‘Aonde quer que eu viaje, a Grécia me fere’: poética da ruína e exílio ontológico em Giorgos Seferis, entre Esmirna, Atenas e América Latina

Alexandre Belmonte

doi:10.5007/2175-7976.2026.e110165

Authors

Alexandre Belmonte Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4475-6462

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5007/2175-7976.2026.e110165

Keywords:

Giorgos Seferis, Asia Minor Catastrophe, historical memory, ontological exile, memory and historical trauma, comparative history

Abstract

The article analyzes the poem “In the Manner of G. S.” (“Με τον τρόπο του Γ. Σ.”) by Giorgos Seferis as a poetic elaboration of the Smyrna Catastrophe and as a critique of policies of monumentalization and silencing in interwar Greece. It argues that landscape and myth operate in the poem as devices of ruin and fractured memory, producing an experience of ontological exile: symbolic uprootedness even within one’s own territory. From a comparative perspective, it brings this condition into relation with Latin American processes of the folklorization of Indigenous memory, proposing Seferis’s poetry as an insurgent archive against the national pacification of the past. The comparison proposed does not proceed through linear historical parallels nor does it assume causal equivalences between two distant worlds, but instead seeks to explore structural resonances produced by coloniality, foundational violence, and the modes of silencing that traverse different historical formations.

Author Biography

Alexandre Belmonte, Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro

Doutor em História. Professor Associado, Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas, Departamento de História, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brasil. Pós-doutorando no Programa de Pós-graduação em História Global da Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina.

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