to the seven old men. 181 00:21:00,540 --> 00:21:07,800 I'm not going to torture you with my demotic. Abominable non French, but I will read in translation. 182 00:21:08,430 --> 00:21:16,290 Teeming swarming city and swarming city. City full of dreams where spectres in broad day accost the passer by. 183 00:21:16,620 --> 00:21:22,020 And it later mentions a dirty yellow fog inundated all space. 184 00:21:23,570 --> 00:21:34,460 But I'm I'm particularly interested in this very Greek or maybe a gene reaction to encountering this northern kind of darkness. 185 00:21:35,180 --> 00:21:43,850 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, 186 00:21:43,850 --> 00:21:51,920 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. 187 00:21:52,520 --> 00:22:00,440 This leads us to the Nokia of the Odyssey in Book 11, which is apt in many ways. 188 00:22:01,250 --> 00:22:08,870 I will say that my husband, who is Greek, when he first came to boarding school in England as a very young man, 189 00:22:09,170 --> 00:22:18,410 he had had an English government governess in Athens who was constantly making tea and filling the kitchen with steam from the tea kettle. 190 00:22:18,830 --> 00:22:28,159 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, 191 00:22:28,160 --> 00:22:33,890 but that everyone in England was boiling tea and it was causing this darkness. 192 00:22:35,180 --> 00:22:44,959 So we might consider a little bit that passage in The Odyssey, where Odysseus has to sail off to talk to the souls. 193 00:22:44,960 --> 00:22:48,020 You know, we think of the Aeneid, we think of Dante. 194 00:22:48,050 --> 00:22:53,150 You actually go down to a physical place to talk to the souls of the dead. 195 00:22:53,450 --> 00:22:57,830 But in the Odyssey, he sails to a faraway place. 196 00:22:58,100 --> 00:23:03,750 And the ghosts are kind of convinced to come up to the surface and talk to him all day long. 197 00:23:03,770 --> 00:23:07,700 This is from The Odyssey. Her sails were full as she held her course over the sea. 198 00:23:08,000 --> 00:23:15,890 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. 199 00:23:16,250 --> 00:23:23,540 Where lies the demons and city of the Samaritans who live in shrouded in mist and darkness, 200 00:23:23,720 --> 00:23:29,030 which the rays of the sun never pierce, neither at his rising, nor as he goes down again out of the heavens. 201 00:23:29,030 --> 00:23:32,210 But the poor wretches live in one long melancholy night. 202 00:23:32,810 --> 00:23:38,210 Later, the souls emerge from Erebus, which name is etymologically linked to the darkness, 203 00:23:38,480 --> 00:23:44,209 and Odysseus communes with the dead, starting with a Theban seer who has been a man and a woman. 204 00:23:44,210 --> 00:23:49,290 Teresa is. For a Greek or someone from the Aegean. 205 00:23:50,010 --> 00:23:57,600 This portal to the land of the dead lies at the ends of the earth, probably to the north and ultimate Thor. 206 00:23:57,660 --> 00:24:01,680 You have to sail out of the Mediterranean and onto the ocean to get there. 207 00:24:01,890 --> 00:24:05,280 It is dark all of the time. The sun cannot pierce the fog. 208 00:24:05,610 --> 00:24:13,140 And interestingly, although the place itself is an entrance to Airbus, you, the passer by, can accost Spectres in the middle of the day. 209 00:24:13,500 --> 00:24:16,760 It seems to be oddly a well-populated place. 210 00:24:16,770 --> 00:24:27,300 Maybe it is even teeming with the people and presumably its own language and even a proper city, a polis, Paris or London. 211 00:24:29,380 --> 00:24:34,530 There is a second point of contact of overlap in the poem Fog with the Odyssey. 212 00:24:34,540 --> 00:24:43,140 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, 213 00:24:43,150 --> 00:24:46,430 the songbirds, the migratory songbirds of the thrushes. 214 00:24:47,140 --> 00:24:55,090 If I think about thrushes with Homer, my minds will go to Book 22 of The Odyssey, where Telemachus has to kill, 215 00:24:55,270 --> 00:25:02,230 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. 216 00:25:02,500 --> 00:25:08,470 And they are compared to long winged thrushes who are trapped in the bush. 217 00:25:09,160 --> 00:25:17,720 So that for me is a very vague, slight mixture of allusions. 218 00:25:18,520 --> 00:25:24,730 Perhaps in Greek it is that fog itself conjures up through the necromancy of rhyme. 219 00:25:27,030 --> 00:25:34,770 Thrushes or meatless and modern Greek frogs cyclase in modern Greek thrushes. 220 00:25:35,100 --> 00:25:38,910 The ancient Greek, the modern Greek for thrush is secular. 221 00:25:39,510 --> 00:25:42,530 The ancient Greek for thrush is keightley. 222 00:25:42,990 --> 00:25:47,880 They are the exactly the same word may be pronounced a little bit differently over the millennia. 223 00:25:48,150 --> 00:25:53,760 Possibly an Italianate kind of church came into that quickly and became secular. 224 00:25:54,900 --> 00:26:01,710 So there is that sense to me, very slight that the thrushes also have an odyssey in. 225 00:26:04,240 --> 00:26:10,510 Aspect to them. So when does surveyors actually encounter? 226 00:26:11,390 --> 00:26:16,200 Elliott. He encounters Eliot in 1932. 