Classical Receptions Journal Vol 5. Iss. 1 (2013) pp.

144–165
https://academic.oup.com/crj/issue/5/1

THE HOMERIC ELPENOR

AND THOSE WHO MADE IL GRAN RIFIUTO
(DANTE’S INFERNO, CANTO 3) IN THE POETRY OF
GEORGE SEFERIS:
MODERNIST NEKUIAS AND ANTIHEROISM

Polina Tambakaki
Classical Receptions Journal Vol 5. Iss. 1 (2013) pp. 144–165

The Homeric Elpenor and those who made

il gran rifiuto (Dante’s Inferno, Canto 3)
in the poetry of George Seferis:
Modernist nekuias and antiheroismy
Polina Tambakaki*

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The First World War has been linked with the appearance of iconic modernist epics,
where the theme of the nether world has pride of place, most often based on the
archetypal journeys to the Underworld in Homer’s Odyssey (book 11), Virgil’s Aeneid
(book 6) or Dante’s Inferno. It was in the context of these modernist reworkings of
the Underworld that Elpenor, the first shade encountered by Odysseus in his journey
to the Underworld, established his presence in modern literature. But in no other
writer did Elpenor play such a pivotal role as he would play in the work of the
Greek poet George Seferis (Nobel laureate 1963). This article explores how the
Seferian Elpenor was formed through a slow process where the poet’s wish to
write ‘an Odyssey in reverse’ was initially informed by a negative reaction towards
C. P. Cavafy’s ‘Dantian’ poem ‘Che fece . . . il gran rifiuto’, and then by a poetic
dialogue with T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Ezra Pound’s Canto 1 and
Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. It sheds new light on the complex intertextual nexus
around Elpenor as a modern antihero and offers new perspectives on Seferis’
early involvement with Cavafy and Pound.

In the poetry of George Seferis, the Homeric figure of Elpenor is of cardinal im-
portance — almost as important as Odysseus, to whom he functions as an antithet-
ical counterpart. Elpenor appears by name or with his ‘insignia’ (his oar, his youth)

*Correspondence: Centre for Hellenic Studies, King’s College London, Strand, London
WC2R 2LS. penelope.tambakaki@kcl.ac.uk
y In the article the following abbreviations are used regarding Seferis’ works:
D1-3 = DokimŒ & [Essays], 3 vols. (Athens: Ikaros, 1974, 1992); M1-6, LŒr"& [Days]
(Athens: Ikaros, 1975–1986); P = Poi–mata [Poems] (Athens: Ikaros, 1974); 6N = Six
Nights on the Acropolis (trans. Susan Matthias; River Vale, NJ: Cosmos, 2007);
A = Antigrafes [Transcriptions] (Athens: Ikaros, 1978). The translations of prose extracts
are my own, unless otherwise noted. Poems by Seferis and Cavafy are given in the
translation by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard (G. Seferis, Collected Poems, revised
edition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995) and C. P. Cavafy, Collected Poems,
bilingual edition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009)) except for the translation
of Seferis’ ‘Arnisi’ [‘Refusal’], which is by Roderick Beaton, with acknowledgment to
Polina Tambakaki. The numbers in parentheses refer to the numeration of Seferis’ lines
in Greek.

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 MODERNIST NEKUIAS AND ANTIHEROISM

in four poems by Seferis: in ‘Argonauts’ and ‘Bottle in the Sea’ from the sequence
Mythistorema (Novel, 1935); in ‘Stratis Thalassinos among the agapanthi’ from the
collection Logbook II (1942): ‘my dear Elpenor! My poor, foolish Elpenor!’ (line 45);
and, more significantly, in ‘Thrush’ (1946). The second part of this long poem starts
with a section entitled ‘The hedonist Elpenor’ [‘O hdonik0& Elp–nwr’],1 which
consists mainly of a dialogue between a man and a woman, a sort of Elpenor and
Circe, on which the central speaker — a sort of Odysseus — of the poem eavesdrops.
In the third (and final) part of the poem, this last figure listens to voices from a
sea-Underworld. In contrast to the Homeric nekuia and other modern nekuias, the
central voice is not that of Tiresias but that of Socrates in the Apology, before the
poem ends with an apocalyptic arrival at the sunlight:

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[. . .] and you find yourself
in a large house with many windows open
running from room to room, not knowing from where to look out first
because [. . .]
the sea will empty, shattered glass, from north to south,
your eyes will empty of the light of day
the way the cicadas all together suddenly fall silent.
(‘Thrush’ III: 75-end)

However, in ‘A scenario for ‘‘Thrush’’ ’ (1949), a letter to George Katsimbalis

(Henry Miller’s (1941) ‘Colossus of Maroussi’), which would serve as a commentary
on the poem, Seferis himself made it clear that the presence of Elpenor in his
poetry is much more pervasive, extending well beyond these four poems. Among
the poems he mentioned, in which Elpenor appears ‘either as individual or as col-
lective character’,2 Seferis referred to two poems from his first 1931 collection
Turning Point [Stro’–]: ‘Arnisi’ [‘Denial’ or ‘Refusal’] and ‘The companions
in Hades’ [‘Oi s0ntro’oi ston Adh’].
# Criticism has acknowledged the importance
of Elpenor in Seferis’ poetry, but his claims about the presence of Elpenor in
these early poems, and especially ‘Arnisi’, have been questioned or debunked.
This article revisits the ‘elpenorian’ elements in Seferis’ work, paying special atten-
tion to these early poems.
Elpenor was an oarsman and the youngest of Odysseus’ hetairoi. ‘Not over valiant
in war nor sound of understanding’, as Homer says (Od. 10.552-3, trans. A. T.
Murray), Elpenor broke his neck and died in a fall from Circe’s roof, after rising
dazed from a night of too much wine. When Odysseus left Circe’s island, Aiaia,
and reached the Underworld in order to consult Tiresias’ ghost about the safe return

1
Or ‘Sensual Elpenor’ in the Keeley-Sherrard translation.
2
D2.38.

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 POLINA TAMBAKAKI

home (n0sto&), Elpenor was the first shade to appear, anxious about his place
in posterity:3

I know that when you leave here and go back from the house of Hades you will put in again
with your well-made ship at the island of Aiaia. When you are there, my lord, I beg you to
remember me (mn–sasqai "m * "8o) [. . .] and heap a mound for me on the shore of the grey sea, a
memorial to a luckless man, for future generations to hear of me (2ndr1& dust–noio, ka1
* somŒnoisi puqŒsqai). Do these rites for me, and fix an oar on my tomb, the oar which was
"s
mine when I was alive and rowing with my companions (m"t’ "m * o8 & e‘t0roisin).
(Od. 11.71, 75–78; trans. Martin Hammond)

