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ments about the extent of Eliot’s influence in a critical debate that
appeared to have no end, especially in Greece, and my late effort
to emphasize Seferis’s originality was no doubt partly the consequence
of my conversations with the poet — and certain of his
astute friends — over the years. But Seferis’s unmailed letter of
1956 could have provided some early authorial substantiation in
this effort of a kind that his apparent reticence sought to avoid.
Along with the question of Eliot’s influence and a series of exchanges
about specific problems in rendering individual words and
lines, the correspondence in these years raises the difficult question
of tact when a poet has to deal with competing translators, all of
whom are more or less friends of the poet: in this instance, besides
myself, Philip Sherrard and Rex Warner. I had met Philip Sherrard
for the first time several years after the two of us completed our
doctoral dissertations in England on contemporary Greek poetry
— in those days, as far as I know, the only graduate students working
on modern Greek poetry anywhere in the world, which generated
an unspoken bond between us that soon became a spoken
one, lasting forty years. In the early 1950s, I had come across some
translations of Cavafy that Sherrard had published in the British
quarterly Encounter — very fine translations, I thought. It occurred
to me then that we might collaborate in some way by bringing
together a selection of translations from the poets both of us had
worked on separately while writing our doctoral dissertations.
This thought led to a meeting on the island of Thasos in the
summer of 1955, where Sherrard was vacationing with his family
and two British friends, Jack Rivas and Jeffrey Graham-Bell, all
strong walkers. It was the 15th of August, feast day in the high,
inland town called Panagia, and that is where Sherrard and his
companions were headed when my wife Mary and I tracked him
down. I joined his group for the climb to the village, and though I
was the youngest of the four, I remember falling behind constantly
and ending up sitting alone by the side of the road for a long
interval to catch my breath, so that when I arrived in the village
square, Sherrard and his friends were already well into celebrative
eating and drinking and in a very congenial mood. Our collaboration
was sealed over the second bottle of raki, an easy sealing because
we agreed then and there to create an anthology of translations
simply by bringing together what he had on hand of Cavafy and
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