“Dear Georges Seferis, so close to the most uncomfortable – the truest – part of each of us, what does this impossibility you speak of in your vigilant poetry mean, to what ultimate contradiction does it owe its suffering? To your history certainly, in part, and it would be easy to recognize in the random events that determined your life the elements seemingly brought together for a theater of the dissociation of reality.

It is not insignificant that a child lived in Clazomenae during the summer, among fishermen and vineyards, and in Smyrna, the grand “resounding” port where Europe and Asia, the timeless and the century, rituals and goods richly wed for the charmed consciousness; then, that the exodus of an entire people, in blood and tears of despair, forever separated him from the happy homeland:

All that I loved disappeared with the new houses last summer, which collapsed under the autumn wind, Seferis wrote, and that is not just an image. But just as decisive was that the new homeland, both the same and so different, Attica with its too-present past, and its present too filled with absurdities and dramas, had little to offer to the young man who came to it but its sorrow of the time: that the “suffering,” so many voices said, of being Greek.

And yet the war, and all kinds of exiles. Georges Seferis spent a large part of his life being Greek – serving Greece – in foreign countries, and he truly was that traveler prevented from returning to the port he evokes in his poems.”