From the Elephant's Back (49 page)

[2]
.   Although Durrell first noted his Heraldic ideas in print in 1938, this short piece is his first published work on his notion of the Heraldic Universe. The concept itself first appeared in his letters to Henry Miller in 1936: “What I propose to do, with all deadly solemnity, is to create my Heraldic Universe quite alone…I am slowly but very carefully and without any conscious thought destroying time” (Durrell and Miller 18). See Pine's detailed discussion in
Lawrence Durrell: The Mindscape
as well as Lee Lemon's “Durrell, Derrida, and the Heraldic Universe” (62–69). The term “Heraldic Universe” is also political in nature via its relationship to the anarchism of Herbert Read and Miller, and the letter in which it first appeared is a largely unrecognized point-by-point response to Read's work on Surrealism and communism (Gifford, “Anarchist” 61–63).

[3]
.   Durrell is likely thinking of Ezra Pound's notion of the Chinese language as ideogrammic and as an ideal for poetic work.

[4]
.   Durrell previously used a similar phrase to describe the Heraldic Universe in his January 1937 letter to Henry Miller (later published as an essay, “Hamlet, Prince of China,” in 1938), which is included in this volume (73–81).

Hellene and Philhellene

[1]
.   A similar interpretation is taken up by David Roessel in
In Byron's Shadow
and Edmund Keeley's
Inventing Paradise
, both of which discuss Durrell's philhellenic works.

[2]
.   Lithgow (1582–1645) was a Scottish poet and travel writer who extensively travelled the Mediterranean and Levant.

[3]
.   Edward John Trelawny (1792–1881) was a writer and friend to Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) and Lord Byron, both of whose funerals he arranged. All three are famous philhellenes, and both Trelawny and Byron were in the Greek War of Independence.

[4]
.   Trelawny 56.

[5]
.   Trelawny 56–57.

[6]
.   The Italianate form of Saint Spiridon, the patron saint of Corfu.

[7]
.   Trelawny 57.

[8]
.   The remarkable Greek resistance to fascist Italian and German invasions during World War II, which continued throughout the war, perhaps most famously on Crete, despite extreme repercussions.

[9]
.   The account of Byron learning the Romaic dialect from Marmaratouri (his tutor and a leader of Greek patriots) while in Athens derives from the compilation of Byron's writings in
The Life, Writings, Opinions and Times of the Right Hon. George Gordon Noel Byron, Lord Byron
(129). Also see Byron's various translations of Romaic songs and “Don Juan,” CLXI–CLXV. Romaic is simply Modern Greek, which would have been largely unconsidered by Byron's contemporaries.

[10]
. Trelawny 137. These comments are preceded by Trelawny's quotation of “His life was one long war with self-sought foes” from
Childe Harold
.

[11]
. Edward Burnett Tylor (1832–1917) was, like Frazer, a founding figure in social anthropology. He is best known for
Primitive Culture
and
Anthropology
. He was the first professor of anthropology at the University of Oxford, whereas Frazer was at Cambridge.

[12]
. Durrell also mentions Rodd in his 1947 piece “From a Winter Journal,” two years prior to “Hellene and Philhellene.” Abbott (1874–1947) was a war correspondent and anthropologist. Abbott frequently discussed folklore in his works, but Durrell is likely referring to his 1903 book
Macedonian Folk-Lore
, for which Cambridge University sent him to Greece and Macedonia.

[13]
. Woolf (1882–1941) was a major British Modernist novelist. Durrell only mentions her works intermittently, though his library held in the Morris Library includes an unusual copy of Woolf's
A Cockney's Farming Experiences
in its 1972 limited printing. Woolf's full sentiment is important here: “Back and back we are drawn to steep ourselves in what, perhaps, is only an image of the reality, not the reality itself, a summer's day imagined in the heart of a northern winter. Chief among these sources of glamour and perhaps misunderstanding is the language. We can never hope to get the whole fling of a sentence in Greek as we do in English.…First there is the compactness of the expression. Shelley takes twenty-one words in English to translate thirteen words of Greek” (35).

[14]
. Woolf 35.

