Demetrios Capetanakis: a Greek Poet in England*

Demetrios Capetanakis: A Greek Poet in England* by DAVID RICKS Many English readers will have read Capetanakis's poems "Abel" and "The Isles of Greece" in the fifth book appended to Palgrave's Golden Treasury, by John Press in 1964. 1- Although a number of the most eminent Greek men of letters settled permanently in England—here one might single out the classic figures of demoticism, Pallis, Eftaliotis, and Vlasto—it's a sur- prise to be reading through a standard anthology of English verse and to come across a Greek name. 2 Some readers have then gone on to discover the posthumous book on which Capetanakis's English reputation rests. This slim and elegant volume, Demetrios Capetanakis: A Greek Poet in England, appeared in 1947, three years after the poet's death, edited and published by his friend John Lehmann. It must have enjoyed reasonable sales at the time, for it was reprinted in a New York edition in 1949 with the title The Shores of Darkness!' It would be fair, however, to say that the success of the dead poet was rather d' estime, and he is today little known as a poet in Eng- land. Indeed, the 1944 edition of Press's anthology has squeezed Capetanakis out.' Where, then, does Capetanakis's interest as an English poet lie? For the poet's own friends, whether Greek or British, there was, in the first place, a sense that his efforts in the exploration and the practice of an adopted literature—conducted *This essay is based on a lecture given at the British Council in Athens at a commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of Capetanakis's death, and later in a revised form at the Council's Thessaloniki branch. DAVID Rams is Lecturer in Modern Greek at King's College London. He has published widely on Modern Greek and Byzantine literature. 61 under conditions of world war and mortally worsening health— constituted more than a psychological curiosity (though that too, perhaps) .5 Capetanakis had a restless and searching mind, which seized on a newly adopted culture as it had earlier em- braced and then rejected that of Germany. So conscious was this choice that it not only has the force of a serious moral decision but may also shed some light on the permeable bar- riers between literary cultures, where Greeks often find themselves. The story of Capetanakis's years in England is easily told in the sense that they were outwardly uneventful. Arriving in 1939, he worked steadily to acquire a knowledge of what was to him a new—but excitingly new—language and literature. (His impressions of what that literature meant to him are full of interest, as we shall see.) Soon associated with a dominant literary circle, the personal impression Capetanakis made on English writers is clear both from the act of piety that led to the publication of his English work and from the tributes by Lehmann, Edith Sitwell, and William Plomer included in the volume with a memoir by Panagiotis Kanellopoulos. All of the above set down a strong sense of the man's character and capacities; but would we be right to infer that this was a case where one might say, with Cavafy, Xckotqlev To ind Tt- tato—Tiiv ia.opcpi Too, and leave it at that? On his death, Capetanakis left a small English oeuvre, but still an impressive result of under five years' work in a new language: 148 pages were considered publishable by Lehmann. These include the poems on which Capetanakis's reputation rests, and an essay called "A View of English Poetry," both of which I shall turn to later, but the bulk of the work consists of a truly cosmopolitan set of essays: on Rimbaud, Dostoevsky, Proust, Charlotte Brontë, Stefan George. The essays are, like Capetana- kis's Greek ones, dense, suggestive, sometimes obscure, always deeply felt, and self-consciously indebted to his revered Kierkegaard. The title Capetanakis was to have given to a prospective book of essays was The Shores of Darkness, and the image pervades his treatment of his chosen authors!' It also has clear enough relevance to the state of the world in which he knew 62 JOURNAL OF THE HELLENIC DIASPORA England—perhaps especially at the time when Britain and Greece alone stood against the menace of the Axis—and to his own imperiled health. But we need to recall the poem from which Capetanakis took the phrase in order fully to appreciate its central place in his work. In his sonnet, "To Homer" (1818), Keats, speaking of Homer's blindness as a source of insight, says, "Aye, on the shores of darkness there is light." Unable to read Homer in Greek but eager to learn, the English poet seeks the Greek example as an escape from his predica- ment: in comparable fashion, but by an inversion, Capetanakis seeks escape from