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In modern literature, the figure of Elpenor emerges during and after the Great War,
when an increasing interest in the themes of nekuia and the descent to the
Underworld is manifest.4 In 1917, we encounter him in Ezra Pound’s Three
Cantos (the first so-called ‘Ur Cantos’, predecessor of the famous Canto I of
1925) and in 1920 in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. By that date, in notes about his
Ulysses, which was first published in installments in the journals The Little
Review and Egoist (1918–20), James Joyce had made it clear that Paddy Dignam
in the episode ‘Hades’ was a form of Elpenor. This was one of the many Homeric
connections of Ulysses’ protagonists, which were established before the novel’s pub-
lication as a book in Paris in 1922, the annus mirabilis of European literature;5 that
same year also saw the publication of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Meanwhile, in
1919, Elpenor featured for the first time as the title of a work, in the short subversive
novel Elpénor by Jean Giraudoux.6
During that period, 1918–24, the young Seferis lived in Paris as a student of law:

I was buying hazelnuts from a barrow when I saw one of those shells [grosse Bertha]
burst, at the far end of a boulevard. Paris was completely empty when I arrived in July;
in November it was completely full with the festivities of the armistice [. . .] My room

3
The scene is depicted magnificently in a red-figure vase (around 475–25 BC), Boston
Museum of Fine Arts 34.79 (see Hall (2008), Fig. 15).
4
For the relation of modern ‘dialogues with death’ to the Homeric nekuia, see Thurston
(2009), Hall (2008: 203–16), and Smith (2001).
5
See Introduction (especially p. xv–vi), Appendix A: ‘The Gilbert and Linati Schemata:
Table of Correspondences’ and Appendix B: ‘Ulysses: Serialization and editions’ by Jeri
Johnson in Joyce (1993).
6
At the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century, Elpenor
reappears in texts by a new generation of writers with a clearly post-colonial or
post-modernist perspective, such as The Odyssey: A Stage Version by Derek Walcott
(1993); for Walcott’s dialogue with Homer through Modern Greece, with particular
references to Seferis, see Greenwood (2010: 58–68); or again in a chapter from the
novel Manhattan entitled ‘Le rêve d’Elpénor’ (‘Elpenor’s dream’) by Hélène Cixous
(2002).

146
 MODERNIST NEKUIAS AND ANTIHEROISM

was the iciest place I have ever known. [. . .] I was reading Homer and the craziest
avant-garde journals.7

It was in Paris that the news of the defeat of the Greek army in Asia Minor and the
burning out of his native city of Smyrna (modern Izmir) reached him. For Greece,
1922 was the year of what became known as the Asia Minor Catastrophe, which
marked the end of the three-thousand-year-old Greek presence in Anatolia.8 As
Seferis would say later in his life, this was the event ‘which affected me above all
others’.9
The role of Elpenor in Seferis’ poetry, his relation to the historical context, as well
as to both the Homeric archetype and his European poetic counterparts, and his

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legacy in Modern Greek poetry have been dealt with in important studies, starting
with the pioneering essay by Edmund Keeley ‘Seferis’s Elpenor: A Man of No
Fortune’ in 1966.10 Yet, attention has not been paid to two issues which relate to
the formation of the figure of Elpenor in Seferis’ work and provide insights into
Elpenor’s place in modern ‘antiheroic’ literature and the nekuia theme: that the
Seferian Elpenor is a peculiar amalgam derived not only from the Homeric
Elpenor but also from the people in Canto 3 of Dante’s Inferno; and that, although
Seferis had alluded to the Homeric nekuia and the ‘neutrals’ of Dante’s Canto 3
earlier in his poetry, this amalgam eventually took shape only after his years in
London, 1931–4, when he famously discovered Eliot, and also Pound, a ‘discovery’
Seferis downplayed, as we will see.

‘The character of Elpenor’ and those who made il gran rifiuto

In ‘A Scenario for ‘‘Thrush’’ ’, Seferis devoted a whole section, entitled ‘About the
character of Elpenor’, to the traits and trajectory of his Elpenor, this ‘sentimental
and faint-hearted’ figure, as he said. He wrote:

Between the heroes (in the Homeric sense, not, for God’s sake, in the Carlylian), on the one
hand, and figures like Thersites, on the other, the men who belong to this category are the
most sympathetic. [. . .] I do not say: loveable or admirable; I say sympathetic, sentimental,
mediocre and wasted [. . .] this soft mediocre man tends to become the most sentimental
among my people, perhaps because he symbolises what in daily conversation we call ‘the poor
man’. Yet, we must remember that these people who are not bad, because they are soft and
7
D2.13; for Seferis’ student years in Paris, see Beaton (2003: 31–64).
8
See Beaton (2003: 50).
9
D2.355.
10
Now in Keeley (1983: 53–67); see also Savvidis (1980), Vayenas (1979 and 1999), Vitti
(1989), Keeley (1996), Papazoglou (2002), Ricks (2007) and Maronitis (2008). Seferis’
legacy has been investigated especially in relation to Takis Sinopoulos and Yannis Ritsos.
Suffice it to mention the poems ‘Forgiveness’ and ‘Non-Hero’ by Ritsos, both responses
to Seferis’ poem ‘The companions in Hades’ (see below, with Keeley 1996: 92); for
Ritsos’ ‘Non-Hero’, see also Brombert (2001: 4).

147
 POLINA TAMBAKAKI

compliant, are very often the best carriers of the evil which has its source elsewhere [. . .]
Sometimes I have pity on him [. . .] but more often than not I am in great opposition to the
soft parts of ourselves he represents and which we feel around us like stagnant waters.11

Evidently Seferis invites us to see ‘Elpenor’ as covering a wide category of charac-

teristics that are based on the Homeric archetype, the luckless, mediocre companion
who was anxious not to be forgotten, but are not restricted to it. Emphasis is placed
on the antithesis between the ‘elpenorian’ and the heroic stance towards life: ‘they
are not heroes, but Elpenors’, Seferis wrote, making a pun with the sounding
similarities of the two words –rw"&-Elp–nor"& in Modern Greek.
The antithesis is indeed pivotal in several of Seferis’ poems, which span his entire

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corpus.12 But although fundamental, this antithesis is by no way clear-cut, as
‘Thrush’ confirms most eloquently. For if the two main male protagonists in the
poem, ‘a sort of Odysseus’, as Seferis says in ‘A Scenario for ‘‘Thrush’’ ’, and ‘the
hedonist Elpenor’, represent the two poles of the antithesis, the former the heroic ‘in
the Homeric sense’ and the latter the un- or anti-heroic, they also share some
important features: above all the burden and the fear of memory. Odysseus’ first
words are as follows:

The houses I had they took away from me. [. . .]

[. . .]
Don’t talk to me about the nightingale or the lark
[. . .]
I don’t know much about houses
(‘Thrush’ I: 1, 7, 10).

