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his poetry from too much compromising analysis, while I was trying
very hard to extract any sort of interpretation that could be
turned into critical prose. At one point I suggested that part of the
obscurity I was encountering in his poems derived from the absence
of punctuation, and I cited a specific passage — I think it
was in Mythistorema 12 — where the addition of a comma at the end
of a line might make all the difference. The poet just stared at me,
but from the other end of the room, Maro Seferis’s voice rang out
in a deep lament: “Put in a comma for the boy, George, help him,
for heaven’s sake” (Vale ena comma yia to pedi, Yiorgo, voithise
ton, yia onoma tou theou).
I learned an important lesson from this encounter, soon reinforced
by my experience with other self-assured artists of some
stature. No poet worth his or her salt, however generous to the
young or the old, is going to restrict the richness of his or her verse
by giving an unassailably precise reading of this or that line, especially
in front of somebody aspiring to put that reading into the
relative permanence of print, whether in Greek or in English or in
some other language. Seferis’s generosity was large enough to allow
him to forgive my post-graduate assault on his work, and this
first meeting did not preclude others that eventually led to an easy
kind of friendship. And I think that friendship emerged partly because
I was never again eager to ask him a question that might
lead to a specific interpretation of one line or another, or even to a
bit of extra punctuation, though I did ask him questions of a broader
kind in the interview that I conducted in 1968, some sixteen years
after this first meeting, when the poet was himself an “advanced
student,” as he put it, at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
1955–1959
The correspondence in these years has to do mostly with my early
efforts to translate and publish some of Seferis’s poetry in the United
States and, more substantially, with a 1956 essay I wrote on the
relationship between the poetry of Seferis and that of T. S. Eliot
and with the anthology of six Modern Greek poets that Philip
Sherrard and I met to plan in 1955 and completed in 1959. My
letter to Seferis in April 1955 antecedes this long-term project but
12 George Seferis: Collected Poems, pp. 3–28.
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