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VACATIONS ALLOWED.

Nobel prize recipient, Odysseus Elytis was born #OTD in 1911. “If you deconstruct Greece, you will, in the end, see an olive tree, a grapevine, and a boat remain. That is, with as much, you reconstruct her. You’ll come to learn a great deal if you study the insignificant in depth.”

Δίνω το χέρι στη δικαιοσύνη

Διάφανη κρήνη κορυφαία πηγή

Ο ουρανός μου είναι βαθύς κι ανάλλαχτος

Ό,τι αγαπώ γεννιέται αδιάκοπα

Ό,τι αγαπώ, βρίσκεται στην αρχή του πάντα

 Οδυσσέας Ελύτης

Odysseus Elytis

(1911-1996)

Greek poet and winner of the 1979 Nobel Prize for Literature.

Elytis’s poems are written in rich language, full of images from history and myths. The lines are long and musical. Inspired by the ‘sanctity of the perceiving senses’ Elytis celebrated in his early poems the mystery of the Greek light, the sea, and the air. Later themes are grief, suffering, and search for a paradise.

Odysseus Elytis (Odysseas Alepoudhelis) was born in Iráklion, Crete, into a prosperous Cretan family. His parents and ancestors came from the island of Lesbos, home of the ancient Greek poet Sappho. Elytis studied law at Athens University from 1930 to 1935 without taking a degree. He worked periodically in the family’s soap manufacturing business.

Inspired by French Surrealism and especially Paul Éluard, Elytis started to write verses. His first poems appeared in 1935 in the magazine Ta Nea Grammata. Elytis’s first collection, combined themes of Eros and beauty with the timeless nature of the Aegean world.

During WW II when Nazis occupied Greece, Elytis joined the resistance movement and served as a second lieutenant in Albania in 1940-41. In 1943 appeared Asma iroiko ke penthimo ghia ton hameno anthipolochago tis Alvanias (Heroic and Elegiac Song for the Lost Second Lieutenant of the Albanian Campaign). In its Elytis’s joyful visions of youth and the sun-drenched Aegean nature changed into an acknowledgment of violence and sudden death. In the poem, the youthful hero is killed on the battlefield and miraculously resurrected through his youth and heroism.

After the war, Elytis wrote critics for the newspaper Kathimerini and worked for the National Broadcasting Institute in Athens in 1945-46 and again 1953-54. In 1948 he moved to Paris, where he studied literature at the Sorbonne. During this time, he became acquainted with Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and other figures of the Parisian art scene.

In 1953 Elytis returned to Greece and took an active role in cultural affairs. He served as member of the Greek critical and prize-awarding Group of the Twelve. He was president and governing-board member of Karolos Koun’s Art Theater and of the Greek Ballet. His silence as a poet ended in 1959 with To Axion Esti, reminiscent of Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself.

The work took him 14 years to write; it was later set music by Mikis Theodorakis. Inspired by the Byzantine liturgy, Elytis combines the biblical story of the creation with modern Greek history. In this work the poet identifies himself in the first section, ‘Genesis’, with the sun and the entire Aegena world and his race. In the second, ‘The Passion,’ he passes through the barbaric war decade, comparing humankind’s suffering with the suffering of Christ. Eventually, like Dante in Paradise, he sees the sun, love, and beauty. “If there is, I think, for each one of us a different, a personal Paradise,” Elytis once said, “mine should irreparably be inhabited by trees of words that the wind dresses in silver, like poplars, by men who see the rights of which they have been deprived returning to them, and by birds that even in the midst of the truth of death insist on singing in Greek and on saying, eros, eros, eros!””

 Between 1965 and 1968 Elytis served on the administrative board of the Greek National Theater and then spent the next two years in Paris after the Greek military coup of 1967. In 1978 he published a long poetic work, Maria Nefeli, which was finished when he returned to Greece. Its alternating monologues are spoken by a girl, Maria Nephele, and the Antiphonist, the poet himself. For much of his life, Elytis spent in semi-seclusion, focusing only on his art, but after the Nobel Prize followed a period of busy traveling.

Elytis never married; during his last years, his companion was the poet Ioulita Iliopoulou. Elytis died of a heart attack on March 18, 1996.

His collected poems appeared posthumously in 1997. Elytis was also a talented painter and produced illustrations of his lyrical world in gouaches and collages.

I know the night no longer

I know the night no longer, the terrible anonymity of death

A fleet of stars moors in the haven of my heart

O Hesperos, sentinel, that you may shine by the side

Of a skyblue breeze on an island which dreams

Of me anouncing the dawn from its rocky heights

My twin eyes set you sailing embraced

With my true heart's star: I know the night no longer

I know the names no longer of a world which disavows me

I read seashells, leaves, and the stars clearly

My hatred is superfluous on the roads of the sky

Unless it is the dream which watches me again

As I walked by the sea of immortality in tears

O Hesperos, under the arc of your golden fire

I know the night no longer that is a night only.

Translated by Kimon Friar

«La isla desierta»

Abril, marzo se os saluda

y tú Cuaresma chiquita

Pongo proa pongo ruta

voy en busca de una isla

que en el mapa no figura

En el aire cuatro aves

de oro la tienen en vilo

En aquel lugar no sabes

de ladrones ni asesinos,

ni de padre ni de madre

Las flores crecen granadas

tres brazadas cada noche

Son sus costas sombreadas

los árboles en sus bordes

cual cangrejos se encaraman

De la soledad en la brisa

todo es santo permanente

Tocas la mano divina

y cual paloma silvestre

en las olas te reclinas

Adiós odio adiós inquinas,

terquedad de cada uno

Si ves la desierta isla

todo lo demás es humo

Basta una vez en la vida.

Odysseas Elytis

Traducción de Cristian Carandell