3 HELLENIC D 13 RA A Quarterly Review VOL. IX, No. 2 SUMMER 1982 Publisher: LEANDROS PAPATHANASIOU Editorial Board: ALEXANDER KITROEFF PASCHALIS M. KITROMILIDES PETER PAPPAS YIANNIS P. ROUBATIS Founding Editor: NIKOS PETROPOULOS The Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora air mail; Institutional—$25.00 for one is a quarterly review published by Pella year, $45.00 for two years. Single issues Publishing Company, Inc., 461 Eighth cost $4.50; back issues cost $6.00. Avenue, New York, NY 10001, U.S.A., in March, June, September, and Decem- Advertising rates can be had on request ber. Copyright © 1982 by Pella Publish- by writing to the Managing Editor. ing Company. Articles appearing in this Journal are The editors welcome the freelance sub- abstracted and/or indexed in Historical mission of articles, essays and book re- Abstracts and America: History and views. All submitted material should be Life; or in Sociological Abstracts; or in typewritten and double-spaced. Trans- Psychological Abstracts; or in the Mod- lations should be accompanied by the ern Language Association Abstracts (in- original text. Book reviews should be cludes International Bibliography) or in approximately 600 to 1,200 words in International Political Science Abstracts length. Manuscripts will not be re- in accordance with the relevance of con- turned unless they are accompanied by tent to the abstracting agency. a stamped, self-addressed envelope. All articles and reviews published in Subscription rates: Individual—$ 15.00 the Journal represent only the opinions for one year, $27.00 for two years; of the individual authors; they do not Foreign—$20.00 for one year by surface necessarily reflect the views of the mail; Foreign—$25.00 for one year by editors or the publisher NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS C. CAPRI-KARKA is a poet and literary critic who received her doctorate in comparative literature from Columbia University. Her books indude, among others, The Age of Antipoetry, The Sorrow of Hellenism, and Peace, My Mother . ALEXANDER KITROEFF is currently completing his doctoral studies in history at Oxford University. In addition, he is a new editor of the Journal . JAMES STONE has translated the work of a number of Greek poets, including George Seferis and Takis Sinopoulos . ELIAS VLANTON is a freelance writer based in Washington, D.C. ERRATUM The following correction is for the article, "Alexandros Kotzias: Antipaiesis Archis and the Poetics of an Antihistorian," published in the spring 1982 (Vol. IX, no. 1) issue of the Journal. Page 28, note 18. After ("Spring 1981)," it should read: "The interpretation per- tains to the ending of 'The Death of Ivan Ilyich,' in which the mysticism derives from Ivan Ilyich's illumination, and that his voice is heard after he is declared dead. In Antipoeisis Archis, if there is no shift in narrative point of view, and the question ('and how?') is uttered by Menios, and not by the second narrator, then Menios's voice is heard after his death." 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS Statement 5 Seferis's Turning Point: A Textual Analysis by C. Capri-Karka 7 Documents: The O.S.S. and Greek-Americans edited by Elias Vlanton 36 In the Dialect of the Desert: Selected Poems of Yannis Kondos 105 A Divided Land: Greece in the Nineteen Forties by Alexander Kitroeff 118 3 Statement With this issue of the journal, the editorial board undergoes its first change since it was established at the time of Pella's assumption of the magazine. Dan Georgakas has resigned from the board and Alexander Kitroeff has agreed to join it. We are delighted to report, however, that we have not lost an editor but have gained a writer. Due to a number of other—and very pressing—writing com- mitments, Dan Georgakas decided that he could no longer con- tribute the enormous amount of time required to function as an editor of the Journal. However, he will still be writing for us. In fact, he, and we, hope that, being freed from editorial respon- sibilities, he will be able to commit much more of his time to the creative writing that is not only his specific forte but greatest love. In any case, Dan's contribution to the editorial board during the last six years was always a provocative and, thus, uniquely fruit- ful one. As the only one of us who was also a member of the Journal's original editorial board, his very presence guaranteed that we would never compromise or dilute the militant conscious- ness—and conscience—that gave the magazine its birth. Also, Dan's singular level-headedness (a quality sorely lacking both from the left and, especially, academe) ensured an editorial project that would never succumb to elitist posturing or intel- lectual hermeticism. In the end, Dan's editorial