Mythistorema - Triceratops Home

44 JOURNAL OP THE HELLENIC DIASPORA
The identity of the people who departed remained very ambiguous
for some time because the poem starts with the statement "We never
knew them," which is then changed to "We saw them twice perhaps"
and is further modified by the information that this is something that
happened in childhood. Robert Levesque, the French critic and translator
of Seferis' poems, discussed this subject with the poet, and in his introduction
to the French translation provides some revealing information
about it. In order to understand the situation described in the poem, at
least on the personal level, it is necessary to refer to the events taking
place in the Smyrna area at the time of the Balkan Wars (1912-1913).
The Greeks living there were persecuted, and the bravest among them
risked everything in order to reach Greece and join the fight against the
Turks. The poet's father, a prominent Greek of Smyrna, helped several of
them escape, and the young Seferis witnessed the nocturnal departures of
Greek patriots who had passed from his house on their way to their
secret mission. These figures acquired mythical proportions in his imagination,
and in his memory the myth blends with their dream for a
Greece that would recapture its lost territory and its past glory. The loss
of these people and of this dream in the Asia Minor disaster of 1922
was a trauma that left indelible marks on the poet's personality. When
he wrote Mythistorema, years after the disaster, the departure of these
heroic figures blended in his memory with the loss of all his childhood
friends, and perhaps also a love of his youth among them, in the destruction
of his hometown, Smyrna, as suggested by the recurring motif of
the dead friends throughout his poetry.
The journey blends with love at the end of the poem. These memories
torment his imagination, and he becomes confused and uncertain as he
thinks that perhaps he never saw these persons, that it may all have been
a hallucination, a dream "at the time sleep still/Was leading [him)
close up to the breathing wave." Perhaps he looks for them because he
is "looking for/ The other life that is beyond the statues,"" for the spell
of a lost paradise.
6
Poem "6" of Mythistorema has as an epigraph the initials M.R.,
which are those of Maurice Ravel, the French composer to whom Seferis
addresses these lines and who is most probably the "old Friend" referred
to in the last line of the first stanza.
33Here, "beyond the statues" refers to a past happiness, before the protagonist
felt alienated as if turning into stone. The reasons for this process are presented
in the sections 'Wednesday" and, more particularly, "Sunday" of the "Notes for
a Week," where people become mutilated statues. As already mentioned, stones
and statues are very complex symbols in Seferis, and they will be further discussed
in connection with poems "18," "20" and "21" of Mythistorema.