227 00:26:16,200 --> 00:26:19,650 And we know pretty much exactly when this happens. 228 00:26:22,120 --> 00:26:27,490 We have a full account of, in theory, his first meeting with Elliot. 229 00:26:27,790 --> 00:26:31,420 So we fast forward to 1932 London. 230 00:26:32,200 --> 00:26:37,300 It's the middle of winter, a few days ahead of Christmas Eve. 231 00:26:37,310 --> 00:26:44,590 Sarfaraz is now a diplomat with the Greek consulate on Gower Street a few blocks away from the British Museum. 232 00:26:45,260 --> 00:26:56,200 Seeing Unreal City out from under the fog of a winter noon, Mr. Sarfaraz, the Smyrna diplomat, steps into a bookstore on Oxford Street. 233 00:26:57,070 --> 00:27:02,290 We know about this because he writes in a letter to a foreign friend about how he encounters Elliott. 234 00:27:03,720 --> 00:27:10,290 I remember the time, he says. It now seems so long ago when I was making my first faltering discover of London, 235 00:27:10,710 --> 00:27:19,500 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. 236 00:27:19,950 --> 00:27:26,190 Also, the shock I experienced at the sour taste of death in the fog and the increased, 237 00:27:26,220 --> 00:27:31,290 intensified circulation of fear in the arteries of the great city. 238 00:27:31,590 --> 00:27:34,800 It's 1932. Things are not looking great on the world stage. 239 00:27:35,340 --> 00:27:42,540 I had no friends in England then. My only acquaintances were the crowds in the street and the museums. 240 00:27:43,110 --> 00:27:51,480 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. 241 00:27:51,720 --> 00:28:03,980 The one of the Elizabeths. Some days before Christmas of 1931, I visited a bookshop in Oxford Street to look for some Christmas cards, 242 00:28:04,490 --> 00:28:10,130 and for the first time, among the colourful engravings, I took a poem by Eliot in my hands. 243 00:28:10,400 --> 00:28:16,130 It was Marina from the series of of aerial poems, and you can see their Christmas poems. 244 00:28:16,580 --> 00:28:20,240 It might make sense for this to be on a Christmas display in a bookstore. 245 00:28:21,830 --> 00:28:32,180 And what did I read? What sees what shores, what grey rocks and what islands, What water lapping the bow and scent of pine. 246 00:28:33,600 --> 00:28:40,110 From that time onwards, this lovely bow which forges slowly ahead, 247 00:28:40,380 --> 00:28:46,170 has impressed itself on my mind as one of the most striking features of Eliot's poetry. 248 00:28:47,070 --> 00:28:50,700 What? In case this may seem strange to you. 249 00:28:50,700 --> 00:28:58,260 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, 250 00:28:58,470 --> 00:29:02,370 as perhaps the sheets of footballs or the photos of deceased relatives have for other people. 251 00:29:03,650 --> 00:29:11,809 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. 252 00:29:11,810 --> 00:29:18,650 The proverb from Petronius Sevilla de Feliz made me glance at the wasteland. 253 00:29:19,460 --> 00:29:23,630 He talks about what intrigues him about Eliot is his dramatic sense. 254 00:29:24,320 --> 00:29:27,410 And then he says, to put it in simpler words. 255 00:29:27,420 --> 00:29:32,210 Apart from the image of the Mediterranean marina, the poetry of Eliot offered me something much deeper, 256 00:29:32,450 --> 00:29:35,960 something which was inevitably moving to a Greek the elements of tragedy. 257 00:29:36,260 --> 00:29:43,370 He also mentions that he's thrilled to discover that Eliot shares with him a passage, a passion for Jewel LaForge. 258 00:29:43,640 --> 00:29:47,770 I was reading in those days both Homer and the wildest avant garde journals. 259 00:29:47,780 --> 00:29:49,460 That's when I came to know the Forward's work. 260 00:29:50,180 --> 00:29:56,680 And he says he's very grateful to the unknown Shopgirl, who offered me the poems I mentioned instead of Ash Wednesday. 261 00:29:59,210 --> 00:30:05,660 So various mentions the plight of the ship and Marina. But let us explore for a moment. 262 00:30:06,200 --> 00:30:10,610 He has been reading Shakespeare. Perhaps he has a sense of where Marina is from. 263 00:30:11,150 --> 00:30:20,180 The poem put into his hands describes a scene out of Pericles, Prince of Tyre, a a play that Shakespeare has a hand in, 264 00:30:20,570 --> 00:30:29,600 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. 265 00:30:30,230 --> 00:30:39,830 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, 266 00:30:40,100 --> 00:30:44,210 is presented with a maiden who is undefiled but working at a brothel. 267 00:30:44,510 --> 00:30:48,140 But luckily, just in time, he recognises her as his own daughter. 268 00:30:48,380 --> 00:30:51,620 Incest is averted and everyone is happily reunited. 269 00:30:53,100 --> 00:30:54,420 It's a very, very complicated plot. 270 00:30:55,530 --> 00:31:05,189 But we must imagine Spheeris homesick, nostalgic, walking out of the brown fog, a ghost of himself, opening the poem, 271 00:31:05,190 --> 00:31:12,810 like opening a window onto the dazzling water, rocks and ships of the gene of his idyllic childhood. 272 00:31:13,080 --> 00:31:17,580 The boom even speaks to him in the voice of a loving father. 