The ancient Greek plays are everywhere. I think of them as foundations of Western literature, but still, I was not expecting to find in Ishmael Reed’s 1973 novel The Last Days of Louisiana Red, which is mostly about radical Black politics in Berkeley, an actor named Chorus who blames his professional and personal problems on Sophocles:
“What I did was to go back to see where I went wrong. It started with plays like Antigone.” (end Of Ch. 5)
Reed’s previous novel, Mumbo Jumbo (1972), includes
an alternate history of the Bible, so logically he moves to the Greeks in this
one.
It was not at all surprising to find lines from Greek plays
and from Homer running all through George Seferis’s Collected Poems:
1924-1955 (although half or more of the poems are from the 1930s, tr. Edmund
Keeley and Philip Sherrard). The great
modern Greek poets all seem to be myth-haunted.
Every island and city and bit of coast come with old stories, old
literature, and Seferis embraces it.
He even writes a self-parody:
from In the Manner of G. S.
Wherever I travel Greece wounds me…
At Mycenae I raised the great stones and the treasures of the house of Atreus
and slept with them at the hotel “Belle Helène”;
they disappeared only at dawn when Cassandra crowed,
a cock hanging from her black throat.
And so on, the parody being that the poem is even more
packed with ancient Greece than usual.
Every sailor is if not Odysseus then one of his doomed companions. The sea is always the sea now, abut also the
sea then.
Seferis gathered a collection of poems from the late 1930s
into a “logbook,” an idea he liked so much it is now titled Logbook I
(1940). Europe was a dark place in 1940,
but not surprisingly Logbook II (1944) is written from exile, in South
Africa and Egypt. Here his recurring character,
a Greek sailor, adjusts to a new landscape and its exotic African lilies:
from Stratis Thalassinos among the Agapanthi:
There are no asphodels, violets, or hyacinths;
how then can you talk with the dead?
The dead know the language of flowers only;
so they keep silent
they travel and keep silent, endure and keep silent,
beyond the community of dreams, beyond the community of dream.
Some of this is straight out of the last book of The
Odyssey, but it is as much about grieving for all of the newly dead in the
Aegean Sea. How do you talk to these
dead? What could you tell them? Seferis’s poems are his attempts.
