From the Elephant's Back: Collected Essays & Travel Writings

  [16]. Durrell uses the same notion of colonizing death nearly forty years later in his novel Monsieur: “Even death has its own precise texture, and the big philosophers have always entered into the image of the world it exemplifies while still alive, so to become one with it while their hearts were still beating. They colonised it” (21).

  [17]. Latin: “Where are you going?” The phrase is primarily in the Christian tradition, John 13:36, “Simon Peter said unto him, Lord, whither goest thou? Jesus answered him, Whither I go, thou canst not follow me now; but thou shalt follow me afterwards.” The phrase was also the title of a famous historical novel, Quo Vadis: A Narrative in the Time of Nero, by Henryk Sienkiewicz, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1905.

  Prospero’s Isle

  [1]. Thomas Nashe (1567–1601) and Robert Greene (1558–1592) were English playwrights, and both were involved in extensive pamphleteering campaigns, ranging from religious to artistic and satiric topics.

  [2]. Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona I.iii.307.

  [3]. James Howell (1594–1666) was a Welsh writer, and Durrell is referring to his 1642 book Instructions for Forrainne Travell (13).

  [4]. Anthony Munday (1553–1633) was a dramatist who collaborated with Shakespeare on the play Sir Thomas More. He was known for his Italianate interests and for having taken the Grand Tour of Europe on foot beginning in 1578, which led to his The English Romayne Lyfe in 1582.

  [5]. Unton (–1553) was knighted at the coronation of Anne Boleyn in 1533. Durrell appears to be inventing this history since Unton pre-dates the use of the umbrella, per se, in England.

  [6]. Thomas Coryat (1577–1617) is known for this travel writings, mainly Coryat’s Crudities Hastily Gobbled up in Five Months Travels in France, Italy, &c and Coryats Crambe, or His Coleworte Twice Sodden (1611), both set in Europe, and his Mediterranean, Persian, and Indian letters in Greetings from the Court of the Great Mogul (1616).

  [7]. Coryat, Coryat’s Crudities (1). Durrell’s personal copy of this volume is the two-volume edition by James MacLehose and Sons with Macmillan, 1905, held in the Morris Library, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale.

  [8]. This is a longstanding critical debate, beginning with Ben Jonson pointing out that there was no seacoast. Dozens of critical works had debated this problem and noted that Robert Greene’s play Pandosto: The Triumph of Time, Shakespeare’s source, used the seacoast of Sicily, though it also uses the Isle of Delphos.

  [9]. Howell 45.

  [10]. A mythical king ruling over a lost Christian nation in the Orient.

  [11]. George Sandys (1577–1644), William Lithgow (1582–1645), Coryat, and Fynes Moryson (1566–1630) were all Elizabethan travellers and writers.

  [12]. The coast of North Africa.

  [13]. Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice I.iii.346–48.

  [14]. III.vii.1883–86.

  [15]. Howell 83.

  [16]. Howell 50.

  [17]. Howell 53.

  [18]. Howell 56.

  [19]. Webbe (1568–1591) was a well-known English critic and translator at the time. Durrell’s source is uncertain, and little is known of Webbe.

  [20]. As previously, Durrell’s source is unknown, but this passage is quoted in Thomas Secombe’s The Age of Shakespeare (1579–1631) (208), as is the previous quotation from Howell (206).

  [21]. Eliot published this work in Latin in 1593. Durrell may have learned of it through F. Yates’s 1931 article “The Importance of John Eliot’s Ortho-Epia Gallica” (419–30), and he is certainly referring to the reprinting of Eliot’s work in extract form in English in 1928 as The Parlement of Pratlers, edited by Jack Lindsay, which bears the subtitle A Book on the Corect Pronunciation of the French Language.

  [22]. Eliot, The Parlement of Pratlers, n. pag.

  [23]. Jourdain’s pamphlet was first published in 1610 and is frequently referred to in attempts to date Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

  [24]. The Tempest I.ii.345–48. This passage is often modernized to “still-vexed Bermudas.”

  [25]. A wind on the Mediterranean from the Sahara desert.

  [26]. The Tempest I.ii.461–62.

  [27]. The Tempest II.i.762.

  [28]. The Tempest II.i.763–64.

  [29]. John Dowland (1563–1626) was a famous composer and lutenist who also had patronage from Denmark at the time of Hamlet’s first performance. The speculation is that Dowland could have offered information about Denmark and Elsinore at the time.

  [30]. The Tempest II.i.1720–27.

  [31]. The Tempest I.ii.472–73.

  [32]. Christopher Marlowe’s (1564–1963) play Doctor Faustus (1594). The Abbey Thélème appears in the first portion of François Rabelais’s (1494–1553) Gargantua and Pantaguel.

  [33]. Matthew 11:15, “He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.” Durrell plays off this same passage repeatedly in his contemporary short story “Asylum in the Snow.”

  [34]. The Tempest Epilogue, 2321–39.

  Ideas About Poems

  [1]. This short piece appeared at the beginning of the first issue of Personal Landscape, the periodical edited in Cairo during World War II by Durrell, Robin Fedden, and Bernard Spencer. Each subsequent issue included an “Ideas About Poems” segment that personalized rather than politicized poetry, despite their proximity to, and the immediate threat of, the war. The kindred terminology of “Ideas About Poems” to the “Attitudes” about Personalism adopted by the New Apocalypse poets in the following year, 1943, is suggestive. G.S. Fraser, who contributed to Personal Landscape and was a friend to the three editors, was also an important contributor to the original New Apocalypse anthologies in London in the preceding years. The personalist nature of both groups appears anti-authoritarian in the same manner as Herbert Read’s notion of the politics of the unpolitical.

  Ideas About Poems II

  [1]. This stanza is later modified to become Durrell’s poem “Echo” (1943).

  The Heraldic Universe

  [1]. The New Apocalypse revised its manifesto to adopt a position of anarchist “Personalism” the following year and used a similar description that rebuffs allusions to T.S. Eliot’s impersonal theory of poetry in “Tradition and the Individual Talent”: “[the artist’s] own personality must transmute the artistic materials presented to it, must give form and life where none had existed before” and “Does the artist search for a completion, a pattern, a purpose in the world about him…? Does he use his creative personality to bring about such a pattern…? If he does, he is a Personalist artist” (Treece 217, 219).

  [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 Scott
ish 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). br />
  [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.