273 00:31:18,390 --> 00:31:28,110 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. 274 00:31:29,080 --> 00:31:32,290 What images return and those images will return. 275 00:31:32,620 --> 00:31:36,850 Oh, my daughter. So we imagine the sun drenched recognition. 276 00:31:37,150 --> 00:31:39,460 And then there's the secondary, one of the wasteland. 277 00:31:39,490 --> 00:31:45,280 Even more powerful once he gets his new books home to Hampstead, where he's next to his neighbour Keats, 278 00:31:46,450 --> 00:31:50,290 already basking in that sparkling again in the middle of winter. 279 00:31:50,560 --> 00:31:59,020 He turns to the wasteland. So, you know, for English readers of the Wasteland, there's a lot to process here. 280 00:31:59,930 --> 00:32:09,120 Okay, we have a mysterious title. We have an unattributed quotation in Latin within which there is Greek. 281 00:32:10,950 --> 00:32:14,489 There is the 1922 which is not going to mean anything to us. 282 00:32:14,490 --> 00:32:19,610 Maybe, but might mean something to a Greek reader. Severest Latin was quite good. 283 00:32:19,620 --> 00:32:24,390 He had studied Latin to study the law, and it's quite straightforward. 284 00:32:25,230 --> 00:32:31,799 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. 285 00:32:31,800 --> 00:32:35,010 We had that wonderful lecture yesterday about the symbol hanging in the jar. 286 00:32:35,370 --> 00:32:39,060 And when the boys would ask her, Sibyl, what do you want? 287 00:32:39,070 --> 00:32:43,170 She would respond, I want to die. So come on here. 288 00:32:43,170 --> 00:32:46,739 Naples, originally a Greek colony, part of Magna gratia. 289 00:32:46,740 --> 00:32:49,890 Hence the reason the boys in the story addressed the age of Sibyl in Greek. 290 00:32:50,730 --> 00:32:57,450 But what stops him? And he tells us what stops him is similar to Feliz. 291 00:32:58,050 --> 00:32:59,040 There is in fact, 292 00:32:59,040 --> 00:33:07,649 zero distance between this ancient question and modern demotic Greek Only the infinitive in the answer is ancient rather than contemporary. 293 00:33:07,650 --> 00:33:17,910 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? 294 00:33:18,240 --> 00:33:23,400 Imagine if, as you read further into this poem, which appeared in October of 1922, 295 00:33:23,640 --> 00:33:30,000 you meet a fellow Dennison, admittedly scruffy and louche of your lost city, some pages later, 296 00:33:30,360 --> 00:33:33,900 and in the voice of a poet who's a fellow devotee of your favourite French poet, 297 00:33:34,140 --> 00:33:39,570 it is hard to imagine the electric shock of this discovery, this and ignorance. 298 00:33:39,570 --> 00:33:43,200 This a salvific recognition. 299 00:33:44,040 --> 00:33:47,699 The effect is pretty much immediate, especially of Marina. 300 00:33:47,700 --> 00:33:53,189 And for seafarers. Marina and the Wasteland are forever entangled. 301 00:33:53,190 --> 00:34:00,569 Whether it's this moment in the shop, he entangles them in his mind, and that now works for me. 302 00:34:00,570 --> 00:34:09,460 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. 303 00:34:09,750 --> 00:34:20,670 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. 304 00:34:22,990 --> 00:34:29,350 In his essay on Cavafy and Eliot, because he does also associate these two poets. 305 00:34:30,220 --> 00:34:36,970 The pivot of recognition will again be the historical inflection point of the date of 1922. 306 00:34:36,970 --> 00:34:43,630 So there's a secondary kind of recognition that happens much, much later about Eliot's and about Cavafy. 307 00:34:44,680 --> 00:34:47,980 So Ferris quotes this Cavafy epigraph. 308 00:34:49,170 --> 00:34:52,200 Those who fought for the action league. 309 00:34:52,530 --> 00:34:57,450 So the Akin League were basically the Greeks who were fighting against the Romans. 310 00:34:58,680 --> 00:35:04,470 Valiant are you who fought and fell in glory, fearless of those who are everywhere victorious. 311 00:35:04,920 --> 00:35:08,940 If they us and Chris allows were at fault, you are blameless. 312 00:35:09,390 --> 00:35:16,920 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? 313 00:35:17,310 --> 00:35:23,520 Written in Alexandria by Anna Qian in the seventh year of Ptolemy Ptolemy letters. 314 00:35:24,210 --> 00:35:30,930 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? 315 00:35:30,930 --> 00:35:36,060 The coda written in Alexandrian by Akin in the seventh year of Ptolemy year? 316 00:35:38,870 --> 00:35:48,140 Years passed, he says. Then one night in blacked out Alexandria, a few days after the battle of Crete, I remembered this epigram. 317 00:35:48,440 --> 00:35:56,660 George Cypresses at that time a diplomat with the Greek government in exile because the Nazis have taken over Greece. 318 00:35:57,570 --> 00:36:05,310 The poem was tragically actual. Perhaps because of this and perhaps because I was in the city of the Ptolemies 319 00:36:05,550 --> 00:36:11,100 suddenly and for the first time I appreciated that the poem was written in 1922, 320 00:36:11,340 --> 00:36:14,580 on the eve of the catastrophe in Asia. Minor and almost without thinking. 321 00:36:14,790 --> 00:36:21,030 I reread these lines as written in Alexandria by Amaechi in the year our race was destroyed. 