Odysseus Elytis : The Poet of Greece

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relations through the rich cultural feast of Greek creation, the Press &
Communication Office communicates through “επιΚοΙνωΝίΑ” with the ancient
civilization of the East, the Chinese civilization, and consolidates the already
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The Greek word “επιΚοΙνωΝίΑ” means “communication”, and it was chosen for
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remind the traditional Chinese lantern, while the blue and the red color are
typical
of
Greece
and
China,
respectively.
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Odysseus Elytis : The Poet of Greece
‘‘created for the young Korai and the Aegean islands,
lover of the deer’s leaping, initiate in the Mystery of olive leaves.’’
The Axion Esti
The Poet of Aegean Sea, the Poet without borders, the gifted Poet of Greece,
Odysseus Elytis, who dedicated his life to a love of hope, beauty, freedom, justice, and
Greek tradition, in poems of captivating lyricism, surreal imaginary and a voice to the
human consciousness, is - once more - invested with glory this year (2011), 100 years after
his birth, the so called “Year of Elytis”.
Elytis established himself as one of the leading voices of a generation of literary
Greek giants, as the principal contributor to the “renaissance” that had been brought to
Greek letters since the mid of 1930’s. Elytis’s lifetime work has been greatly influenced
by the art, literature, philosophy, language and religion of pre-classical Greece, of
Byzantium, of heroic years of Greeks against fascism during II World War. He was a
Platonic idealist, without believing, however, that poetry is made of ideas, but rather of
feelings.
The Nobelist poet with ‘‘his most ambitious poem’’ as Elytis had characterized his
‘AXION ESTI’ - which was described by the Swedish Academy as ‘‘one of the 20th
century literature’s most concentrated and ritually faceted poems’’- recounts the world of
E r o s, including his battle against the darkness created by misunderstanding and hatred,
his victory, and the ultimate justification and praise.
Ένα το χελιδόνι κι η Άνοιξη ακριβή
Για να γυρίσει ο ήλιος θέλει δουλειά πολλή…
Θέλει νεκροί χιλιάδες να ‘ναι στους Τροχούς
Θέλει κι οι ζωντανοί να δίνουν το αίμα τους.
Θέ μου Πρωτομάστορα μ’ έχτισες μέσα στα βουνά
Θέ μου Πρωτομάστορα μ’ έκλεισες μες στη θάλασσα !
1
A Solitary swallow and a costly spring,
for the sun to turn it takes a job of work,
It takes a thousand dead sweating at the wheels,
it takes the living also giving up their blood.
God my Master Builder, You built me into the mountains,
God my Master Builder, You enclosed me in the sea !
The Axion Esti
As one critic remarked: “For the first time in centuries, an immortal Greek sea,
which had once been the mother and nurse of the most creative forms in the history of the
Arts regained its youthful vigour in Elytis’s poetry. The Aegean Sea, not only as
geographical area but chiefly as the reminder and vindication of a racial continuity,
constituted for Elytis the source of novel visions where in life and dream, feeling and
nostalgia, the present and the past, were once again reunited. Its mystical function, which
often assumes a purely metaphysical extension, exists already even in the juvenilia, the
early poems of Elytis.
In 1972, Odysseus Elytis - describing the aims of his poetry
- wrote: “I consider poetry a source of innocence full of
revolutionary forces. It is my mission to direct these forces
against a world my conscience cannot accept, precisely so as
to bring that world through continual metamorphoses more
in harmony with my dreams. I am referring here to a contemporary kind of magic whose
mechanism leads to the discovery of our true reality. It is for this reason that I believe, to
the point of idealism, that I am moving in a direction which has never been attempted
until now. In the hope of obtaining a freedom from all constraints and the justice which
could be identified with absolute light, I am an idolater who, without wanting to do so,
arrives at Christian sainthood. There was always the oriental side which occupied an
important place in the Greek spirit. Throughout antiquity oriental values were
assimilated. There exists an oriental side in the Greek which should not be neglected. It is
for this reason that make the distinction”
Throughout his long career as a poet, Elytis remained true to his
vision of a poetry that addresses the power of language and
connects the history, the mythology of Greece to the physical
2
world and the realities of the modern age. Renowned for their astonishing lyricism and
profound optimism, Elytis’ s poems capture the natural wonders of Greece and give voice
to the contemporary Greek – and to more universally human – consciousness. The
imagistic beauty in his poems derived from the natural world he had inhabited since
birth and with which he was deeply and permanently enamoured.