his Greekness to find insight through the poetry of an adopted culture, in which he can move free of inhibitions.' The inhibitions are partly those he feels as a Greek bur- dened by the past, as we shall see from his poem, "The Isles of Greece"; but they are also those resulting from an ul- timately stultifying encounter with another adopted culture, that of Germany. In his essay on Stefan George, Capetanakis sets out his definition of what he considers to be the foundations— and, for him, the attractions—of English poetry in contradis- tinction to that of Germany and of George in particular. While recognizing that George never showed any sympathy for the Nazis and died outside Germany in 1933, Capetanakis considers that he was, nonetheless, "undoubtedly one of Hitler's forerunners."' The reason is that George is, in the Greek poet's view, "the most typical example of a pure state poet in modern times"—something unknown to England. Capetanakis goes on to say, in an important passage: By all this we do not mean that English poetry is a power dissolving the reality of man. On the contrary, we find a strong tendency in the tradition of English poetry to make man conscious of himself and his fate—that is, to make him more solid and more real. But the means English poetry uses to achieve this are different from the means used by state poetry. Instead of reconciling man with the world, the great English poets reveal to him the terrifying abyss of human destiny, they lead him to the verge of the precipice, Demetrios Capetanakis: A Greek Poet in England 63 and it is by the terror before nothingness that they make man more solid. The threat of utter destruction makes man gather all his forces in order to assert himself, his reality, his solidity, against the powers of nothingness. The reader of English poetry may be re-begot Of absence, darkness, death: things which are not, Capetanakis's culminating quotation from Donne's "A Nocturnal upon S. Lucy's Day" is significant, quite apart from the fact that the quotation, there in its full-form beginning, "I am re-begot," appears on his tombstone in London." In acquainting himself with the tradition of English poetry, and at the same time attempting—how consciously at first, we can- not know—to make himself part of this tradition, Capetanakis makes the above lines his key. "A View of English Poetry," the English reader can see how a Greek freshly interprets his tradition. The essay begins with some characteristically bold gen- eralizations: If one could explain why the English are the gentlest and at the same time the most stubborn people of the world, one could also explain why the English language is the poetic language par excellence. The English are gentle and stubborn at the same time because they are neither too gentle nor too stubborn. Balance is the secret of the English genius.' The essay, it is evident, is the sketching of a poetic Cape- tanakis admires and aspires to take further in his own poetry rather than a potted history of English verse. In no particular order, but with the true essayist's gift for quotation, Capetana- kis moves from poet to poet: Drayton, Ben Johnson, Blake, Chaucer, Henryson, Marlowe, Keats, Collins, Spenser, Vaughan, Shakespeare. These are anthology pieces, to be sure, but in- ternalized by a new sensibility: Capetanakis evidently feels close to the English tradition. 12 But Capetanakis did not seek to abandon his Greek iden- tity. He worked for the Greek embassy in London, giving two 64 JOURNAL OF THE HELLENIC DIASPORA short talks on modern Greece and publishing translations from Prevelakis and Elytis. On the strength of these, he was invited to lecture at the University of London (I presume for the Koraes Chair at King's College London) after the war. Yet the poet's dwindling energies seem mainly to have been invested in his customary voracious reading, now from English sources such as Dickens and Dryden. Interestingly, so English a critic as Geoffrey Grigson wrote of Capetanakis that "The poems he wrote would have pleased so English a critic as Dryden in their directness and muscular simplicity"—for Capetanakis was now attempting his own contribution to English poetry." Capetanakis came to England at twenty-seven, published his first English poem at thirty, and died at thirty-two. His first poem, published under the name D. Capetanakis, appeared in Penguin New Writing in 1942 and was sufficient of a success that he published a number of other poems, despite the advance of ill-health." It is worth trying to reconstruct the first poem's effect by looking at it in a little detail, but before we do so we should outline Capetanakis's poetic legacy.

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