322 00:36:21,930 --> 00:36:32,100 Cavafy poem is ostensibly about 146 B.C. the Battle of Corinth, where Greece becomes forever under the thumb of the Romans. 323 00:36:32,340 --> 00:36:38,010 Corinth is sacked, the men are slain, the women and children are sent into slavery. 324 00:36:38,370 --> 00:36:43,830 The two generals who failed go off somewhere and commit suicide. 325 00:36:44,610 --> 00:36:52,150 This becomes associated with 1922. And the Greek leaders who were in charge of that do get taken to Athens and executed. 326 00:36:52,170 --> 00:36:58,620 The trial of the six. He then points out that the wasteland of Elliot was also written in 1922, 327 00:36:59,010 --> 00:37:03,880 between the end of the First World War and the beginning of the years preceding the next war. 328 00:37:03,900 --> 00:37:12,960 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. 329 00:37:13,440 --> 00:37:16,350 Let us now look at a passage from the first part of the poem. 330 00:37:16,680 --> 00:37:24,479 It describes an encounter between the poet or Theresa as Elliot sort of says that Iris uses the principal personage of the poem, 331 00:37:24,480 --> 00:37:27,510 but Sarfaraz takes it kind of one further. 332 00:37:27,750 --> 00:37:35,700 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. 333 00:37:36,390 --> 00:37:45,209 This is against the ferries. Quoting unreal city under the brown fog of a winter dawn, a crowd flowed over London Bridge. 334 00:37:45,210 --> 00:37:50,220 So many I had not thought death had done so many. 335 00:37:50,220 --> 00:37:55,530 Whoops, that's not the right one. Then I saw one I knew and stopped him crying. 336 00:37:55,800 --> 00:38:07,290 Stetson, you who are with me in the ships at my Miley you hypocrite lecture months one frere There's my abominable French. 337 00:38:09,480 --> 00:38:12,090 Who is this Stetson? So Ferris asks. 338 00:38:12,090 --> 00:38:21,629 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., 339 00:38:21,630 --> 00:38:25,800 and we shall meet him again in the third part of the poem under the name of Mr. Eugenides. 340 00:38:25,800 --> 00:38:33,730 And in part four, Flee was the Phoenician. Much here is of interest in Ferris's interpretation. 341 00:38:34,270 --> 00:38:38,720 There is the connection between 146 B.C. and 1922. 342 00:38:40,030 --> 00:38:48,189 And when Cavafy says in 1901 46 B.C., when others are everywhere victorious, the Romans are victorious, 343 00:38:48,190 --> 00:38:54,520 not just against the Greeks in 146 B.C., but against the Carthaginians in the third Punic Punic War. 344 00:38:55,120 --> 00:38:59,440 And they are destroyed. The Carthaginians are as a as a. 345 00:39:00,430 --> 00:39:13,220 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. 346 00:39:13,490 --> 00:39:20,810 An Anglophone reader like myself who has looked up the battle of my league will perhaps think of it as a Roman victory. 347 00:39:21,650 --> 00:39:27,650 The first time Rome gets the better of the seafaring Venetian related people, the Carthaginians in a naval battle. 348 00:39:27,980 --> 00:39:32,990 I think we're kind of taught to look from the side of the Romans, not the side of the Carthaginians. 349 00:39:34,580 --> 00:39:38,900 But the Greek reader knows better. Stetson is a ghost. 350 00:39:38,930 --> 00:39:44,630 The Romans are everywhere victorious. And he and the speaker are on the side of the losers. 351 00:39:46,040 --> 00:39:50,540 Stetson is one of those things people think a lot about. 352 00:39:50,540 --> 00:39:56,210 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. 353 00:39:56,450 --> 00:40:01,040 Here's Elliott in a Stetson. Is there something of a missourian? 354 00:40:01,040 --> 00:40:10,460 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. 355 00:40:10,640 --> 00:40:16,790 So I think for someone from Missouri, also mentioning Carthage may have this context as well. 356 00:40:18,050 --> 00:40:24,380 So Severe reads the poem from a very Greek perspective, the figures walking out of the Fog, An Odyssey, 357 00:40:24,390 --> 00:40:31,160 and Nakia made obvious by the presence of Teresa as Mr. Eugenides is a phantom associated with the one eyed merchant, 358 00:40:31,160 --> 00:40:35,060 the drowned Sailor, but also with Stetson. 359 00:40:37,370 --> 00:40:40,669 So what happens then when he does get around to translating? 360 00:40:40,670 --> 00:40:51,469 So in April, I think of 20 1933, he starts translating the wasteland in his letter to a foreign friend, of course, is April. 361 00:40:51,470 --> 00:40:55,940 When he starts in his letter to a foreign friend, he talks about his relationship with Eliot. 362 00:40:56,840 --> 00:41:01,760 The fact is, I attempted to translate the wasteland into Greek for two reasons. 363 00:41:01,760 --> 00:41:06,980 First, because I had no other means of expressing the emotion which Elliott had given me. 364 00:41:07,490 --> 00:41:11,960 And secondly, because I wanted to test the resistance of my own language. 365 00:41:12,910 --> 00:41:20,290 I think we think of translations as being on a spectrum from foreign izing on one extreme to native izing on the other extreme. 