Ancestry and Continuity (Hellas-Ellada)

“History’s marvel, Hellas in despite 

Of time and interposing circumstances” 

Laurence Binyon, The Lamp of Greece, 1940 

“Most academic views of the Greeks are either incomplete or mistaken. The distinction between the ‘ancient’ and the ‘modern’ Greeks is positively harmful, since it disguises the most obvious facts that the Ancient Greeks were modern and that the modern Greeks are ancient.”

Rex Warner, Introduction, The King of Asine and other poems, George Seferis, 1948


“Perhaps we descend from them, perhaps we don’t, what does it matter? And who did they descend from, pray? Nobody knows. They were Greeks and so are we, that’s all we know…Who cares? Greece is an idea, that’s the thing! That’s what keeps us together- that, and the language and the country and the church- not that I like priests particularly, but we owe them a lot.”

(On the Ancient Greeks, according to a train guard in Thrace), Patrick Leigh Fermor: Roumeli, Travels in Northern Greece, 1966, p.63.


“I meant Greece is a continuous process. In English the expression “ancient Greece” includes the meaning of “finished,” whereas for us Greece goes on living, for better or for worse; it is in life, has not expired yet. “ George Seferis (Paris Review interview).


“Here every door has a name chiselled for some three thousand years or more,
every stone has been painted with a saint with wild eyes and ropy hair…” Yannis Ritsos, Romiosyni.


“Poetry written in Greek constitutes the longest uninterrupted tradition in the Western world. From Homer to the present day not a single generation of Greek has lived without expressing its joys and sorrows in verse, and frequently in verse of outstanding originality and beauty” (Constantine Trypanis, Penguin Book of Greek Verse, Introduction, p. lxv)

“No other language has so long a tradition. A writer of today will find himself using words and phrases which were in use long before Homer. And through all the vicissitudes of so extensive a history, the tradition is continuous. As Seferis will often point out, a modern Greek folk song may throw light on a passage of Homer or of Aeschylus. I doubt too whether it is possible to find a better guide than Thucydides to modern Greek politics…the Greeks themselves and their language have suffered change but never a loss of identity” (C. Trypanis, ibid).

See, for instance, the poem WORD by Aristotle Nikolaidis, translated by Kimon Friar:

Word

  

I first came upon it in Homer

and then for years afterward pursued it

through various texts. Disguised at times,

it surfaced in neglected chroniclers

or was wedged tight but breathing in compound words.

I found it again in a somewhat altered meaning

in distant dialects of the Greek,

and in chemical laboratories transformed

into specialized terminology: barbarous lips stammer it

in a variety of pronunciations.

                                                     Oh yes, it never died,

but traveling throughout the centuries, rooted

in the deep mouth of the Poet, it will be preserved

with unsuspected leaves and branches, with secret

flowers- a word that perhaps had been articulated for the

   first

time by the lips of devious Apollo.

Aristotle Nikolaidis

Translation, Kimon Friar

First published, POETRY, Chicago, November 1981.