Mythistorema - Triceratops Home

28 JOURNAL OP Tilt iltLLENIC DIASPORA
of its poems, but also because there is in it an explicit identification of
the journey with love.
As the epigraph of Mythistorema, Seferis uses two lines from Rimbaud:
"Si j'ai du goat, ce n'est guêres/Que pour la terre et les pierres." 1
The complex symbolic meaning of the stones, which appear very often in
Seferis' poetry, will be explored further in connection with poems "20"
and "21." One might say at this point, however, that although the stones
imply the decline of the senses, they mainly represent the classical Greek
tradition and the ideas of measure, balance and justice that are its rule.
In his Journals, Seferis writes that if he had come across the following
lines from T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets before writing Mythistorema, he
would have used them as an epigraph for it:a
. . . As we grow older
The world becomes stranger the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered
("East Coker")
The use of this epigraph by Seferis would have implied that in Mythistorema
the experience of life and love becomes a tragic enigma, a tragic
complication.
Seferis had not read the Four Quartets at that time, but he had read
Eliot's Waste Land and other early poems, induding "Marina." As he
writes in a letter of tribute to the English poet, he first read Eliot in 1931.
He started working on Mythistorema in 1933, and the Waste Land's
influence on it is quite evident. 'While Seferis' Turning Point was written
in rhyme and in a style suggesting the influence of the French Symbolists,
Mythistorema is written in free verse, employing the modern techniques
of Eliot and James Joyce. It is for this reason that Mythistorema is considered
by many as the real "turning point" not only in Seferis' own
poetic development but in Greek poetry in general, because it marks the
introduction of these modern techniques into Greek letters.
The title of the sequence already implies the use of what Eliot, in his
essay on Joyce, terms the "mythical method." Mythistorema {Maar&
pv,a1 is a modern Greek word which, literally translated, means
1From the poem "Fetes de la Faim," reproduced in Une Saison en Enter.
aGeorge Seferis, Mem [Days), 5 vols. (Athens: Ikaros, 1977) E, 59. Only
one volume of this series of diaries has been translated into English, under the title
A Poet's Journal: Days of 1945-1951, tr. Athan Anagnostopoulos (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974). The Greek series will be referred to
hereafter as Journal A, Journal B, etc.