366 00:41:20,290 --> 00:41:25,749 So the translator either is trying to bring home this is a really weird poem 367 00:41:25,750 --> 00:41:29,190 in a language that is not mine with cultural references that are not mine. 368 00:41:29,200 --> 00:41:39,040 That's one experience reading the poem, or I'm going to completely translate, transfer and transplant this poem into my own language. 369 00:41:39,490 --> 00:41:42,280 Obviously, Sarfaraz is going to go for that. 370 00:41:42,310 --> 00:41:50,560 He is native izing the translation or homogenising the translation to such an extreme degree that it really is its own poem in Greek, 371 00:41:50,560 --> 00:41:58,990 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. 372 00:41:59,260 --> 00:42:07,239 But it's maybe the most important translation. I have some comparisons with a much more recent translation that is very foreign izing. 373 00:42:07,240 --> 00:42:16,780 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. 374 00:42:16,780 --> 00:42:21,690 So you've got the English one facing pages. Love Your Nose is an Oxford educated Greek poet. 375 00:42:21,700 --> 00:42:24,070 His English is perfect. His Greek is perfect. 376 00:42:24,250 --> 00:42:31,059 He also has the advantage of 100 years of scholarship on the wasteland, whereas Sarfaraz is entirely self-taught. 377 00:42:31,060 --> 00:42:33,400 He's an autodidact when it comes to English. 378 00:42:33,820 --> 00:42:42,490 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. 379 00:42:42,730 --> 00:42:48,190 And his notes are Eliot's notes, plus his own notes to the Greek reader about Eliot's notes. 380 00:42:49,750 --> 00:42:53,290 We can see even right from the covers, the extremes. 381 00:42:53,500 --> 00:42:56,910 So Love You knows it's T.S. Eliot. 382 00:42:56,980 --> 00:43:00,280 You know, tea is tea or it's toff sigma. 383 00:43:00,280 --> 00:43:09,040 Eliot, The wasteland is hard to translate. He translates it as the generative earth, the unvarying earth. 384 00:43:10,030 --> 00:43:17,020 And it's a bilingual translation. But look at Sophia's rate, from the first letter, he is completely harmonised. 385 00:43:17,080 --> 00:43:23,800 T.S. Eliot because T.S. Eliot, that stands for Thomas, which is Tomas, which is a feeder, not a top. 386 00:43:24,250 --> 00:43:28,300 So from the very first letter, Eliot has been completely native ized. 387 00:43:28,540 --> 00:43:32,709 We have not. We have the wasteland is the deserted land. 388 00:43:32,710 --> 00:43:37,030 And then if you look at the first pages of the poem, this is also clear. 389 00:43:37,930 --> 00:43:41,350 We have, you know, maybe what the English reader would expect. 390 00:43:42,070 --> 00:43:51,760 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. 391 00:43:51,910 --> 00:43:59,380 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. 392 00:44:01,020 --> 00:44:04,860 We could do worse than go directly to the passage that we've been looking at. 393 00:44:05,610 --> 00:44:13,560 Unreal City under the brown fog of a winter named Mr. Eugenides, the Spartan merchant unshaven with his pocketful of currants. 394 00:44:14,340 --> 00:44:22,319 You see, this is comes right after those wonderful bird sounds when Eliot is talking about progeny and Philip miller, 395 00:44:22,320 --> 00:44:27,780 A.C. and the metamorphosis of the Nightingale and the Swallow and the Hoopoe. 396 00:44:28,140 --> 00:44:34,060 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. 397 00:44:34,080 --> 00:44:42,690 That's not an easy thing to translate. What Sarfaraz does is he makes it non existent. 398 00:44:42,780 --> 00:44:45,900 An existent, almost undone city. 399 00:44:46,200 --> 00:44:56,310 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. 400 00:44:56,940 --> 00:45:03,240 But instead we have politeia which is closer to a polity or city state. 401 00:45:03,780 --> 00:45:05,850 So it has more of the sense of a government. 402 00:45:07,470 --> 00:45:15,240 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, 403 00:45:15,450 --> 00:45:22,230 which is De Cuvee Tati, and he's kind of translating that sense of city as poverty into the Greek. 404 00:45:23,610 --> 00:45:32,090 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. 405 00:45:32,460 --> 00:45:42,060 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, 406 00:45:42,090 --> 00:45:49,740 which if you look in the English, it kind of is in English also where you have merchant rhyming with current his 407 00:45:50,460 --> 00:45:54,870 there's we don't need to say currants because we know that raisins is meaning that. 408 00:45:55,590 --> 00:46:03,030 C i f London. I think Eliot says something complicated about that, but my understanding is it means cost, insurance, freight. 409 00:46:04,490 --> 00:46:09,200 And this is in the voice of a London Greek merchant. 410 00:46:09,230 --> 00:46:13,040 So instead of saying Seif, you just said Seif Seif Londra. 411 00:46:14,570 --> 00:46:22,160 So Londra is a very colloquial, kind of quaint, old fashioned way of seeing London in Cyprus's notes. 412 00:46:22,190 --> 00:46:28,760 He says long DNA, which is the more formal way. But here it's Chief Londra documents on site. 413 00:46:29,990 --> 00:46:33,560 There's not really a way to do demotic French in Greek. 