Later on, chased by the image of statues, Elpenor says:

[. . .] It’s as though
in the last days of your youth you loved
a woman who was still beautiful, and you were always afraid,
as you held her naked at noon,
of the memory aroused by your embrace;
(‘Thrush’ II: 30–34)

What differentiates Elpenor and Odysseus is how they treat this burden and fear.
Elpenor leaves the scene passively without any reaction after his failure to woo Circe,
whereas Odysseus faces eventually the ‘light, angelic and black’ (‘Thrush’ III: 56; see
also above).
Interestingly, however, as G. Savvidis noted, ‘in ‘‘Thrush’’ Seferis ascribed to
Elpenor some of his most personally charged lines.’13 The question of heroism and

11
D2.39.
12
For ‘elpenorian’ elements in ‘The last day’ from Logbook I or ‘Helen’ from Logbook III,
see, for example, Tambakaki (2008) and (2011).

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 MODERNIST NEKUIAS AND ANTIHEROISM

cowardice as encapsulated in the figure of Elpenor seems to have haunted Seferis,

both as a poet and as a man, in a very deep, personal manner. In 1925, just after his
return from Paris to Athens, he wrote in his diaries: ‘The only way to be sure that
real heroes exist is to try to become a hero yourself’;14 and in 1935, in a way highly
reminiscent of his description of Elpenor in ‘A scenario for ‘‘Thrush’’ ’:

I imagine that the real rhythm of my life is something I would call ‘interchange of extremes’.
Any time I have done something worthy I have done it through this interchange. By contrast,
what always wasted me were some conditions in the middle, marshlands which made me sick
deep down even to the memory. The surrender, the self-indulgence, the compromise, this
tender turn to ourselves, this compassionate permission we give to ourselves – sometimes it

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took me a long time to repulse them. Sometimes I forgot that if something unworthy is set
free to enter into our castle, it stays there hidden, lost, and then suddenly it betrays us exactly
when we do not expect it, or we realise the betrayal after a long time has past.15

The question of ‘elpenorian’ vs. heroic stance was urgently posed in many crucial
moments in Seferis’ personal and professional life. One such period was exactly the
decade between the last diary entry, in 1935, and the writing of ‘Thrush’, in 1946. In
1936 the Metaxas dictatorship (1936–40) was established in Greece; and in 1946, the
fiercest phase of the Greek Civil War started (1946–9).16 In between, there was the
Second World War (1940–5), which added a new meaning to the notion of nekuia as
a journey into darkness, through the millions of dead, the Holocaust and the nuclear
bombs in Japan.17
During the Metaxas dictatorship, Seferis worked as Director of the Foreign Press
Bureau (1937–41), a post which would be the cause of allegations against him of
cowardly co-operation with the authoritarian regime. The available evidence by no
means substantiates such allegations, but what seems certain is that the main reason
for Seferis’ acceptance of the post was his wish to be close to Maro Londou, his
future wife.18 In 1941, his peregrinations as a member of the Greek Government in
Exile, in Egypt and South Africa, started. It was during this period, that he wrote
‘Manuscript Sept. ’41’, in order, as he wrote, ‘to put my conscience in order.’19
There he spoke of the two parallel roads of his life, as a civil servant and as a poet,
stressing their ‘elpenorian’ and ‘heroic’ character, respectively: ‘one road of

13
Savvidis (1980: 21).
14
M1.16.
15
L3.22.
16
For this period see Clogg (2002); during this period and under the influence of Seferis,
Elpenor appeared in the work of other poets, most notably Sinopoulos; see Ricks (2007).
17
See Falconer (2005).
18
See Beaton (2003: 157) and Beaton (2001), where different views about Seferis’ relation-
ship to politics are summarized.
19
D3.55.

149
 POLINA TAMBAKAKI

obligations, patience and compromises, and another road trodden without conces-
sions, freely, by my deepest self.’20
Poetically the antithesis between the ‘elpenorian’ and the heroic stance was
expressed in the most explicit way in the poem ‘Last stop’, written just prior to
Seferis’ return to Athens in 1944:

We come from the sands of the desert, from the seas of Proteus,
souls shrivelled by public sins,
each holding office like a bird in its cage
[. . .]
Man frays easily in wars;

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man is soft, a sheaf of grass
[. . .]
Heroes move forward in the dark
(38–40, 46–47, 95)

Evidently Elpenor was a figure-symbol through which Seferis viewed his own
contradictions, human nature and human history. But the emphasis placed on the
cowardly and irresponsible aspect of Elpenor and his link with the ‘evil’ (in Seferis’
statement that ‘elpenorian’ people are ‘the best carriers of the evil which has its
source elsewhere’) was not predicated on Homer, where no such ethical consider-
ations are found. It was rather predicated on the people in Canto 3 of Dante’s
Inferno, the first shades Dante encountered in the vestibule of Hell, just before
the first circle known as ‘Limbo’, and the very reason for their condemnation.
This was a crowd of ‘neutrals’, who did not take sides in life and lived ‘with no
blame and with no praise’, hence there was no place for them either in Paradise or in
Hell. This Canto played a crucial role in modern nekuias, especially in the work of
Eliot, most famously in The Waste Land:21

Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
[. . .]
[. . .] each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
(‘The Burial of the Dead’: 60–70)

The famous line ‘I had not thought death had undone so many’ was a direct trans-
lation of Dante’s lines 56–57 of Canto 3.
In Greece, this Canto had become famous thanks to Cavafy’s 1899/1901 poem
‘Che fece . . . il gran rifiuto’ (also known as the ‘Great Yes and the Great No’). Its

20
D3.18; cf. Beaton (2003: 3).
21
For the presence of Canto 3 in Eliot, see Frye (1963: 50–3).

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 MODERNIST NEKUIAS AND ANTIHEROISM

title is a quotation of line 60 (that is, three lines below the verses of Canto 3 to which
Eliot alludes in The Waste Land), where among the crowd of ‘neutrals’ Dante singled
out a man ‘who made from cowardice the great refusal’: ‘che fece per viltà il gran
rifiuto’. According to most commentators, the figure whom Dante accused of the
‘great refusal’ may be the pope Celestine V, who abdicated in 1294. Cavafy’s poem
reads:

Che fece . . . il gran rifiuto

For some people the day comes
when they have to declare the great Yes or the great No.
It’s clear at once who has the Yes

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ready within him; and saying it,
he goes from honor to honor, strong in his conviction.
He who refuses does not repent. Asked again,
he’d still say no. Yet that no – the right no –
drags him down all his life.

