[The publication of this translation of A Poet's Journal: Days of 1945–1951] represents an act of personal homage on the part of each of us to one of this century's greatest poets and most civilized men. (pp. vii-viii)

[No] one, under whatever circumstances, can fail to be moved by the intimacy and intensity of these journal entries, which take us so completely into the heart and mind of the poet and his creative act, in a way that few other such documents do. There are other great literary journals in this century—Gide's, Woolf's, Camus's, Pavese's—and there are also collections of letters which help us better to understand an author. But I cannot think of many which expose quite so clearly the naked thought and sensibility out of which poems have grown. Generally, the closest we seem to get to the genesis of literary works is in documents such as the canceled version of The Waste Land. This journal, however, reveals to us the deep inner sources of Seferis's poetic achievement. It possesses that candor of revelation and that rare numinous quality which we associate with James's notebooks and the letters of Keats and Rilke. (p. viii)

With [his title], Seferis joins hands with, and pays tribute to, the greatest of his predecessors in modern Greek literature, Constantine Cavafy, a number of whose most personal and powerful poems begin with the same title, though of course with different dates. And indeed, if any spirit haunts these pages, it is that of Cavafy—Cavafy the European, Cavafy the Greek, the lonely exile, the skeptical political observer, the chronicler of history, the forger of language, the celebrant of love, the man of memories, the witness and martyr (in his tongue the same word signifies both) of the decline of Greek civilization.

Seferis's journal, or more precisely that portion of it printed here, begins shortly after the liberation of Greece by the Allies at the end of World War II. (p. ix)

[Following the war, Seferis] and his wife Maró went off for two months to a house appropriately named Galini—the Greek word for calm, peacefulness, serenity—on the island of Poros near the coast of Argolis.

It is here on Poros that the first of the three central preoccupations of this journal begins. Seferis seems to have had some intimation of what was about to happen to him. "I am starting," he writes, "on a long, very dark voyage, and I'm deeply wounded by my land." Nursing that wound, thinking to escape everything, he comes to the Galini only to discover that his voyage has brought him to the great poem his whole life had been preparing him for. To the reader who knows that poem, "Thrush," these are pages of endless fascination through which one can chart the gradual emergence of this work which, as Seferis says, sums up all the past years and brings to fulfillment ideas for verses he had for some time been jotting down at random in his journal. One finds those "ideas"—phrases, rhythms, images, thoughts—hidden away in this diary from its earliest pages; many of them eventually take their final form in the "Thrush," others are employed even later in Three Secret Poems. His experience of the Galini, "the house by the sea," which gave him as he later said "for the first time in many years the feeling of a solid building rather than a temporary tent," leads him down Proustian paths to speculate on the houses he has known and lost during his lifetime, and these memories become the genesis of the plangent threnody on houses that forms the opening section of the "Thrush." So too, we see him go off one day for a swim and come upon the sunken wreck which provides his poem with its title and one of its basic images. In the same way, we follow his increasing preoccupation with the light—"the most important thing I've 'discovered' since the time the ship that brought me home entered Greek waters." The presence of the sea and the insistence of the "angelic and black light" become more and more overwhelming for him, until in the end he has to close the shutters of his room to block them out in order to finish his poem. As one follows the daily life and thought this journal records, one watches the elements of Seferis' poem take root and flower; one feels the febrile tension of the poetic process, the moments of illumination, the heavy fatigue of creation, inspiration's "sudden flaring up and dying down like green wood burning"; until finally one experiences the drained sense of relief as the poem is completed on the last day of October. If the name of the house on Poros seems strangely to echo the culminating word of Seferis' first great poem, so too the last experience he records on the island echoes an image and a hope expressed in that same poem, "Mythistorema," over a decade earlier. For as he leaves Poros at the beginning of December, the sight of the first almond tree in flower performs a kind of benediction on these weeks of introspection and creativity.

The second great preoccupation or theme of this journal is Cavafy, to whom Seferis' thoughts return again and again. This should not of course be surprising, since Cavafy's achievement can never be far distant from the thoughts of any modern Greek poet; it is something that everyone who would fashion poems in that language must somehow come to terms with…. Yet the subject was only to prove increasingly refractory for him. In some very basic way, his experience of life obliged him ultimately to reject the great art of Cavafy in favor of the humbler, earthy, analphabetic, vital prose of Makriyannis. But one s ould recognize that such a rejection, if that is even the proper word for it, comes paradoxically only at the ultimate stage of admiration…. Nonetheless, in April 1950 he copies into this journal some of the extensive notes he had assembled…. Fragmentary and undeveloped though they are, they remain extraordinarily suggestive and provocative, with the insights that only one great poet can have about another. At times they come close to expressing Seferis' own ars poetica. Throughout these critical observations, one is conscious that their special luminosity derives from a lifetime of reading and experience, of asking what it means to be a Greek, of steadfast fidelity to the Muse of poetry. (pp. x-xii)

It is hardly an exaggeration to claim that [the] destruction of Smyrna [his birthplace] was the determining historical event in Seferis' life: it is this that made him feel permanently and profoundly heimatlos, this that gives all his poetry its sense of irredeemable alienation, this that demanded his lifelong search for his identity as a Greek. (p. xiii)

The burden of emotion in [the] final pages is almost intolerable. Returning to the place of his beginnings, Seferis feels that his life has come full circle and that all his past is both summed and summoned up. "At every step, memories stir within me overwhelmingly; a constant, almost nightmarish piling up of images; incessant invitations from the dead."… "Memory," he wrote in one of the two beautiful poems he composed during his visit to Skala, "wherever you touch it, hurts."

But Memory, as Greeks have always known, is also the Mother of the Muses. Out of the experiences so vividly recorded in this journal, the repository of memory, some of Seferis' finest poetry was created. The chronology of events and experiences … is, in the last analysis, unimportant. "I didn't have in mind," Seferis explains," 'to write the story of my life, day by day.' Day by day we live our life; we don't write it." What matters is rather the unique sensibility which shines out of every page. Often Seferis' perceptions have the painful sensitivity of an open wound, "pulsing in the midst of life," and there are entries here written in blood. Often his perceptions are given instantaneous form and shape by his intense mythopoeic awareness, and there are moments when we behold the raw stuff of life miraculously transmuted in the alembic of this poetic imagination. Often his perceptions are endowed with lengthening shadows in the receding perspective of memory. But always, his mind and heart are open to receive whatever life proffers, however rewarding, however painful. And courage is not the least of the qualities that make these pages so memorable. (pp. xiii-xv)

Like all the most significant journals, it tells us not so much what its author did day by day as who he was and who he became as those days went by. It bestows on us, ultimately, the gift of himself, preserving for all time the lineaments of the living, experiencing man and his singular honesty in facing the light of day. As such, these daily jottings are precisely what he so touchingly called them: "the footprints one leaves behind as he passes." (p. xv)