Μιλούν οι ποιητές…

I have not spoken to you of the ancients

I have not spoken to you of the ancients. I did not want to tire you. Perhaps I should add a few words. Since the fifteenth century, since the fall of Byzantium, they have increasingly become the heritage of mankind. They have been integrated into what we have come to call European civilization. We rejoice that so many nations contribute to bring them closer to our life. Still, there are certain things that have remained our inalienable possessions. When I read in Homer the simple words «φάοϛ ήελίοιο» – today I would say «φῶς τοῦ ἥλιου» (the sunlight) – I experience a familiarity that stems from a collective soul rather than from an intellectual effort. It is a tone, one might say, whose harmonies reach quite far; it feels very different from anything a translation can give. For we do, after all, speak the same language – a language changed, if you insist, by an evolution of several thousand years, but despite everything faithful to itself – and the feeling for a language derives from emotions as much as from knowledge. This language shows the imprints of deeds and attitudes repeated throughout the ages

down to our own. These imprints sometimes have a surprising way of simplifying problems of interpretation that seem very difficult to others. I will not say that we are of the same blood, for I abhor racial theories, but we have always lived in the same country and have seen the same mountains slope into the sea. Perhaps I have used the word «tradition» without pointing out that it does not mean habit. On the contrary, tradition holds us by the ability to break habits, and thus proves its vitality.

…

I am also grateful that «the bounty of Sweden» has permitted me in the end to feel as if I were «nobody» – understanding this word in the sense that Ulysses gave it when he replied to the Cyclops, Polyphemus: «οὖτις» – nobody, in that mysterious current which is Greece.

Γιώργος Σεφέρης, Νομπελίστας