Oxford DNB article: Mavrogordato, John Nicolas Page 1 of 3
Mavrogordato, John Nicolas (1882–1970),
Greek scholar and translator
by Peter Mackridge
© Oxford University Press 2004–11 All rights reserved
Mavrogordato, John Nicolas (1882–1970), Greek scholar and translator, was
born on 19 July 1882 at 34 Gloucester Gardens, Kensington, London, the second
son of Nicolas Mavrogordato (1850–1890), merchant, and his wife, Alexandra
(otherwise Amalia, Amélie, or Amelia), née Scaramanga (1857–1945). His father
was born in Constantinople and his mother in Trieste. Members of another branch
of his father's family, which originated from Chios, had found fame and fortune as
hospodars (governors) of Wallachia and Moldavia under the name Mavrokordatos
in the eighteenth century. Both of his parents had become naturalized British
subjects by the time he was born, and, although he was related by birth to an
international network of cosmopolitan Greeks, in most respects he lived the life of
an English gentleman.
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.
Exploiting his wide range of influential connections, Mavrogordato acted, at
various stages in his career, as a conduit for information and advice between the
British and Greek political establishments, fostering understanding between the
two countries by explaining and promoting Greek national interests in Britain. He
was convinced that Greek interests were best served by a republican rather than a
royalist regime. In 1914, at the request of the Foreign Office, he helped R. M.
Burrows to organize British propaganda in Greece. During the First World War he
also worked for the Anglo-Hellenic League, set up in London in 1913 ‘to defend the
just claims and honour of Greece’ in the wake of the Balkan wars. From 1916 to
1918 he served as the league's honorary secretary, and between 1916 and 1921 he
published articles and pamphlets promoting the cause of Greece in its territorial
disputes with Bulgaria and Turkey. The league played a leading role in establishing
the Koraes chair of modern Greek and Byzantine history, language, and literature
at King's College, London. In 1919, before Arnold Toynbee was appointed as its first
incumbent, Mavrogordato inaugurated the chair with a series of lectures on
modern Greek history. The Greek government awarded him the Gold Cross of the
Order of the Redeemer the same year.
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In 1917 Mavrogordato had published an anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist
manifesto, The World in Chains: Some Aspects of War and Trade, in which he
argued, in caustic and trenchant style, that international socialism was the only
remedy for modern society. A pacifist and anti-nationalist, he was a member of
various committees of the League of Nations Union during the inter-war years.
During this period he wrote occasional book reviews and reports on manuscripts
submitted to publishers. He was Bywater and Sotheby professor of Byzantine and
modern Greek language and literature at Oxford from 1939 to 1947, during which
time he resided in Exeter College, while his wife remained in their house in
Charmouth, near Lyme Regis. In 1947 he was elected president of the League for
Democracy in Greece, which was set up in London in support of the Greek left after
the Second World War.
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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Known to close friends and family as Johnnie and by colleagues as Mavro,
Mavrogordato was greatly loved by his wide circle of friends, and he in turn valued
his friendships, which included close relationships with a number of younger
women. He generally avoided eating meat (making an exception for bacon). He
frequently complained of feeling the cold, and during the winter months he would
don green velvet ear-muffs even when walking a short distance in Oxford. A
generous, courteous, charming, and modest man, he was a philanthropist, genial
companion, conversationalist, connoisseur, talented amateur artist (Stephen
Gaselee's book Stories from the Christian East, 1918, was illustrated with his line
drawings), and collector of books and art. He was acquainted with the directors of
many art galleries and publishers and with members of the Bloomsbury and
Camden Town groups, and was a close friend of James Elroy Flecker, Compton
Mackenzie, Norman Douglas, and Mark Gertler. The last of these painted a fine
portrait of him in 1925. He purchased a number of paintings and sculptures by
leading modern British artists and donated many books to the universities of
Cambridge, London, and Oxford. He died at his home, 3 Montpelier Walk,
Knightsbridge, on 24 July 1970, of heart failure. He was survived by his wife and
their two sons, Nicolas and Michael.
PETER MACKRIDGE
Sources D. Kitsikis, Propagande et pressions en politique internationale: la Grèce et ses
revendications à la conférence de la paix, 1919–20 (1963), 310, 459–61 · The Times (27 July 1970) · E.
O. James, Folklore, 81/3 (autumn 1970), 219 · R. Clogg, ‘How to become a professor’, Times Higher
Education Supplement (21 Aug 1987) · S. MacDougall, Mark Gertler (2002) · Bodl. Oxf., papers of John
Mavrogordato, MSS dep. Mavrogordato · family genealogies, www.christopherlong.co.uk, accessed on
24 March 2009 · WWW · personal knowledge (2010) · private information (2010) [P. Mavrogordato,
grandson; H. T. Willetts] · b. cert. · m. cert. · d. cert.
Archives Bodl. Oxf., corresp., diaries and papers | GL, Edward Gleichen MSS, corresp. · U. Reading
L., Hogarth Press papers, corresp.
Likenesses M. Gertler, portrait, 1925, Exeter College, Oxford
Wealth at death nil: administration with will, 22 Dec 1970, CGPLA Eng. & Wales
© Oxford University Press 2004–11 All rights reserved
Peter Mackridge, ‘Mavrogordato, John Nicolas (1882–1970)’, Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography, Oxford University Press, May 2010
[http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/53079, accessed 21 Feb 2011]
John Nicolas Mavrogordato (1882–1970): doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/53079
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