Not Knowing About Poetry

Season 2, Episode 4: Roger Christofides on George Seferis and Shakespeare


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Roger Christofides discusses 'Neofitos Engleistos Speaks' (1953) by George Seferis, in connection with Shakespeare's play Othello. Roger is a Shakespeare scholar with a book on Othello that you can buy here - https://www.hive.co.uk/Product/R-M-Huddersfield-University-UK-Christofides/Othellos-Secret--The-Cyprus-Problem/18893065 . 

''Neofitos Engleistos Speaks' is not included in the major translations of Seferis' works.  A translation by John Stathatos (first printed in Labrys 8, 1983) is included below. You can find the Greek text here - https://www.greek-language.gr/digitalResources/literature/tools/concordance/browse.html?cnd_id=1&text_id=3183 .


Neofitos Engleistos Speaks

…. as for king Isaac, he imprisoned him in the castle known as Marcappo. And as for his colleague Saladin, the rogue took no action against him, but instead sold the country to the Latins for twelve hundred measures of gold. Which was the cause of great lamentation, and as foretold, the smoke coming from the north became unbearable… (Neofitos the Monk, Concerning the Wrongs done to the Land of Cyprus)

Overbearing structures; Hilarion Famagusta Bufavento; mere backdrops

hardly how we used to conceive of that ‘Jesus Christ Triumphs’

once seen above the walls of the Imperial City, now pocked with weeds and hovels

and the great towers cast down like some defeated giant’s dice.

It had meant something else to us, this war for Christ’s faith

and for man’s soul cradled by Our Lady of Victories

her eyes holding the anguish of the Greeks like a mosaic,

the anguish of that sea at the approach of kindness.

What if they strut their Lusignan melodramas against crusader backdrops

while we gag on the smoke from northern torches.

Let them hack at each other, beating the wind like a galley before the storm.

You are welcome to Cyprus, Lords. Goats and monkeys!

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Not Knowing About PoetryBy J S