intervention came down to the defense of two simple principles: don't become so "serious" that you lose your intelligence and, above all else, don't forget the moral—which is to say, political—impulse for whose reason you presumably exist. Alexander Kitroeff is, in that precise sense, the perfect person to take over Dan Georgakas's role on our board. While he is a young scholar of extraordinary, and obvious, quality, he also possesses an ethical commitment to knowledge and the world that does not allow him to compromise with any of the structures of 5 6 JOURNAL OF THE HELLENIC DIASPORA domination that rule over both knowledge and the world. We believe that Alexander will add a great deal to the Journal. The very fact that he is our first English-based editor will, in itself, expand the Journal's intellectual boundaries. Much more im- portant than that fact, however, is that Kitroeff possesses an un- derstanding of history—which is his specific field of inquiry— that ensures a particular sensitivity to the two most basic beliefs of the Journal: that history is made by people as a whole and that people as a whole must have power over their history. Finally, our second installment of the O.S.S. documents proves that point quite directly, as we see the activities of some of the people who were a part of Greek history in the Forties. It should be stressed once again, however, that what we see here is through the mediation, not of our own eyes—and minds—but of those of the "observers" of the O.S.S. That "agency" becomes especially interesting—and illuminating—when one reads the O.S.S. political evaluations of the Greek personalities of that era. —The Editors Greece's leading biweekly of independent commentary and analysis For subscription information, write: ANTI DIMOCHAROUS 60 • ATHENS 601, GREECE Seferis's Turning Point: A Textual Analysis* by C. CAPRI-KARKA Turning Point is Seferis's first collection of poems. Even in this early work, published in 1931, one can find signs of his profound conscious- ness of the classical Greek tradition and at the same time of his thorough assimilation of the Greek and European poetic techniques of the time, most notably of the French - Symbolists. It is all written in rhyme and, although not as fine in form as his later work, it employs the same com- plex imagery and symbolism encountered in the collections that followed. Some of the recurrent motifs in his work appear for the first time here, providing the basis for further variation and development in his later poetry of certain essential themes which he keeps reiterating. The collection opens with the poem "Turning Point," which has the same title as the whole collection. It refers to the persona's change of attitude toward life, presumably as a result of a betrayal in love. This change is also implied in the epigraph of Turning Point,' and it is also referred to in the poem "Denial" of the same collection. A moment of terror comes to the protagonist, and the delightful journey of love becomes abortive, as betrayal poisons, like a snake, the heavenly garden. In contrast to the "Turning Point," in which the protagonist acknowl- edges his love for the person who later betrayed him, in most of the *This article is taken from C. Capri-Karka's recently-published book, Love and the Symbolic Journey in the Poetry of Cavafy, Eliot and Seferis. [Quotations of the poems of the collection Turning Point are from G. Seferis, Collected Poems 1924- 1955, tr. Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1967). Unless otherwise noted, quotations of poems from other collections are from G. Seferis, Poems, tr. Rex Warner (Boston, Mass.: Little Brown & Co., 1960), except for quotations from the Three Secret Poems, tr. Walter Kaiser (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967). On some occasions, one or two words of the translation were changed because a more literal rendering better supported the interpretation proposed by the author. In these cases, the modified words were enclosed in brackets. Unless otherwise noted, translations of Seferis's prose writings and poems not induded in the above collection are by the author.) 'But everything went wrong for me and upside down, the nature of things was reborn for me. (Erotokritos) 7 8 JOURNAL OF THE HELLENIC DIASPORA poems that follow, "Slowly you spoke," "The Sorrowing Girl," "Auto- mobile," "Comments," "In Memoriam," he suffers from an inability to love or he experiences an ephemeral emotion which quickly fades away, leaving him exhausted. Turning Point Although the poem "Turning Point" refers to a very important mo- ment in the protagonist's life, as far as time is concerned it represents a mere "grain of sand" in the hourglass. The protagonist does not spell out exactly what the moment was.