[15]
. Warner (1905–1986) was a British writer, known for his translations from Greek, whom Durrell knew well. Durrell's co-translation of
The King of Asine and Other Poems
with Bernard Spencer and Nanos Valaorotis was given an introduction by Warner (1948). Durrell borrowed from Warner's translation of Xenephon's
The Anabasis
(
The Persian Expedition
in the contemporary Penguin edition, which is Warner's) for Nessim's historical dreams in the first book of
The Alexandria Quartet
(143–56). This was first noticed by William Leigh Godshalk.

[16]
. MacNeice (1907–1963) was a major poet in the Auden circle. Durrell is referring to his 1936 translation of
The Agamemnon of Aeschylus
, published by Faber & Faber.

[17]
. T.E. Lawrence's (1888–1935) 1932 translation of
The Odyssey
for Oxford University Press and Rieu's (1887–1972) 1946 translation of the same for Penguin, which led to his founding and editorship of Penguin Classics.

[18]
. Solomos (1798–1857) is most famous as a poet for writing “Hymn to Liberty” that became the Greek national anthem. He also lived on Corfu, not far from where Durrell first stayed. Andreas Kalvos (1792–1869) was, like Solomos, a major Greek poet born on Zakynthos and who settled on Corfu where he became the director of the Ionian Academy.

[19]
. Greek was divided within “Romaic” or Modern Greek between Demotica and Katharevousa, the former being the spoken language and the latter a mid-point between the ancient and modern language. Durrell was fluent in Demotic Greek and translated Emmanuel Royidis's
Pope Joan
from Katharevousa, though Panaiotis Gerontopolous has argued Durrell relied on T.D. Kriton's 1935 English translation of
Papissa Joanna
. Katharevousa was often presented as the appropriate language for written literature.

[20]
. Harvey (1545–1630) is most famous for his public dispute with Thomas Nashe and his “pedantic” attempts to impose Latin meter and iambic hexameter on English poetry.

[21]
. This appears to be Durrell's own translation.

[22]
. This article is close in time to Durrell's editorship of
Personal Landscape
and its politics of the unpolitical as well as the Personalist movement in the New Apocalypse and New Romanticist movements in Britain. Durrell's emphasis of the term here calls up this broader contemporary context.

[23]
. Solomos's major work, which exists in a variety of unfinished states. A complete performance in Greek was delivered in May 2010 at the Durrell School of Corfu. Durrell may have also known of it through his good friend Stephanides, who translated Greek poetry of this period and adapted some of Solomos's works (Stephanides 113–14).

[24]
. Durrell's own translation.

[25]
. Durrell may be developing this from Edith Sitwell's “The Poetry of Capetanakis.”

[26]
. Kostis Palamas (1859–1943) was a major Greek poet, wrote the Olympic Hymn, and was closely involved with the Athenian Academy. Several of C.P. Cavafy's (Kavaphis) poems were translated by Durrell. Cavafy appears frequently as a reference throughout
The Alexandria Quartet
and was translated in
Personal Landscape
, which Durrell co-edited from 1942 to 1945.

[27]
. Cecil Maurice Bowra (1898–1971) was a classicist and professor of poetry at the University of Oxford who championed Cavafy's works. Bowra was known for his homosexuality and erudition equally. E.M. Forster (1879–1970) knew Cavafy while in Alexandria, corresponded with him, and promoted his works' publication in English translation. Liddell (1908–1992) was a poet and novelist who wrote the first English biography of Cavafy; he was also good friends with Durrell, published several works in
Personal Landscape
, and had escaped to North Africa with Olivia Manning. See his “A Note on Cavafy” in particular (9–10). Much of the Durrell–Liddell correspondence is held in the Gennadius Library, Athens.

[28]
. Durrell translated “The City” in
The Alexandria Quartet
(201–02) as well as other Cavafy poems (882–84). Also see his “A Cavafy Find,” which contains further translations.

[29]
. This is an allusion to his homosexuality.

[30]
. Durrell's own translation. This poem has also been translated as “Far Back.”

[31]
. Sikelianos (1884–1951) was a major Modern Greek poet whom Durrell translated only three years earlier in
Six Poems From the Greek of Sikelianos and Seferis
(1946).

