ABSTRACT
Nicholas Samaras’s poem ‘Translation’ is prefaced by an epigraph, a passage from Henry Miller’s Colossus of Maroussi (1941):
This passage comes from Miller’s account of his travels through the Peloponnesian countryside. After having seen the ruins at Mycenae, he gazes ‘into the field of green’ and contemplates the ‘eternal’ land before him. The immediate experience of place leads him to rethink how land is imagined in American nationalist discourse. But land, he observes, needs to be stripped of its nationalist rhetoric to attain its ‘vital’ function as provider of home, shelter and subsistence. In redeeming such a primordial image of the land, he re-defines the notion of home as it relates to national identity. With this reference to Miller, Samaras taps into a rich tradition of travel writing about Greece ensconced within Anglo-American literature that often conflates the aestheticised topos of home with the articulation of national sensibilities (see Leontis 1995, 1999; Tziovas 1989). Though grounded in the discourses of Hellenism, this tradition nevertheless dictates its own ideological interpretation of the Greek landscape, projecting a particular trajectory for the casual traveller replete with visits to ancient and pastoral sites.
