Dinner with Persephone: Travels in Greece

310 Pages·1997·1.55 MB·English

by  Patricia Storace

PATRICIA STORACE
Dinner with Persephone
A native of Mobile, Alabama, Patricia Storace was educated at Columbia
University and the University of Cambridge. She is the author of a book of
poems, Heredity, and the winner of a prize for poetry from the American
Academy of Arts and Letters. Her essays have appeared frequently in The New
York Review of Books and in Condé Nast Traveler. This is her first book of prose.

FIRST VINTAGE DEPARTURES EDITION, SEPTEMBER 1997
Copyright © 1996 by Patricia Storace
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United
States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by
Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by
Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1996.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
Cambridge University Press: Excerpt from Folk Poetry of Modern Greece by Roderick Beaton. Copyright
© 1980 by Cambridge University Press. Reprinted by permission of Cambridge University Press. • Hestia
Publishers and Booksellers: Excerpts from “Demotiko Tragoubi Tis Xenitias,” translated in this work by
Patricia Storace. Copyright © 1990 by Hestia Publishers and Booksellers. Reprinted by permission of
Hestia Publishers and Booksellers. • Ludlow Music, Inc.: Excerpt from “This Land Is Your Land” by Woody
Guthrie. TRO Copyright © 1956, renewed 1958, 1970 by Ludlow Music, Inc. Reprinted by permission of
Ludlow Music, Inc. • Original Book, Inc : Excerpts from Oneirocritica by Artemidorus, translated by
Robert J. White, 1990. Reprinted by permission of Original Books, Inc. • Princeton University Press:
Excerpts from “Denial,” “Syngrou Avenue, 1930,” and “The Mood of a Day” from Collected Poems of
George Seferis, translated by Keeley Sherrard. Copyright © 1967, 1981 by Princeton University Press.
Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Storace, Patricia.
Dinner with Persephone / Patricia Storace.
p. cm.
1. Storace, Patricia—Journeys—Greece. 2. Greece—Description and travel. I. Title.
DF728.S76 1996
949.5—dc20 96-7650
eISBN: 978-0-307-76533-8
Author photograph © Jeffrey Weiner
Random House Web address: http://www.randomhouse.com/
v3.1
For Mrs. Emily M. Flint
and in loving memory of
Mrs. Louise S. Lovett
Where is love that with one stroke cuts time in two and stuns it?
—From “The Mood of a Day”
by George Seferis
In the different cities of Greece and at the great religious gatherings in that country … in the
largest and most populous of the islands, I have patiently listened to old dreams and their
consequences.
—Artemidorus of Daldis
May we believe in Greece.
—Serapheim, Archbishop of Athens and All Greece
C
ONTENTS
Cover
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
M G
ARBLE IRLS
T B G E
HE LUE LASS YE
I
MMORTALITY
F S
LESH AND TONE
M
ETAMORPHOSIS
T L -G W
HE IFE IVING ELLSPRING
T T L
HE RUE IGHT
I S E
EE LVIS
A D V
REAM OF THE IRGIN
C S
OLD HOULDER
T S A G
HE ISTER OF LEXANDER THE REAT
M B
IRRORS AS IOGRAPHERS
T G
HE ODFATHER
W H
ISHES AS ISTORIANS
T P F
HE AST AS THE UTURE
T P
HE LANETARKHIS
L S
UST FOR A AINT
A N T
YMPH’S EMPLE
P N
OLYTECHNIC IGHT
How I A I
T LWAYS S
A D B O
REAM OF A ODILESS NE
M D
ACEDONIA AY
W
EDDING
P
OMEGRANATES
H T
EADS OR AILS
T R W
HE ULE OF OMEN
P M
REGNANT EN
C M
LEAN ONDAY
A C
T OLONUS
S S
OUL ATURDAY
I D
NDEPENDENCE AY
T I C
HE NVINCIBLE OMMANDER
C
ANDLES
T B M
HE US TO ETAMORPHOSIS
T P
WIN EAKS
T D L A D
HE REAM OF OVE FTER THE ANCE
T U
HE NWRITTEN
T D N
HE REAM OF ARCISSUS
T S V
HE LEEPING IRGIN
T M K
HE ARBLE ING
T S D
HE TATUES ANCING
Also Available from Vintage
A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS
I thank Lynn Nesbit, for her support of this work. I also owe thanks to the
Department of Hellenic Studies of Princeton University, and in particular to
Dimitri Gondicas. Affectionate thanks also to Richard Burgi, Robert Lane,
Demos Kounidis, Krista Zois, and John and Athina Davis, for evenings of white