414 00:46:33,680 --> 00:46:36,860 I mean, it'll sound very weird to say his demotic French and Greek. 415 00:46:37,160 --> 00:46:43,520 So he kind of maybe not realising what Pound has done goes back to abominable French. 416 00:46:44,210 --> 00:46:51,410 His cheap, low rent French Cannon Street Hotel is just put exactly as it would be spoken by a Greek. 417 00:46:51,420 --> 00:46:54,890 So it's just transliterated and then metropol in Greek. 418 00:46:55,940 --> 00:46:59,600 Again, anything that is English in the poem will be put into Greek letters. 419 00:46:59,610 --> 00:47:04,519 [INAUDIBLE] leave French as French, [INAUDIBLE] leave Latin as Latin, Dutch as Dutch. 420 00:47:04,520 --> 00:47:08,960 But anything that is English will end up being in Greek letters. 421 00:47:09,230 --> 00:47:15,590 Metropol suggests in Greek, the metropolis, the mother city, and maybe also the metropolitan, 422 00:47:15,830 --> 00:47:22,520 the archbishop, whom we might think being so close to Smyrna, was hanged on the key. 423 00:47:23,480 --> 00:47:27,080 This is Venus's version. 424 00:47:27,500 --> 00:47:35,300 He does something else with Unreal and various other you know, he makes it a little closer to what maybe the English sounds like. 425 00:47:36,110 --> 00:47:40,340 And they're both doing the bird sounds. Let's get to the bird sounds, because this is actually one of my favourite bits. 426 00:47:41,990 --> 00:47:47,140 So in English, we have Twit, Twit, twit. Chug, chug, chug. 427 00:47:47,150 --> 00:47:50,330 Oh, this has it worked out. Sorry, This is the spacing is wrong. 428 00:47:51,830 --> 00:47:55,489 I hope you all be able to sort it out. This is my own fault with slide twit to it. 429 00:47:55,490 --> 00:47:59,300 To it. Chug, chug, chug, chug. So rudely forced teru Eliot. 430 00:48:01,000 --> 00:48:04,180 So love. You know this is going to make it very foreign izing. 431 00:48:04,180 --> 00:48:09,130 That is to sound as much like English as possible. Simply does as well as he can. 432 00:48:09,760 --> 00:48:13,340 Greek does not have that short I so it's actually sounds more English is. 433 00:48:13,360 --> 00:48:19,630 Tweet, tweet tweet tweet. There is no Jay sound in Greek so that makes jug a problem. 434 00:48:19,960 --> 00:48:27,900 Still, he does the best that he can. Tab Z2 has a duck, duck, duck, duck tag. 435 00:48:28,600 --> 00:48:33,040 It's very weird looking and Greek, I think I'm not a native speaker, but it looks weird to me. 436 00:48:33,310 --> 00:48:36,460 He leaves Tara in Latin letters. 437 00:48:37,030 --> 00:48:42,180 Sarfaraz does something altogether different. So Sarfaraz has been very beautiful. 438 00:48:42,190 --> 00:48:49,329 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. 439 00:48:49,330 --> 00:48:56,770 He tracks down every reference that Eliot mentions, and he tracks down references that Elliott doesn't even really mention. 440 00:48:56,770 --> 00:49:03,850 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, 441 00:49:04,510 --> 00:49:13,960 so sings yet so does Whale Otis the Ravish Nightingale Chug, chug, chug, chug Teru she cries and still her woes at midnight rise. 442 00:49:14,860 --> 00:49:18,519 So then he thinks, okay, this is a play. Do I have a play? 443 00:49:18,520 --> 00:49:21,550 I can go to four Bird sounds in Greek. 444 00:49:22,420 --> 00:49:26,709 That would be the birds in Aristophanes. 445 00:49:26,710 --> 00:49:29,720 And he goes, He finds this wonderful bird sounds. 446 00:49:29,740 --> 00:49:34,300 So for one thing, we have something very close all ready to tweet, tweet, tweet, twit, twit. 447 00:49:35,260 --> 00:49:38,560 I'm not trying to scan this. I'm just trying to make it sound like bird sounds. 448 00:49:38,890 --> 00:49:42,130 Jo Jo, Jo, Jo. Jo Jo Things. 449 00:49:43,510 --> 00:49:47,979 We have in the Aristophanes. 450 00:49:47,980 --> 00:49:53,020 So shot, shot, shot is basically almost exactly the same thing. 451 00:49:53,650 --> 00:49:56,080 But he has a problem. What to do with Chug, chug, chug. 452 00:49:56,080 --> 00:50:04,600 The nightingale in Aristophanes sings this beautiful, elegant Greek poem doesn't make a bird sound. 453 00:50:04,930 --> 00:50:11,350 So he goes looking for a bird sound and he finds it in the clamour of the swans wings. 454 00:50:12,040 --> 00:50:17,290 This clamour being a kind of joyful, festive shout yack on. 455 00:50:18,130 --> 00:50:25,240 And he translates that into yak, yak, yak, yak, yak and leaves tell you in the original. 456 00:50:27,540 --> 00:50:36,720 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. 457 00:50:37,800 --> 00:50:42,630 I'm including this passage from the cicada onwards, because even though we have not the cicada singing, 458 00:50:42,810 --> 00:50:46,170 a negative in poetry lets you have your cake and eat it too. 459 00:50:46,440 --> 00:50:51,540 And the cicada is the only element of the egg in summer that Marina has neglected to include. 460 00:50:51,900 --> 00:50:54,180 The cicada will return to us at the end. 461 00:50:54,780 --> 00:51:03,720 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. 462 00:51:04,740 --> 00:51:07,530 Its water dripping song is justly celebrated. 