[32]
. Seferis (1900–1971) was the defining voice of Greek poetry in the twentieth century, a Nobel Laureate for Literature, and gave his first translations of Eliot's
The Waste Land
into Greek in 1936 (Keeley 214–26). Durrell first met Seferis in the mid 1930s and they formed a friendship that lasted until Seferis's death, despite popular opinion that they had abandoned their friendship after Durrell's service on Cyprus.

[33]
. Both poets were strongly influenced by the French poet
Jules Laforgue
(1860–1887).

[34]
. The fifteenth section of Seferis's epic poem “Mythistorema,” in Durrell's translation. Notably, the “myth-history” became the subtitle to the Greek translation of the first book of Durrell's
Alexandria Quartet, Justine: Mythistorema
.

A Cavafy Find

[1]
.   Antonis C. Indianos (1899–1968) co-founded
Cypriot Letters
, which ran from 1934 to 1956. He corresponded widely with Greek and English writers, and Durrell would surely have known of his public support as a lawyer for EOKA during the Enosis struggle on Cyprus at this time. He translated both Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot into Greek.

[2]
.   Aristedes Cavafy (1853–1902).

[3]
.   As many scholars have noted, Durrell repeatedly uses objects to express emotional content, in particular in the closing scenes of novels, such as the various detritus gestured to at the end of
Justine
and
Bitter Lemons
, both written during the same year as this article. Robert Duncan noticed this Durrell's poetry, which he published in two issues of
Experimental Review
, and echoed in his own tribute “An Ark for Lawrence Durrell” (11), which was first published in the January issue of the same journal.

[4]
.   The following translations are Durrell's own. He first began to translated Cavafy with his good friend Stephanides while living on Corfu. In 1939, their translation of “The Barbarians” (Waiting for the Barbarians) appeared in
The New English Weekly
(MacNiven 242).

A Real Heart Transplant into English

[1]
.   Keeley has gone on to write about Durrell in detail in his
Inventing Paradise: The Greek Journey, 1937–47
. Sherrard (1922–1995) was a major British translator of Modern Greek literature. Both knew many of the authors they translated or wrote about personally.

[2]
.   Angelos Sikelianos (1884–1951) was a major Greek poet aligned with both anti-authoritarian and surrealist movements. Odysseas Elytis (1911–1996) was an equally prominent Greek Modernist poet. Durrell was deeply familiar with both of their works.

[3]
.   Forster's (1879–1970) role in having these translations appear in
The Criterion
is an important factor in the spread of Cavafy's fame. Durrell used Forster's
Pharos and Pharillon
as well as his
Alexandria: A History and a Guide
during this time in Egypt and while writing
The Alexandria Quartet
.

[4]
.   This contention was disputed by W.H. Auden in his letter to the editor responding to Durrell's article, in which he reminds his readers of his own Introduction to Rae Dalven's translations (Auden 427).

[5]
.   Bien's
Constantine Cavafy
was a part of Columbia's Essays on Modern Writers series. It was formally published in January of 1965.

[6]
.   Miller's
The Colossus of Maroussi
features both, and Gerald Durrell's
My Family and Other Animals
famously depicts Stephanides, though in a frequently fictional form.

[7]
.   This book is Kastimbalis and Stephanides's 1930 collection
Some Modern Greek Poets
.

[8]
.   Valaoritis (1921–) is an important Greek writer and was both a friend to and co-translator with Durrell, which he has described in detail (46–56).

[9]
.   Rex Warner's Seferis translations followed after Durrell's joint translations in 1948 with Bernard Spencer and Nanos Valaoritis,
The King of Asine and Other Poems
, which itself came after Durrell's own translations of Seferis and Sikelianos as
Six Poems From the Greek of Sekilianos and Seferis
, though it was not published until he was residing on Rhodes in 1946. Durrell corresponded with Liddell before the two were evacuated to Egypt, and he retained a strong friendship with him. Liddell wrote the influential first English biography of Cavafy and includes a Cavafy figure in his Alexandrian novel,
Unreal City
, which precedes Durrell's
Alexandria Quartet
. Amy Smart's “The Poetry of Cavafy,” was published as Amy Nimr and appeared in Durrell's co-edited journal
Personal Landscape
in Cairo in 1945 (14–20). It contains several translations, as does the journal's print run as a whole. Smart's correspondence from Durrell is now held at the McMaster University Library, Hamilton, ON.