wine and Cavafy, and much more. My heartfelt thanks and love to my dear
friends Sofia Theonas, Zacharias Thrillos, the poet Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke,
and the painter Yiannis Zikas; nothing would have been possible without them. I
am grateful to Robert J. White for his eloquent translation of the Oneirokritika,
from which all the Artemidorus quotations are drawn. Thanks to the painter
Peter Devine, for joyful hours spent looking at Greek art; and love and gratitude
to Ron, involved in this book in more ways than he knows. A number of people
did not want acknowledgment, for reasons of privacy; you know who you are,
and you know my gratitude.
It is an honor and an education to work with the editor Erroll McDonald; the
guidance of such a profound literary mind is beyond thanks.
It is rightfully against the law to remove antiquities from Greek territory; and
yet I brought home ancient treasures in the form of Greek words. Thanks to my
teachers, Tryphon Tzifis and Dora Papaioannou, without whose patient work I
could not have shared in these precious possessions.
The chapter “Dream of Love After the Dance” includes references and
quotations from the books of the archives of P.S. Delta “First Memoir” and
“Memoir of 1899” which were published by Hermes Publishing House under the
supervision of P.A. Zannas and Alexandros P. Zannas. The quotations have been
reprinted with the permission of Alexandros P. Zannas and Asimina Zannas.
M G
ARBLE IRLS
A
rkhe tou paramythiou, kalispera sas, is a traditional beginning of a Greek
fairy tale. The fairy tale begins, good evening to you.
I lived in Athens, at the intersection of a prostitute and a saint. It was a
neighborhood of mixed high-rises and a scattering of neoclassical houses, some
boarded up while the owners waited to be offered the right price for their
inheritance. The neighborhood hardware stores carried, along with screwdrivers
and lengths of wire and caulking pastes, icon frames with electric lights in the
shape of candles attached, so you wouldn’t have to inconvenience yourself with
oil for the perpetual flame. All the neighborhood shops—the laundry, the
butcher’s, the vegetable market, the TV and appliances store, the cheap dress
shop and the bridal gown shop, the school supplies shop with its large-sized
brightly colored picture books of Greek myths and tales of Alexander the Great
—were defended by charms against the evil eye suspended over their counters.
If you took the evening volta, stroll, that provides most Athenians with their
exercise during the punishingly hot times of the year, certain streets gave you
glimpses of Mount Hymettus, smudged with darkening violet light, like a
drawing someone had started and then decided to cross out with ink.
The tiny cottage of an apartment I moved into yesterday has already begun to
teach me what a different world I have come to, physically, socially, historically.
It is no easy matter to find apartments with furniture and kitchen appliances here.
In Greece, the tenant is supposed to supply these things. Until 1983, when the
obligatory dowry—the prika—a woman brought to her husband was declared
illegal, refrigerators and beds were components of the marriage agreement. And
for the most part, unmarried people until fairly recently lived with their parents,
and had no need for their own domestic equipment. Even now, when it is
common for couples to marry later, and to live together before they do, many
people I know from previous visits live in a kind of compromise between
independence and family surveillance. Their parents or grandparents built
family-only apartment buildings in which each child of adult age is housed on a
different floor, along with members of the extended family, who wander in and
out of each other’s living rooms, dandling each other’s babies, stirring each
other’s pots of stifado, hoping to catch a glimpse of the man Kiki has gone out