The Power of Pygmalion

Transcription

1 Byzantine and Neohellenic Studies 3 The Power of Pygmalion Ancient Greek Sculpture in Modern Greek Poetry, von Liana Giannakopoulou 1. Auflage The Power of Pygmalion Giannakopoulou schnell und portofrei erhältlich bei beck-shop.de DIE FACHBUCHHANDLUNG Peter Lang Bern 2007 Verlag C.H. Beck im Internet: ISBN Inhaltsverzeichnis: The Power of Pygmalion Giannakopoulou

2 Preface For this reason are the works of Pericles all the more to be wondered at; they were created in a short time for all time. Each one of them, in its beauty, was even then and at once antique; but in the freshness of its vigour it is, even to the present day, recent and newly wrought. Such is the bloom of perpetual newness upon these works, which makes them ever to look untouched by time, as though the unfaltering breath of an ageless spirit had been infused into them. 1 Plutarch s description of the sculptural works on the Parthenon sounds almost prophetic to the modern reader. Indeed, from the eighteenth century to the first decades of the twentieth, ancient Greek sculpture has played a central role in the life of the educated people in the West. Its beauty, the pulse of life it has been felt to catch despite its fragmentary condition, the combination, in the most famous works, of maturity and experience in the skill involved with what was interpreted as a youthful and vibrant look and an evergreen spirit, became the starting points of a new aesthetic and a certain way of thinking and feeling. 2 This has not failed to have impact on poetry. Minor and major poets of Germany, England and France have responded in verse to works of classical sculpture. Indeed Stephen Larrabee, for example, devoted an entire book to the way ancient Greek marbles inspired 1 Plutarch, Life of Pericles XIII.3. 2 See, for example, the relevant portions of the following books (the selection is limited): for Germany, Edith M. Butler, The Tyranny of Greece over Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935) and Suzanne L. Marchand, Down from Olympus. Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); for England, Richard Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980) and Dignity and Decadence: Victorian Art and Ancient Greece (London: Harper Collins, 1991), Frank Turner, The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981).

3 English poets from the seventeenth century on. 3 Quite often, it is true, such poets followed established conventions and fashions. But inspiration became a deeper influence in the Romantic period, when famous works of sculpture such as the Apollo Belvedere and above all the Elgin Marbles marked England s cultural life and the poetic responses of Byron, Keats and Shelley. As Larrabee shows, in the most interesting cases sculpture becomes an internalized metaphor for poetic creation or a symbol intimately connected with the poet s attitude towards his own art. Such a relation between poetry and sculpture has been more fully and systematically discussed in recent, highly sophisticated studies, in the context of a growing interest in the poetics of ecphrasis. Scholars examine with great insight poems written in response to a work of visual art, and many interesting analyses have been devoted to ecphrastic poems on sculpture. 4 But the association of poetry and sculpture goes beyond the genre of ecphrasis and indeed deserves a separate study. It has been noted, for example, that in the case of poets such as Goethe, Rilke, Yeats or Pound, an acquaintance with and study of sculpture has had a more pervasive and lasting effect than the composition of any particular ecphrastic poem: their poetry has changed its course through the experience of sculpture. No such separate study exists for Goethe and Rilke, but it has been widely acknowledged that the way they perceived poetry radically changed after they got in touch with sculpture. 5 They both learned how form tames and shapes feelings 3 Stephen A. Larrabee, English Bards and Grecian Marbles. The Relationship between Sculpture and Poetry especially in the Romantic Period (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943). 4 Notably James Heffernan, Museum of Words. The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993) discusses sculpture in the poems of Byron, Keats and Shelley; John Hollander, in The Gazer s Spirit. Poems Speaking to Silent Works of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) includes a wider variety of poets from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries. Grant F. Scott s, The Sculpted Word. Keats, Ekphrasis, and the Visual Arts (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1994) is exclusively devoted to Keats. 5 Goethe travelled to Rome, South Italy and Sicily, and Rilke became familiar with the work of Auguste Rodin as his secretary. See (the selection is again limited) Humphry Trevelyan, Goethe and the Greeks (Cambridge: Cambridge 12