With the omission of the phrase ‘per viltà’ (‘from cowardice’), as he himself argued,
Cavafy aimed to show that ‘the poem deals with or hints at the absence of coward-
ice’.22 But for Seferis this poem was simply and plainly ‘Cavafy’s greatest failure’,
as he wrote in his 1946 influential essay ‘C. P. Cavafy, T. S. Eliot: Parallels’.
He repeated the same view in his essay ‘A little more about the Alexandrine’
(1941–6), where he expanded on the people in Dante’s Inferno, Canto 3:

[. . .] [these] are the souls the most contemptible [. . .] the souls of the unconcerned, luke-
warm, cowardly, indifferent, neutral people [. . .] Those who made [the refusal] do not say
either yes or no, because they are a dead point, and in order to say yes or no, great or small,
you must not have made the refusal [arnisi] of life.23

Unlike in the case of Cavafy, Seferis praised the use of the same Canto by Eliot. He
said about the denizens of The Waste Land:

the crowd which goes round there is comprised of the people ‘who made from cowardice the
great refusal’ – ‘che fece per viltà il gran rifiuto’, as Dante teaches us.24

Interestingly, both texts in which he spoke of the Dantian ‘neutrals’ on the occasion
of Cavafy’s ‘Che fece . . . il gran rifiuto’ (‘C. P. Cavafy, T. S. Eliot: Parallels’ and ‘A
little more about the Alexandrine’) were written during the period in which Seferis
appears most preoccupied with Elpenor, when he wrote ‘Thrush’ (1946) and, three
years later, ‘A scenario for ‘‘Thrush’’’ (1949). Although the way in which he spoke in

22
Quoted in Savvidis (1985: 161); see also Tsirkas (1974: 347–66).
23
D1.391.
24
D1.357.

151
 POLINA TAMBAKAKI

the latter text about the ‘sentimental and faint-hearted’ Elpenor was undoubtedly
much milder than the way in which he spoke about Dante’s ‘neutrals’, there is
equally no doubt that by stressing Elpenor’s share in ‘evil’ he also pointed to
what connects him with the first shades in the Inferno: his occupying the neutral
middle ground and his irresponsibility towards life.
The question arises: When did Seferis draw this connection between Elpenor and
the Dantean ‘neutrals’ for the first time? And, furthermore, are there signs of this
connection in his poetry?
Seferis situated his systematic reading of Dante in the summer of 1935,25 after his
return from London, where he had served as consul in the Greek Embassy (1931–4).
But he must have read at least some parts of Dante’s Divine Comedy much earlier —

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certainly Canto 3. In fact, in his library there is an edition of the Inferno probably
acquired early in 1927, with annotations especially on Canto 3. And this Canto may
also have been employed in the early drafts of his novel Six Nights on the Acropolis,
which, as Seferis says, reflects the years 1925–30 — the years after the Asia Minor
Catastrophe, when he returned from Paris to Athens.26
Interestingly, in this ‘Dantian’ novel we hear of the negative view held by the
protagonist, Stratis (an alter ego of Seferis) about Cavafy. Seferis himself many years
later would say:

[. . .] I did not bear any sort of admiration for Cavafy. I am very sorry to say this, but we are
referring to the years 25, 26.27

In Six Nights we also hear of Stratis’ wish to write comments/scholia on the Odyssey
— or as Seferis wrote in his diaries in 1925, ‘an Odyssey in reverse’.28 Both Stratis in
the novel and Seferis in his diaries give examples of such scholia, the first on Calypso,
the other on Circe, the versification and ironic tone of which bring to mind ‘Arnisi’
and ‘The companions in Hades’. These last poems are dated from the end of the
1920s and appear consecutively in Seferis’ first collection Turning Point, whose
ambiguous title in Greek (Stro’–) pointed, among other things, to the turning
point in the poetry and history of Greece.29 As we saw, these were also the two
poems in which Seferis claimed that Elpenor appears for the first time in his poetry.
25
D2.249.
26
See Beaton (2003: 440, n. 8): we know, for example, that Seferis was planning initially to
have as an epigraph for his 1932 poem The Cistern three lines from the last Canto of
Inferno (XXXIV 91–3); see also Marangkopoulos (2002).
27
Seferis-Philipe (1991: 77); cf. 6N.44.
28
L1.15 and M1.43 (‘ ‘‘Gloss’’ on the Odyssey’), with 6N.43; see Vayenas (1979: 170) and
Ricks (1989: 121–2).
29
Although it precedes ‘The companions in Hades’ in Strophi [Turning Point], ‘Arnisi’ was
written after it. In Seferis’ archive the first draft of ‘The companions in Hades’ is dated
‘20 March 1928’, whereas ‘Arnisi’ ‘18 October 1929’: see Beaton (2003: 429, n. 55 and
431, n. 72); for the meaning of the title Strophi, see Beaton (2003: 96).

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 MODERNIST NEKUIAS AND ANTIHEROISM

‘The companions in Hades’ and ‘Arnisi’: ‘an Odyssey in reverse’ and Cavafy
In ‘The companions in Hades’ the speaker, using the first person plural, refers to the
reasons for their current situation in the Underworld. Although they had hardtack at
their disposal, they had eaten the Oxen of the Sun:

Since we still had some hardtack

how stupid of us
to go ashore and eat
the Sun’s slow cattle
(1–4)

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The Homeric allusion of the poem is unmistakable, and the two lines from the
Proem to the Odyssey (lines 8–9), where Odysseus’ companions are judged in the
most severe way in the whole epic, are used as its epigraph:30

n–pioi, o7 kat1 boN& ‘Y p"r0ono& *H "l0oio

4sqion: a2t1r 3 to8sin 2’"0l"to n0stimon 9mar.
fools, who ate the cattle of Helios Hyperion;
and he deprived them of the day of their return

Yet in Homer’s account, Elpenor was not among those who ate the sacred cattle of
the Sun through foolishness and could not thus be part of the plural ‘we’ of the poem
— although, of course, by the time these companions reached Hades, he had already
become one of its inhabitants. But the ‘elpenorian’ characteristics of the people in
‘The companions in Hades’, as Seferis would define them in ‘A scenario for
‘‘Thrush’’’, are clear. We are told of their ‘soft’ character which allowed them to
indulge in pleasures without restraint:

On the earth’s back we hungered,

but when we’d eaten well
we fell to these lower regions
mindless and satisfied.
(9-end)

Interestingly, and in contrast to Seferis’ own statement about his early, generally
negative, stance towards Cavafy, in the last two lines of the poem, ‘we fell to these
lower regions, j mindless and satisfied’, criticism has detected an early Cavafian tone:
Seferis’ lines are reminiscent of the phrase ‘oblivious, peaceful, and pleased’ in
Cavafy’s poem ‘The footsteps’.31 But if in Cavafy the object of irony was the

30
See Ricks (1989: 122) with Maronitis’ fundamental essay ‘The philetairos Odysseus’
(2008: 51–70).
31
See Sinopoulos (1961: 190) and Vayenas (1979: 230); cf. Eugenio Montale’s poem
‘Leggendo Cavafis’.

