Ancient Greeks - and Louis de Bernieres - by the Lake

Landing stages at Theatre by the Lake, Keswick, March 2014

Words by the Water (a festival of Words and Ideas, staged by Ways with Words) (#WBTW14) finished today at Theatre by the Lake in Keswick, Cumbria.

This year I volunteered to chair three talks with connections to Greece and/or Greek, and was granted all three. This post is about Louis de Bernieres, who spoke to a large audience on March 7th, Day 1 of the festival.

Louis read some of the poems in Imagining Alexandria, his first book of poetry, published last year. He says the style of the poems in this book follows that of Constantine Cavafy, who lived in Alexandria and wrote poems in Greek from about 1900 to 1933. 

I sometimes read Cavafy's poems to keep my modern Greek alive, and my children studied a few of them at school. Some of them are about love between men (both ancient and modern) and some take moments in Ancient Greece and look at them through the eyes of an unexpected participant - a battle viewed by a poet*, or a pedlar confused by a phoney victory parade**. 

Some of Louis' poems are similar. One particularly poignant one is imagined as by the jailor of Socrates***.

In my introduction, I quoted Louis as writing about the British: 
"We are rigid and formal in some ways, but we believe in the right to eccentricity, as long as the eccentricities are large enough... Woe betide you if you hold your knife incorrectly, but good luck to you if you wear a loincloth and live up a tree."
He told us that this was an extension of the opinion of a Frenchman who said, "Britain really is an immense lunatic asylum".

Louis read other unpublished poems. One of them was about his lively young daughter who woke up saying "I dreamed I was flying." Another was about rooks wheeling and riding the wind over the valley near where he lives. Louis told us he rescues baby rooks that fall out of nests and keeps them as pets (see the introduction page to his website). He is convinced they are more intelligent than dogs. In my opinion, Louis is not quite in the loincloth-up-a-tree class, but he's much more entertainingly eccentric. 




* Darius by C. P. Cavafy
** In Alexandria, 31 B.C. by C. P. Cavafy
*** The Jailer by Louis de Bernieres

Those Ancient Greeks are still following me ...

Hello again!

Further to my previous post about those Ancient Greeks following me everywhere, they've been appearing in the oddest places in London ...

Socrates said, "The unexamined life is not worth living".

On the underground ...

at 350 Euston Road, London

... and on the street! 

Hermes at Olympia

I couldn't find any reference to the sculptor of these two naked men facing each other through the glass, but I'm sure there was at least some influence  from statues such as the Hermes in the museum at Ancient Olympia. If you know who made the two men, please contact me. 

At present I am reading The Gods of Olympus: A History by Professor Barbara Graziosi. She traces people's attitudes to the twelve gods from their origins before Homer to the Middle Ages, a period of more than 2000 years. In the preface she says, "Like many migrants, they adapted to their new circumstances, while retaining a sense of their distant origins". That seems an appropriate comment on their appearances in our lives today.

artist's representation of Phidias' statue of
Zeus at Olympia, by Sian Frances

And they are still here - with me, at least - as kaleidoscopic and mutable as the human characteristics they represent. They fire my imagination and augment my stories. In fact, today is the second anniversary of the publication of The Boy with Two Heads in which Zeus features so strongly. I have a copy of Sian Frances' painting of him on my noticeboard. 

So now it's more a case of my following the Ancient Greeks, I suppose...

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