4 and ideas, but also what was considered as the organic development of a work of art. The Roman Elegies are the outcome of Goethe s experience of sculpture. And if Rilke does not restrict himself to ancient Greek sculpture only, it is through two sonnets on Archaic kouroi, and particularly so in the Archaic Torso of Apollo, that the impact of sculpture in his work is explicitly acknowledged and in turn has proved most influential. Finally, Michael North has shown how sculpture and to a great extent ancient Greek sculpture in its public aspect becomes a central concern in the poetry of Yeats and Pound. The metaphor of sculpture allows both these poets to explore and define the meaning of tradition and the relation of their work to tradition and society. 6 And yet, despite its obvious centrality, the relationship between ancient Greek sculpture and modern poetry has never been thoroughly examined with reference to modern Greek poetry. In setting out to provide a discussion of the topic, I have inevitably had to impose an arbitrary time-limit: from the decade in which a preoccupation with sculpture becomes more conscious to the 1950s, when Seferis abiding interest closes. Again, my choice of poets has also had to be selective: if the ones chosen are indisputably major figures with closely linked (if not always acknowledged) preoccupations, other poets too in the period use sculptural imagery with some self-referential scope. 7 University Press, 1942); C. M. Bowra, The Neue Gedichte, in Rainer Maria Rilke. Aspects of his Mind and Poetry, ed. William Rose and G. Craig Houston (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1938), pp ; also Rilke s own writings on sculpture in Rainer Maria Rilke, The Rodin-Book (1903 and 1907), in Rodin and Other Prose Pieces, trans. G. Craig Houston (London: Quartet Books, 1986), pp. 3 71; finally Donald Prater, A Ringing Glass. The Life of Rainer Maria Rilke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), pp Michael North, The Final Sculpture. Public Monuments and Modern Poets (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985). 7 Indeed, poets such as Ritsos and Engonopoulos use sculptural imagery extensively after They both exploit the public aspect of ancient Greek sculpture, Engonopoulos in order to dwell on the position of modern art in a conventional society and Ritsos in his poetry mainly after the 1950s in a political context: the symbol of the statue is associated with his experience of exile and reflects the alienation and terror experienced during the years of the military junta. 13

5 The work of the Greek Romantics has been underestimated in this as in other respects, although it came into being in a period in which neoclassical architecture and sculpture were dominant in a newly founded Greek state that sought to define its identity with reference to classical antiquity. Sculpture in the voluminous poetry of Palamas has hitherto only been discussed with reference to the Parnassians which, as I argue in Chapter One, is not as important a dimension as one might expect. Savidis openly acknowledges the lack of a study on Cavafy and the visual arts, stating that such a perspective would highlight important aspects of his poetics. 8 What is more, the central relevance of sculpture to the poetry of Sikelianos has barely been discussed in the scholarly literature. Finally, apart from occasional references to the importance of statues in Seferis poetry, the issue has not been taken up seriously by any critic despite the fact that the importance of sculpture in Seferis work is indeed palpable and the need for such a study explicitly acknowledged. 9 This book, then, aims to make a first step towards fulfilling this need. Its aim is to provide a general account of the impact of ancient Greek sculpture in modern Greek poetry between 1860 and 1960, covering the work of some major Romantic poets, Palamas, Cavafy, Sikelianos and Seferis. It seeks to explain how ancient Greek sculpture is appropriated by these influential poets, and to discuss what this tells us about their poetics and the relationship between them. But a 8 G. P. Savidis, μ μ (Athens: Ermis, 1978), pp. 25 6: μ, ( μ μ μ ) μ μ μ μ., μ μ, μ - μ. 9 See for example, Andreas Karantonis, (Athens: Estia, 1957), pp ; Alexandros Argyriou,, in. μ μ, ed Nora Anagnostaki and others (Athens: [n. pub.], 1961), pp (pp ); and Alkis Angelou, (first pub. 1972), in, ed. Dimitris Daskalopoulos (Irakleio: PEK, 1996), pp

6 few more words of justification are needed as for the choice of this subject. Sculpture has been chosen as the perspective of this thesis in the realization that it informs an important number of central, related poems in the work of major modern Greek poets, and that it illuminates aspects of their poetry which have been left either totally unexplored or which have wider implications for the poet s oeuvre and for his relation with other poets. So, through the perspective of sculpture I shall discuss central aspects of the poetry of the midcentury Romantics, and their relevance to the poets who followed: Cavafy, Palamas and indeed Seferis. For Palamas ancient Greek sculpture is strongly bound up with the question of tradition. Again, ancient Greek sculpture is perhaps the best perspective to use in order to discuss Cavafy s attitude towards artistic creation and the image of the artist. Sikelianos response to sculpture reflects both his relaxed attitude towards tradition in contrast with Palamas and Seferis and his attitude towards his own art, essentially an erotic one. (Here, a perhaps surprising affinity with Cavafy makes itself felt.) Finally, a discussion of ancient Greek sculpture in the poetry of Seferis gives interesting insights into poems already widely examined from other points of view (, μ ) encourages a new approach to and also underlines the rather neglected importance of Palamas for Seferis work right up to μ μ,, his last collection to include significant reference to ancient Greek sculpture. Two particular preoccupations lend coherence to the literary historical narrative that follows. We shall find that, on the one hand, ancient Greek sculpture in the work of the Romantics, Palamas and Seferis is intimately associated with issues of national identity and tradition and frames the ways each poet perceives his work in relation to the classical heritage. Significantly, the Pygmalion motif serves to connect these otherwise quite different approaches. This dimension is not irrelevant to Sikelianos, but in his work as in the work of Cavafy, ancient Greek sculpture is important essentially for its aesthetic and erotic properties, and it is through them that each poet helps to define his relation with his own art. 15