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 POLINA TAMBAKAKI

Emperor Nero, in the case of Seferis’ poem, the irony related to the companions of
Odysseus, this ‘we’ in which the speaker includes himself. In the aftermath of the
Asia Minor Catastrophe questions of responsibility and fate, as well as of how to find
a way out of loss and pain were posed in an urgent way on the collective and indi-
vidual levels. As Ricks remarks, ‘‘‘The Companions’’ can be read [. . .] as a gloss on
the Asia Minor Disaster that in scale and tone is a rejection of an earlier generation’s
use of Homer.’32 It was within this context that ‘Arnisi’ was also situated.
‘Arnisi’ is perhaps the most well-known poem by Seferis owing to its influential
trajectory as a song, after its setting to music by Mikis Theodorakis in 1961. On the
occasion of this setting, we are offered another statement by Seferis about the poem,
informal this time, in addition to his comments in ‘A scenario for ‘‘Thrush’’’ about

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the presence of Elpenor in the poem. In a letter to Savvidis, Seferis expressed his
ambivalence about this very popular musical interpretation of ‘Arnisi’: on the one
hand, he spoke about it positively, but on the other hand he was totally negative
about the omission by Theodorakis of the semi-colon in the poem’s last stanza,
whose third line had become: ‘p–ram" th zw– ma& l0qo&’ [‘we set out on life’s
path wrongly’]. This omission, Seferis argued, was detrimental to the meaning of
the poem. He wrote: ‘the lack of a pause before the word ‘‘l0qo&’’ [‘‘wrongly’’]
makes nonsense of the last verse.’33
‘Arnisi’ does not allude to Homer but shares with ‘The companions in Hades’ the
scenery of a seashore and the first plural ‘we’ of the speaking voice. However, instead
of hunger it is thirst which pestered the people there, a thirst which they were not
given the opportunity to quench:

Upon the hidden shore so fine

as fair as any dove
we thirsted from the sun above:
the water though was brine.
(1–4)

In the second stanza, an erotic tone emerges, as the people wrote the name of a
woman on the sand and the sea-wind came and swept it off. It is through this image
—a poetic topos34 — that the people are identified as men:

There on the strand we set about

to write her name in sand:
nicely the sea wind lent a hand
and wiped the writing out.
(5–8)

32
Ricks (1989: 122).
33
Quoted in Beaton (2003: 362).
34
See Savvidis’ notes to Seferis’ poem (P312) with reference to Palamas.

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 MODERNIST NEKUIAS AND ANTIHEROISM

As for the third (and last) stanza (which contains the semi-colon which would
be lost in Theodorakis’ setting), this refers to a change in the way of life of the
people:

Such heart and soul we had to give

such sadness and such longing
when we set out on life’s path: wrongly,
and changed the way we live.
(9-end)35

Concerning ‘Arnisi’, Seferis’ claims either about Elpenor or the ‘lost semi-colon’

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have not been accounted for. The furthest criticism has gone is to argue that ‘the
unsung semi-colon, while not exactly changing the meaning, alters the atmos-
phere’.36 As for Elpenor, Seferis’ statement has even been deemed confusing and
not contributing ‘in any way to the better understanding of ‘‘Arnisi’’ ’.37 ‘Arnisi’ is
thus one of those famous poems which are generally understood in a way that defies
the statements made by their own creators. Another such case is the 1915 poem ‘The
road not taken’ by Robert Frost: despite the American poet’s insistence on the
playfully tricky nature of his famous poem, this has been interpreted as ‘an
emblem of individual choice and self-reliance, a moral tale in which the traveller
takes responsibility for their own destiny’.38 Moreover, its two roads are also
reminiscent of ‘The great Yes and the great No’ of Cavafy’s ‘Che fece . . . il gran
rifiuto’, to which, I suggest, ‘Arnisi’ is a reaction.39
Interestingly, in the rare cases where Elpenor’s presence in ‘Arnisi’ is somehow
acknowledged by critics, it has been related both to the semi-colon and the poem’s
title. The ‘elpenorian’ element, critics say, is detectable in the ease with which the
people in the poem respond to the ‘loss’ depicted in each of the three stanzas, always
after the semi-colon: in the first stanza there is the refusal of nature to provide
drinking water for the people on the seashore; in the second stanza, its denial to
preserve the name of the beloved woman written by them on the sand; and in the

35
The original reads: Sto p"rigi0li to kru’0 j ki 0spro san p"ristŒri j diy0sam" to
m"shmŒri! ma to n"r0 glu’0. jj P0nw sthn 0mmo thn xanq– j gr0yam" t’ 0nom0 th&! j
wra0 a pou ’0shx"n o mp0th& j kai sb–sthk" h gra’–. jj L" ti kardi0, m" ti pno–, j ti
p0qou& kai ti p0qo& j p–ram" th zw– ma&! l0qo&! j ki all0xam" zw–.
36
Papanikolaou (2000: 10).
37
Papazoglou (1995: 447–8).
38
Hollis (2011: 233–4).
39
The possibility of influence or imitation in the case of Frost and Cavafy, as well as of
Frost and Seferis must be ruled out. Cavafy became known to the English public after the
publication of an article on his poetry by E. M. Forster in the London magazine The
Athenaeum in 1919; as for Seferis and Frost, despite their poetic kinship, they ‘knew little
or nothing of one another’s work’ (Hadas,1985: 7).

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 POLINA TAMBAKAKI

third stanza, the people’s own renunciation of their previous life.40 This under-
standing of the poem has also been reflected in the way in which the title of the poem
has been translated into English. The standard translation is ‘Denial’, by which
Theodorakis’ song is also known; ‘Renunciation’ is another alternative.41
Without exception, criticism has stressed the title’s descriptive function (to use
Genette’s terminology42) in relation to that ‘loss’ which, as we saw, was pinpointed in
each stanza of the poem. But the way in which ‘loss’ is depicted in the poem seems to
call for further attention, and accordingly the title might equally — and I venture to
say, more accurately — have a connotative function, as a sort of comment on the
stance of the people towards life. For, although we can see a sort of loss in each stanza,
the people themselves do not seem to feel it as such. The most explicit evidence of it is

