The Poet’s Body
Nassia Linardou
Georges Séféris, the Greek Nobel laureate, who advocated the Hellenism of language, loved to repeat in his Essais that poetry is similar to the human breath - a short breath, what a misfortune for the human being! Séféris established a vital bond between the linguistic expression of poetry and the human body. He added moreover that what was thereby felt, was the rhythm, linked to the word as if charged with a special emotion. Emotional sensitivity, even a sensory impression, were the effects he said to feel in the body-to-body encounter with language. The mark of the Great Catastrophe of the Smyrna by the Turks in September 1922 was overprinted on these effects. Séféris called it a “tragedy without catharis”.
An early decision led him to devote all of his libido and all of the intensity of his poetry to the contemporary “res greca”. Every authentic poet, he states, has a particular experience of the “language thrill, which awakens “the presence of language” in (and on ) the body. A real body event, one might say, its effect is early. It alone allows the poetic truth to emerge. Poetry, “pouasie”[1], is an effect of meaning but also as a hole effect/an effect of/on the hole[2]. Hole effect and body event are interdependent. In Séféris the thrill of language has received as many names as have haunted his poetry. It is the sea of which he makes “an essential vital experience”. It is also the Greek light that enchants him, carries him away, that transports him, that humanises and persecutes him and of which he makes his question: “Deep down, I am a question of light”[3]. Séféris confided that he loved the human voice very much. Alone, he used to recite poems at length. He insisted on saying “the magic” that the recital of the antic odes, of rhapsodies where the word only vocalises to immediately yield its place to the one that follows, exerted on him, allowing essentially the rhythmic effect to lead. Thus the body of the poet becomes the bearer of a very special libido. The poem is not only writing. It is first of all voice: the voice as what remains of the signifier when it is emptied of meaning.
Translated by Eva Sophie Reinhofer