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Mavrogordato was a king's scholar at Eton College, and in 1901 he went to Exeter
College, Oxford, as an open classical scholar. His second-class results in both
moderations (1903) and Greats (1905) did not do justice to his scholarly potential.
From 1908 to 1912 he worked as a reader and literary adviser for various
publishers, and from 1910 to 1912 as sub-editor of the English Review. From
November 1912 to April 1913 he was the correspondent of the Westminster Gazette
in Greece, covering the Balkan wars. During the same period he served on the
International Committee for the Relief of Turkish Refugees, set up in Salonika. He
was unfit for active service in the First World War. In 1914 he published Cassandra
in Troy, a tragedy illustrating the evil consequences of war. On 14 November that
year he married Christine Maud Humphreys (1886–1971), daughter of George
Humphreys, cabinet maker. They had two sons.
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A diffident scholar, Mavrogordato carried out the major part of his research and
writing during his many years of unemployment before he was appointed to his
first and only academic post at the age of fifty-seven. Modern Greece: a Chronicle
and a Survey, 1800–1931 (1931), which concentrated on the period after 1914,
became the standard work on modern Greek history in English. This account of
political developments in Greece was marred by the author's unrealistic proposal
for a Balkan confederation of nations, with its federal capital on the
deterritorialized island of Delos. His view on Cyprus was that ‘it is still doubtful
whether the Greek islanders continually excited by a fanatical and ignorant clergy
will be able to excrete the poison of nationalism and be glad to leave the task of
administration to those who are more capable of it than themselves’ (p. 96)—in
other words, the British colonial officials. His two other major scholarly
publications were his translation of the complete canon of C. P. Cavafy's poems,
which was finished in 1937 but not published until 1951, and his edition of the
Byzantine heroic romance Digenes Akrites, with English blank-verse translation
and extensive introduction (largely completed by 1939 and published in 1956).
Both have met with a mixed reception. He was the only twentieth-century English
translator of Cavafy's poems to preserve the metre and rhyme scheme of the
original, but the result was sometimes a certain clumsiness: in 1958 Cavafy's friend
E. M. Forster characterized ‘Wooden cordato's’ translation as ‘reliable rather than
inspired’ (P. Jeffreys, ed., The Forster–Cavafy Letters: Friends at a Slight Angle,
2009, 215). His translation of Digenes Akrites was the first to make this, the most
important of the Byzantine heroic romances, available in English, and it remained
the only English translation until it was superseded by that of Elizabeth Jeffreys in
1998. Mavrogordato's English rendering of the Byzantine hero's name as Twyborn
the Borderer provided the surname of the protagonist in Patrick White's novel The
Twyborn Affair (1979). However, David Blamires expressed the view that ‘the
translation provided by Mavrogordato is bizarre and only semi-coherent’ (D.
Blamires, ‘Patrick White, the Twyborn affair’, Critical Quarterly, 22/1, 1980, 85).
As early as 1928, however, Mavrogordato had published two articles in the Journal
of Hellenic Studies on Greek drama in Renaissance Crete, in which his prodigious
knowledge of Italian literature enabled him to identify Luigi Groto's Lo Isach
(1586) as the model for the anonymous Greek drama The Sacrifice of Abraham,
while in 1929 he published The Erotokritos, an essay and plot summary of the
Cretan romance of that name. In 1934 he published excerpts from a long poem,
Elegies and Songs, which showed him to be a highly accomplished minor poet
influenced by T. S. Eliot.
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PETER MACKRIDGE
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