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given in the second stanza in the phrase ‘nicely [wra0a] the sea wind lent a hand j and
wiped the writing out’ at the center of the poem (my emphasis).
In effect, the people in ‘Arnisi’ simply comply with anything fate brings — in
each stanza after the semi-colon: the lack of water, the sea-breeze or a sudden
‘thought’ or ‘realisation’ concerning their own life, which do not seem to have
more weight for them than the sea-breeze itself. Their stance can be characterized
as ‘neutral’ and irresponsible. And this becomes more evident as the poem pro-
gresses from bodily survival (first stanza), to sentimental life (second stanza) and
eventually to one’s whole way of life (last stanza).
In this light, the poem appears to be an answer to Cavafy’s ‘Che fece . . . il gran
rifiuto’, which was very popular during the 1920s, and which Seferis knew and
evidently disliked so much. If Cavafy had left out the phrase ‘per viltà’ (‘from
cowardice’) from Dante’s Canto 3 about the ‘neutrals’, Seferis’ stressed exactly
this ‘neutral’ cowardice, which he equated with ‘the refusal [0rnhsh] of life’ (see
above).43 In this context, the title ‘Arnisi’ (‘Arnhsh’)
# itself should be understood and
translated accordingly as ‘Refusal’: a bitter comment on the irresponsible stance of
people towards life, towards nature and history, collective and/or personal, made (as
in the case of ‘The companions in Hades’) through internal focalisation, the first
personal plural ‘we’.
As we saw, in ‘A scenario for ‘‘Thrush’’’, Seferis would relate this compliant stance
to the figure of Elpenor. And it is worth remembering that, in ‘Thrush’, ‘the hedonist
Elpenor’ accepts without complaints or hints of anger his failure to persuade Circe
about his erotic feelings. But, his claims notwithstanding, there is no indication that
when writing ‘Arnisi’ Seferis had Elpenor in mind. Except for its versification and

40
Papanikolaou (2000: 10); see also, Lignadis (1981), Karantonis (1931: 27) and
Christodoulou (1982: 18–9).
41
See Beaton (2003: 90); but also Beaton’s translation in the present article.
42
Genette (1997: 93).
43
Chrysanthopoulos (1995) points briefly to a connection between Seferis’ ‘Arnisi’ and
Cavafy’s ‘Che fece . . . il gran rifiuto’, but without further analysis or any reference to
Elpenor.

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 MODERNIST NEKUIAS AND ANTIHEROISM

ironic tone, akin to the other scholia on the Odyssey written by Seferis during that
period (see above), the only vestige of a Homeric subtext might be the curious fact
that in the second stanza of the poem, unlike the standard poetic topos, we find many
men writing on the sand the name of one woman, something which in the light of the
next poem in Turning Point, ‘The companions in Hades’, might be seen in connec-
tion with the Homeric Circe.
However, when in 1935, four years after the publication of Turning Point, Seferis
‘officially’ introduced Elpenor into his poetry in the poem ‘Argonauts’, he did so, I
suggest, in tandem with complex references to Dante’s ‘neutrals’, also revisiting
‘The companions in Hades’ and ‘Arnisi’. This time he built the link between the
Homeric and Dantian nekuias with Eliot and Pound as guides.

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‘Argonauts’: Seferis reading Eliot and Pound
In 1935 Mythistorema was published, ‘perhaps the most influential single work of
poetry in twentieth-century Greece’ and the first major fruit of Seferis’ preoccupa-
tion with the Homeric nekuia: ‘The revival of this episode from the Odyssey, and its
endowment with a new significance for the present, is perhaps Seferis’ most dis-
tinctive contribution to European poetry.’44 Mythistorema, whose intringuing title
referred to the genre of the novel, consisted of twenty-four sections (reminiscent of
the twenty-four books into which the Iliad and the Odyssey are divided),45 and had
the dateline December 1933–December 1934 at its end. It bore witness to Seferis’
apprenticeship to the work of the Anglo-American ‘high modernists’ during his
London period, August 1931–January 1934 — above all to Eliot, as Seferis himself
was at pains to point out in his prose writings.
Undoubtedly ‘Argonauts’, Mythistorema’s fourth section, is one of the best
examples of this apprenticeship with its mythical and historical references, its
highly elaborative nexus of allusions, and its nekuian character. It is there that
Elpenor appears for the first time, ‘as a collective character’ with his emblematic
oar. Towards the end of the poem we read about the dead companions: ‘Their oars j
mark the place where they sleep on the shore’. In the poem the companions’ most
prominent ‘elpenorian’ trait has been clearly pronounced: the fact that they accepted
(the verb is heard twice in two consecutive lines) everything:

They were good, the companions, they didn’t complain

about the work or the thirst or the frost,
they had the bearing of trees and waves
that accept the wind and the rain
accept the night and the sun
without changing in the midst of change
(6–11)
44
Ricks (1989: 135 and 137).
45
For whether Mythistorema is a large poem with 24 sections or a collection of 24 poems, see
Beaton (1991: 89–90); see also Padel (1985).

157
 POLINA TAMBAKAKI

The acceptance by the companions in ‘Argonauts’ of whatever fate brought seems to

glimpse back to the people of ‘Arnisi’, and the similarities on the level of lexical
correspondences and imagery are noteworthy: the words ‘thirst’, ‘wind’, ‘sun’ and
above all ‘change’ — suffice it to remember the last line of ‘Arnisi’: ‘and [we]
changed the way we live.’
But in ‘Argonauts’ the companions have a further hallmark: their ‘lowered eyes’
— a phrase heard thrice in the poem:

They were fine, whole days

they sweated at the oars with lowered eyes
[. . .]

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Sometimes they sang, with lowered eyes
[. . .]
The companions died one by one,
with lowered eyes. [. . .]
(12–13, 16, 38–39)

The ability to see is cardinal to the poem. At its opening, Socrates’ voice, in his first
appearance in Seferis’ poetry, speaks about self-knowledge through looking at the
soul (from Plato’s Alcibiades 133b):

Ja1 yuc1
"2 mŒll"i gnÞs"sqai a3t1n
"2 & yuc1n
a2tI bl"ptŒon
And the soul
if it is to know itself
must look
into the soul46

In the wider nexus of allusions of the ‘lowered eyes’ in ‘Argonauts’, the people
flowing over London Bridge in Eliot’s The Waste Land seem also to have played a
crucial role. As we saw, exactly at the lines where the modern ‘neutrals’ from the
Dantean vestibule of Hell appear in the poem, ‘each man fixed his eyes before his
feet’ — an unmistakable image of their alienation and, in Dante’s words, their ‘blind
life’ (Canto 3, line 47).
Arguably, Seferis’ study of Eliot in London 1931–4 must have offered him a new
way to read Dante and, within this context, Canto 3 seems to have played a role in
the harsh tone at the end of the poem: ‘Nobody remembers them. Justice’. For in
‘Argonauts’ the wish of the Homeric Elpenor to have his oar planted above his burial
46
In the notes to his poems, Seferis added that this phrase from Alcibiades had brought him
‘a feeling very akin to the following lines by Baudelaire (‘La mort des amants’): Nos deux
coeurs seront deux vastes flambeaux, j Qui réfléchiront leurs doubles lumières j Dans nos
deux esprits ces miroirs jumeaux’ (P315–6).