463 00:51:08,280 --> 00:51:16,079 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. 464 00:51:16,080 --> 00:51:23,430 We have the thrush in the pine trees yet again. Drip, drip, drip, drop, drop, drop, drop. 465 00:51:23,640 --> 00:51:27,240 But there is no water loving us. 466 00:51:27,240 --> 00:51:31,110 We will see. Tries to get the hermit thrush in there. 467 00:51:31,110 --> 00:51:38,009 The the sickler estimates the era might thrush as if it's kind of a nightingale via Keats and again 468 00:51:38,010 --> 00:51:44,880 simply transliterated as the the ornament a poetic English sound which looks really weird in Greek. 469 00:51:45,630 --> 00:51:49,590 There you have to use a new and a tough to make it hard disowned. 470 00:51:50,400 --> 00:51:53,430 Drip, drip, drip. Drop, Drop, drop, drop. 471 00:51:56,320 --> 00:52:00,549 What is foursquare us to do here? Well, first thing, he doesn't make it a hermit thrush. 472 00:52:00,550 --> 00:52:03,060 That's a North American bird that's not very native izing. 473 00:52:03,070 --> 00:52:07,990 Let's just put it back as a thrush and then it can be in a g interest or a mediterranean thrush. 474 00:52:08,440 --> 00:52:11,380 But what does he do with the sound? He doesn't. 475 00:52:12,040 --> 00:52:16,909 It looks like it might be something found out of Aristophanes, but as far as I can tell, this is completely original. 476 00:52:16,910 --> 00:52:20,710 It is Ferris, he says. Bricks, rocks. 477 00:52:21,590 --> 00:52:25,040 Bricks, rocks, rocks, rocks. 478 00:52:26,210 --> 00:52:30,380 A sound, I think, which is wonderfully evocative of the dripping of water. 479 00:52:30,380 --> 00:52:37,610 It doesn't really mean anything in Greek, but it is etymological extremely suggestive of water. 480 00:52:38,420 --> 00:52:43,790 LEXIS In ancient Greek means a wetting. Means it is raining. 481 00:52:44,120 --> 00:52:47,479 He also in modern Greek. Is the rain rocky again? 482 00:52:47,480 --> 00:52:52,040 It is raining. So this is a wonderful drenching sound. 483 00:52:52,340 --> 00:52:55,340 Bricks, rocks, rocks, rocks, rocks. 484 00:52:55,730 --> 00:53:03,560 My favourite moment in his translation. We are rounding the corner lines made of sheep and the darkling thrush. 485 00:53:04,010 --> 00:53:16,150 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. 486 00:53:17,630 --> 00:53:22,010 And Sarfaraz takes is a response from Valerie that a lion is made of assimilated lambs. 487 00:53:22,490 --> 00:53:30,230 Other would be Billy Elliot doesn't strike one as mutton. Sometimes the flock seems less assimilated than at other times. 488 00:53:30,260 --> 00:53:38,590 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. 489 00:53:39,020 --> 00:53:42,020 We have Elliott to come to Larry in Jerusalem. 490 00:53:42,020 --> 00:53:49,940 The ungoverned. This is the Keeley Sherrard translations Jerusalem ungoverned city Jerusalem city of refugees. 491 00:53:50,270 --> 00:54:03,470 Sometimes you see at noon the scattered black leaves, the migratory birds that are passing overhead as often in Greek folksong. 492 00:54:03,740 --> 00:54:08,750 Migratory birds are associated explicitly with refugees and with exile. 493 00:54:09,830 --> 00:54:13,280 This is from his visit in July of 1942. 494 00:54:13,520 --> 00:54:17,840 A very dark time in the war, a visit to Jerusalem and mandatory Palestine. 495 00:54:18,080 --> 00:54:24,740 Whilst safaris is with the Greek government in exile in Cairo, and safaris numbers himself among these refugees. 496 00:54:24,950 --> 00:54:29,540 And you can see also this. This is the place, gentlemen, in all caps. 497 00:54:29,870 --> 00:54:33,649 That's an English in the poem. And it looks a lot like. Hurry up, please. 498 00:54:33,650 --> 00:54:38,630 It's time in the poem. I mean, there's so many things. It really feels like a pastiche of Eliot. 499 00:54:39,350 --> 00:54:47,420 But he does come around to something that is truly assimilated and that is safaris, although it has a lot of Eliot in it. 500 00:54:47,750 --> 00:54:51,680 And that is his five part called THRUSH. 501 00:54:52,460 --> 00:54:56,190 Notice here, though, it is quickly not sickler. 502 00:54:56,660 --> 00:55:00,379 It is the ancient word for thrush, not the modern words. 503 00:55:00,380 --> 00:55:05,840 And it is not the bird, but the name of a ship. 504 00:55:08,090 --> 00:55:13,940 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. 505 00:55:13,940 --> 00:55:19,280 And yet there is this title which strongly suggests the thrush. 506 00:55:20,150 --> 00:55:23,810 The poem begins with a section called The House by the Sea. 507 00:55:24,590 --> 00:55:27,740 The houses I had, they took away from me. 508 00:55:28,460 --> 00:55:34,040 The times happen to be un propitious. War, destruction, exile. 509 00:55:34,730 --> 00:55:37,850 Sometimes the hunter hits the migratory birds. 510 00:55:38,270 --> 00:55:42,500 Sometimes he doesn't hit them. Hunting was good at my time. 511 00:55:42,770 --> 00:55:48,890 Many felt the pellet. The rest circle aimlessly or go mad in the shelters. 512 00:55:49,490 --> 00:55:59,390 So the strong association of refugee life with the plight of migratory birds who are constantly subject to hunters and to traps. 