Between the Lines: Seferis Anti-Writing Pound's Homer

This essay examines the translation theory and practice of Greek modernist poet Giorgos Seferis, focusing on his translation of Ezra Pound's first canto (itself a translation of the Odyssey's Book 11). By looking at how Seferis handles effects and traces of translation already present in his original and exploring the fragile boundary between the two kinds of translation he identifies, antigrafi (interlingual) and metagrafi (intralingual), I show that the Canto One translation represents not his failure to find an equivalent for Pound's poem or the Odyssey, but his resistance precisely to this notion of equivalence, even of the kind that Pound himself is promoting. Writing in response to and against Pound (what I call, adapting Seferis's term, anti-writing), Seferis translates Pound as a way of resisting nationalist ideological appropriation and performs a linguistic archeology that uncovers not a single buried layer—akin to Pound's Anglo-Saxon—but multiple points of originating exchange.