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 MODERNIST NEKUIAS AND ANTIHEROISM

mound, in order to be remembered, has failed and this is what ought to have been
done. Such a merciless condemnation is not in Homer but in Canto 3 of Dante’s
Inferno about the ‘neutrals’:

The world will not record their having been there;

Heaven’s mercy and its justice turn from them.
Let’s not discuss them; look and pass them by.
(49–51)47

But there is also another influence on the poem: that of Ezra Pound, ‘il miglior
fabbro’ (‘the best craftsman’) to whom The Waste Land was dedicated. After all, it

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was Pound and not Eliot who referred directly to Elpenor in his poetry, first by name
and in a clearly Homeric context in the famous nekuia of his Canto 1 (1917/1925).
Pound’s ‘aggressive translation’ of the words of the pitiful spirit of the Homeric
Elpenor (cf. above, Hammond’s translation) has been viewed as encapsulating the
poet’s recognition and anxiety of belatedness — a hallmark of many modern
nekuias:48

‘[. . .]
But thou, O King, I bid remember me, unwept, unburied,
Heap up mine arms, be tomb by sea-bord, and inscribed:
A man of no fortune, and with a name to come.
And set my oar up, that I swung mid fellows’.
(42–56)

In criticism, Pound’s ‘influence’ on Seferis has been situated in the late 1930s,49 and
has not received adequate attention so far owing, to a great extent, to the Greek poet
himself. Seferis’ first translation of a poem by Pound was ‘Exile’s letter’ from Cathay
in 1935, pointing to Pound’s preoccupation with Chinese literature. Seferis’ trans-
lations from Pound’s Cantos, where the Homeric element is pronounced (especially
Canto 1), only appear in 1939, that is, closer to the publication of Logbook I in 1940
than that of Mythistorema in 1935.50 As for his essays, unlike the way in which he
spoke about Eliot, Seferis restricted his references to Pound to scattered phrases,
almost always in conjunction with Eliot. There are many possible reasons for
Seferis’ suppression of Pound, not least Pound’s political beliefs. By the 1930s
Pound had already been well associated with Italian fascism, something which
could not have escaped Seferis’ attention.
When, for example, he quoted the following phrase by Pound ‘The reader’s first
and simplest test of an author will be to look for words that do not function’, Seferis

47
Trans. Mark Musa (Dante’s Inferno, The Indiana Critical Edition (1995)).
48
Thurston (2009: 33) with Dubois and Lentricchia (2003: 160).
49
See Beaton (2003: 163) and Thaniel (1974).
50
See A213.

159
 POLINA TAMBAKAKI

did not name him. He added instead: ‘As someone said.’51 This was in a lecture on
General Makriyannis given by Seferis in Alexandria and then again in Cairo in May
1943, which in addition to its literary side had a clearly patriotic tone of resistance. In
the same period, 1941–3, Pound was delivering his political radio broadcasts in
which he criticized American intervention in the war. These broadcasts would
lead to his indictment for treason by the American authorities, and, after the war,
to his imprisonment in Pisa and finally to his confinement in a psychiatric unit for
the criminally insane for almost thirteen years. Even if Seferis did not follow
Pound’s political activities closely during that period, it is highly unlikely that he
did not know the latter’s loudly pronounced political allegiances. Interestingly, he
had not referred to Pound even when he applied for the first time in his essays the

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Poundian method of ‘looking for words that do not function’, as early as in
December 1936, in his essay ‘Questions in reading Kalvos’.52 Mythistorema,
whose modernist technique has been viewed by critics solely in relation to Eliot,
bears equal witness to Seferis’ reading of Pound, not only of the Cantos, but also, and
most fundamentally, I suggest, of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. The figure of Elpenor in
‘Argonauts’ is a telling trace of Seferis’ dialogue with this latter work.
Seferis did not refer to Mauberley either in his Essays or in his diaries. Yet he must
have read it carefully in the edition of Pound’s Selected Poems by Eliot in 1933.
Eliot’s Introduction includes phrases which would become famous (e.g. ‘The poem
which is absolutely original is absolutely bad’), and places laudatory emphasis on
Mauberley:

It may give surprise that I attach so much importance to Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. This seems
to me a great poem. On the one hand, I perceive that the versification is more accomplished
than that of any other of the poems in this book, and more varied. [. . .] On the other hand,
[. . .] it is compact of the experience of a certain man in a certain place at a certain time; and it
is also a document of an epoch; it is genuine tragedy and comedy; and it is, in the best sense of
Arnold’s worn phrase, a ‘criticism of life’.53

Mauberley might have played a significant role in the overall conception of

Mythistorema, and even in its very title, which has triggered much discussion, but
never in relation to Pound. Seferis himself explained the title of his collection as
follows:

MYTHISTOREMA – it is its two components that made me choose the title of this work:
MYTHOS, because I have used, clearly enough, a certain mythology; ISTORIA [meaning

51
D1.260. This phrase comes from ABC of Reading by Pound (1960: 63), first published in
London in 1934.
52
For this essay, see Tambakaki (2011: 142–5).
53
Pound (1933: xxviii–xxviv) (Eliot’s Introduction). In 1946, speaking of Eliot’s ‘historical
sense’, Seferis would quote a long passage from this Introduction; see D1.518.

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 MODERNIST NEKUIAS AND ANTIHEROISM

both ‘story’ and ‘history’], because I have tried to express, with some coherence, a condition
which is as independent from myself as the characters of a novel.54

But ‘Mythistorema’ primarily means ‘novel’, and Mauberley had complex poetic
aspirations to this genre: according to Pound, it was ‘an attempt to condense the
James novel’,55 and the phrase ‘his Penelope was Flaubert’ appears there twice, in
the introductory sections of its two parts, ‘E. P. Ode pour l’élection de son sepul-
chre’ and ‘Mauberley, 1920’. The reference to Flaubert was surely connected with
the poem’s quest for le mot juste (‘the right word’), its openness of form and its
‘perspectival ambiguity’.56
In Seferis’ Mythistorema the quest for the exact and concrete language was a

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hallmark of its new modernist idiom, as is the absence of a single or sustained
perspective or point of view.57 Suffice it to mention the cases where the same or
similar phrases appear in different sections of the poem, undermining the sense of a
stable single speaker. Even, for instance, the austere condemnation of the ‘elpe-
norian’ companions in ‘Argonauts’ to oblivion (‘Nobody remembers them. Justice’;
see above) would be undermined in a later section of the poem, through a voiced
urge for compassion:

Pity those who wait with such patience

[. . .]
Pity the companion who shared our privation and our sweat
and plunged into the sun like a crow beyond the ruins,
without hope of enjoying our reward.
(Mythistorema 15: 15–22)58

Mauberley was also significant for Seferis in signalling his new poetic departure, and
consequently his own nekuia.59 Mauberley of 1920 was Pound’s farewell to London
and his aesthetic ambitions hitherto. In January 1921, the American poet would
move to France and then to Italy — literally going further east into the European
tradition. For Seferis too Mythistorema of 1935 was a farewell to London. But in his
case, this farewell was also a manifestation of the Greek poet’s new aesthetic aspir-
ations and a return, a nostos, after having spent three years in the British capital.