513 00:55:59,690 --> 00:56:03,169 This first section also Namechecks Cities. Smyrna. 514 00:56:03,170 --> 00:56:14,389 Rhodes. Syracuse. Alexandria. There is a second section sensuous help for one of his companions where we listen to a phonograph and on 515 00:56:14,390 --> 00:56:20,330 the gramophone there is a quotation of made up popular song which has the perfume of pine and birdsong. 516 00:56:20,630 --> 00:56:26,660 Though again, no thrushes are mentioned in this poem, explicitly described as titled as thrush. 517 00:56:27,840 --> 00:56:30,959 The third section describes the fantastic underwater wreck. 518 00:56:30,960 --> 00:56:36,390 So this is a transport that is sunk in World War two named the THRUSH, 519 00:56:36,390 --> 00:56:42,390 and he is on the island in Paris looking at this underwater ship, this shipwrecked Mediterranean shipwreck, 520 00:56:42,660 --> 00:56:48,870 the mast broken sway at odd angles, deep underwater like tentacles or the memory of dreams, 521 00:56:48,870 --> 00:56:54,810 marking the whole vague mouth of some huge dead sea monster and extinguished in the water. 522 00:56:55,080 --> 00:57:05,780 Calm spread all around. The shipwreck description is immediately followed by a Nakia, a communication with the dead. 523 00:57:06,260 --> 00:57:11,150 But it is not an Eliot communication with the dead. There is no yellow fog. 524 00:57:11,930 --> 00:57:15,560 It's not Homer. Exactly. It's not Dante. It is very seafarers. 525 00:57:16,530 --> 00:57:20,130 And gradually, in turn, other voices followed. 526 00:57:20,460 --> 00:57:27,240 Whispers thin and too thirsty, emerging from the other side of the sun, the dark side. 527 00:57:27,510 --> 00:57:31,979 You might say they longed for a drop of blood to drink. Familiar voices. 528 00:57:31,980 --> 00:57:37,070 But I couldn't distinguish one from the other. And the voice of the old man reached me. 529 00:57:37,080 --> 00:57:40,590 I felt it quietly falling in the heart of days, now motionless. 530 00:57:41,010 --> 00:57:47,460 And here is the voice of the old man. And if you condemn me to drink poison, I thank you. 531 00:57:47,880 --> 00:57:53,459 Your law will be my love. How can I go wandering from one foreign country to another? 532 00:57:53,460 --> 00:57:56,490 A rolling stone? I prefer death. 533 00:57:57,820 --> 00:58:01,480 This man, of course, is not Theresa or Stetson. 534 00:58:01,780 --> 00:58:08,680 It's not Mr. Eugenides. It's Socrates who preferred suicide to exile. 535 00:58:09,190 --> 00:58:15,280 It's a sentiment, no doubt, that a weary exile or a refugee is familiar with and even sympathetic to. 536 00:58:17,080 --> 00:58:20,780 The poem. Which is Datelines. 537 00:58:21,050 --> 00:58:27,710 1946 It is after World War Two, but it is the beginning of the Greek Civil War. 538 00:58:28,400 --> 00:58:32,780 The poem ends with a section called Simply Lite Force. 539 00:58:33,500 --> 00:58:39,770 One of the most powerful Greek words that sufferers recognises as coming directly and undiminished from Homer. 540 00:58:39,770 --> 00:58:43,520 And he writes about the force in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. 541 00:58:44,120 --> 00:58:47,359 First is a section that's brightly lit with dark shadows, 542 00:58:47,360 --> 00:58:53,840 their images that could be from Poros or scholar of boys diving from both sprits into the Aegean. 543 00:58:54,440 --> 00:59:05,540 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. 544 00:59:05,840 --> 00:59:12,860 Two a tier Achilles and Polymet sees the brothers who fight in the seven against Thebes, and to poor Antigone, who is caught up. 545 00:59:13,400 --> 00:59:17,570 There is the chirping of birds and pine trees and thrumming cicadas. 546 00:59:17,570 --> 00:59:20,840 Those insects Socrates, considered as belonging to the muses. 547 00:59:21,320 --> 00:59:26,360 These are images that have returned from Marina and the Wasteland. 548 00:59:26,570 --> 00:59:34,729 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. 549 00:59:34,730 --> 00:59:41,180 Xs and Xs as he lets us hear the cicadas just at the moment they cease. 550 00:59:41,930 --> 00:59:46,100 I will just point out that he wrote this in this house. 551 00:59:46,910 --> 00:59:50,510 This beautiful red house by the sea. And porous. 552 00:59:52,550 --> 01:00:00,290 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. 553 01:00:00,560 --> 01:00:03,260 So this is the voice of a constant exile refugee. 554 01:00:03,770 --> 01:00:12,990 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. 555 01:00:13,010 --> 01:00:21,320 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. 556 01:00:22,130 --> 01:00:30,350 You don't know where to look first because the pine trees will vanish and the mirrored mountains and the chirping of birds, 557 01:00:30,830 --> 01:00:35,330 the sea will drain dry, shattered glass from north and south. 558 01:00:35,720 --> 01:00:42,650 Your eyes will empty of daylight the way the cicadas suddenly all together fall silent. 559 01:00:43,600 --> 01:00:53,590 That is how the poem ends. Although in Greek it ends with the cicadas posts stomach an examining cock ola Maisie to see. 560 01:00:54,010 --> 01:00:57,260 Yeah. And that's where I will end up.