54
P314.
55
In a 1922 letter to Felix Schelling; Pound (1971: 180); see also Espey (1974: 49–61).
56
Coyle (2006: 435).
57
Cf. Coyle (2006: 435). Cf. Beaton (1991: 96) about the stark end of ‘Argonauts’: ‘there is
no clue as to whether the last word reflects the view of the speaker in the poem, the
comment of someone else, or the belief of the poet’; and Beaton (2003: 125) about a
reference by Seferis to Henry James in a letter to Theotokas during the period of writing
Mythistorema.
58
See Keeley (1983: 93); Vayenas (1979: 154), quoted in translation in Keeley (1983: 88).
59
See Hall (2008: 206).

161
 POLINA TAMBAKAKI

A three-year period and the question of art take pride of place in both works. This is
how Mauberley starts:

For three years, [. . .]

He strove to resuscitate the dead art
Of poetry; to maintain ‘the sublime’
In the old sense. [. . .]

And Mythistorema:

The angel –

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Three years we waited for him, attention riveted,
[. . .]
When we woke we travelled towards the north, strangers
[. . .]
We brought back
These carved reliefs of a humble art

In Mauberley too sculpting and carving play a key role. There we read lines such as
‘his art [. . .] an art j in profile’, and one of its most famous sections is ‘Medallion’,
with which Mauberley ends.

Luini in porcelain!
[. . .]
The face-oval beneath the glaze,
Bright in its suave bounding-line, as,
Beneath half-watt rays,
The eyes tune topaz.
(Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, ‘Medallion’: 1, 13-end)

But in Seferis’ Mythistorema we do not find references to such ‘high’ works of art. In
his Modern Greek nekuia, Seferis speaks instead of humble reliefs, most probably
ancient tombstones, the products of simple craftsmen like those in the
Kerameikos.60 This appears to be what Seferis brings as a Greek poet to
European modern nekuias and at the same time what he finds at his return home.
It is within this context that Elpenor makes his first collective appearance in

60
For the tombstones of Kerameikos, cf. Elytis (1992: 31). In criticism Karyotakis’ line
‘Humble art without style’ from ‘March, mournful and vertical’ has been connected with
Seferis’ last line (see P315, Savvidis’ note, with Ricks (1989: 139–42)). But cf. D1.65,
Seferis’ reference to Karyotakis’ lines with emphasis on the expression ‘without style’,
together with Pound’s line ‘The ‘‘age demanded’’ chiefly a mould of plaster’ from
Mauberley (Part I, ii, line 9). Also note the use of the word ‘humble’ [‘tap"in0&’] in
Seferis’ poetry almost always in the sense encountered in Elytis’ text.

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 MODERNIST NEKUIAS AND ANTIHEROISM

‘Argonauts’, in Mythistorema, not by name but through his oar, as in Mauberley,

where we read:

Then on an oar
Read this:

‘I was
And I no more exist;
Here drifted
An hedonist’.
(Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, ‘Mauberley 1920’, IV: 20–25)

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At the opening of this particular section of Mauberley, just before these lines,
Elpenor is linked with ‘a consciousness disjunct’ like the ‘scattered Moluccas’,
which do not know ‘day to day, the first day’s end, in the next noon’ and whose
foreshores were ‘washed in the cobalt of oblivions’ (1–3 and 8–9). This was exactly
the consciousness of the companions in Seferis’ ‘Argonauts’ who accepted every-
thing ‘without changing in the midst of change’. It is remarkable that when the word
‘memory’ appears in the poem, there is a sudden shift from the first person plural to
the third person plural, stressing what separates the speaker, a sort of Odysseus,
from his companions:

We moored on shores full of night-scents,

the birds singing, with waters that left on the hands
the memory of a great happiness.
But the voyages did not end.
Their souls became one with the oars and the oarlocks
(‘Argonauts’: 31–34)

In the second part of ‘Thrush’, as we saw, ‘The hedonist Elpenor’ [‘O hdonik0&
Elp–nwr’] appears. The word ‘hdonik0&’, a hapax in Seferis’ poetry, clearly
evokes both Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley and Cavafy: in Mauberley, this was
the word used for the figure of Elpenor; and ‘hdonik0&’ is a key word throughout
Cavafy’s work. By naming the most famous Elpenor in his poetry ‘an hedonist’,
Seferis paid tribute to the two poets who had played, each in a different manner, a
defining role in the moulding of one of the most important figures in his poetry.
Cavafy was his first ‘guide’ in paying attention to Dante’s ‘neutrals’ of Canto 3 of the
Inferno and the reason for their condemnation: their cowardice, ‘per viltà’, the
phrase which Cavafy omitted in his famous poem ‘Che fece . . . il gran rifiuto’;
and in Pound’s Mauberley, the connection of the ‘hedonist’ Elpenor with the
image of ‘a consciousness disjunct’ helped Seferis in his own subtle treatment of
the ‘elpenorian’ personal and collective memory.
In the nekuia of ‘Thrush’, Seferis also substituted Socrates in the Apology for
Tiresias as the ‘interpreter of nostos’: unlike Homer and other modern nekuias, it

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was Socrates’ last words before his death that would lead Odysseus to his ‘home’,
that is, the sunlight at the end of the poem. ‘The reasons for this substitution’,
Keeley says, ‘take us to the heart of Seferis’s moral universe’, as it had been manifest
since ‘The companions in Hades’.61 They were closely intertwined with the ethical
questions linked in Seferis’ work with Elpenor, the figure who encapsulated not so
much the poet’s recognition and anxiety of belatedness, as in other modern nekuias,
but the anxiety of cowardice towards life. It is no surprise that, after ‘Thrush’, where
he finds his subtlest, most compact and humane form, Elpenor will officially
disappear from Seferis’ poetry.

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Acknowledgments
Versions of the article were presented at seminars held at King’s College London
and the University of Cyprus, and at the 2011 Modern Greek Association Studies
(MGSA) Symposium in New York. I thank the audiences for their constructive
feedback. For their insightful comments, criticism and suggestions at various stages,
I am deeply indebted to Roderick Beaton, Peter Bien, Edmund Keeley, David Ricks,
and the CRJ readers. I am also grateful to Roderick Beaton for permission to use his
translation of the poem ‘Arnisi’ [‘Refusal’] by George Seferis. The familiar clause
regarding the claiming of responsibility for the opinions expressed and for errors and
oversights applies here as well.

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