Elytis combines values of innocence, light and hope, a sense of “living history” whereby
all elements and influences associated with
Greece can be fused together to recover a
restored sense of identity. He reflects the hope
even in the tragedy, he emphasizes the energies
of human being and his soul and the spirit of
nature. He connects myth with history in order
to confront good and evil. The Dionysian and
Apollonian aspects of life blend together within
the individual and the culture. The sound and
smells of the open-air market places, the emphasis of sun light on the sea ever present,
and all together represent a continuity in time and a celebration of life and death. The
Poet created a synthesis of rich and visceral aspects of the Aegean landscape and culture,
ideological elements of youth, warmth, beauty and all elements of Greece’s tradition and
complex history. He criticized the vulgarity of contemporary society’s culture,
reformulated the fundamental, minimal essentials of life, he brought to Greek literature a
clarity and sharpness which it had not known since the national poet Dionysios Solomos,
a century earlier.
Master of powerful language, Elytis is together
with Seferis, the starting point for the innovation of
the neo-Hellenic poetic language. His language has
an exceptional elegance, a lyrical voice, a diffuse
richness. He is particularly sensitive to the distant
echo of the myths of the Hellenic poetry, to the tone,
to the interior speech ultimately to its ethical
rhythm above history and style. The last quality, particularly in the poet’s later work,
drew on the Greek language through the ages.
3
TΗ ΓΛΩΣΣΑ μου έδωσαν ελληνική,
το σπίτι φτωχικό στις αμμουδιές του Ομήρου.
Μονάχη έγνοια η γλώσσα μου στις αμμουδιές του Ομήρου.
I was given the Greek language,
a poor house on Homer’s beaches.
Μy only care my tongue on the sandy shores of Homer...
Τhe Axion Esti
In China, the Nobelist Greek poet is very popular among
the Chinese intellectuals. Elytis’ s superior work ‘‘THE
AXION ESTI’’ is translated in Chinese language ( 2007 ) in
a very trustworthy translation by the Hellenist Mr. Liu
Ruihong, with the Greek name “Leonidas”, awarded with
the “A΄ Greek Prize of Best Translation for a Foreign Book”
by Greek Ministry of Culture. At the preface of the Chinese
publication, the Elytis’s poem is characterized by the
translator as “a great piece having the nature of music and architecture. Therefore,
we can say without exaggeration that this poetry can be not only read, but also
heard and seen. No matter which way you choose, you will have unique experience.
In this poetry, the writer revealed the secret from birth-torture-death-revival to
eternal life”.
Πριν απ’τα μάτια μου ήσουν φως
Πριν απ’ τον Έρωτα έρωτας
Κι όταν σε πήρε το φιλί
Γυναίκα.
Before I had eyes you were light,
Before Eros love
And when the kiss took you
A woman.
Orientations
4
Love is free. Eros is triumphant. Thought is free too. Eros has a permanent and
insistent presence in Elytis’s work, concurrent with his love of life. Blessed by the wind
the poet seems to summon us to a world of universal brotherhood serving beauty and
poetry. Elytis’s Eros flaps the wings under the sea and the lands, the beaches and the
rocks, showing us the Greek Archipelago, with its boats and sea-shells under the Greek
light unfolding before us a world of Elytis’s memories and visions in “this world so small,
this world so great”.
Elytis publicizing that “My country’s spatial area is one of the smallest; but its
temporal extension is infinite” (Nobel Prize Speech, 1979) never forgets to come at the
end with the - so opportune today - invocation :
Της Δικαιοσύνης ήλιε νοητέ * και μυρσίνη συ δοξαστική
μη παρακαλώ σας
*
μη λησμονάτε τη χώρα μου !
O sun of Justice in the mind * and you O glorifying myrtle
do not oh I implore you * do not forget my country
The Αxion Esti
Christos G. Failadis
Press & Communication Counsellor
Embassy of Greece in Beijing
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The small world the great of Odysseus Elytis
ΣΤΗΝ ΑΡΧΗ το φως. Και η ώρα η πρώτη
που τα χείλη ακόμη στον πηλό
δοκιμάζουν τα πράγματα του κόσμου
In the beginning is the light. And the first hour
when lips still in clay
try out the things of the world.
Πανωραία στον ύπνο της άπλωσε και η θάλασσα
γάζες αιθέρος τις αλεύκαντες
κάτω από τις χαρουπιές και τους μεγάλους όρθιους φοίνικες
And the sea, so exquisite in her sleep, spread
unbleached gauze of sky
under the carob trees and the great upright palms
Πρώτα σύρθηκαν με δύναμη
και ψηλά από τα μπεντένια ξεκαρφώθηκαν πέφτοντας
οι Εφτά Μπαλτάδες.
First the Seven Axes, wrenched with force,
Pried loose from high up in the battlements,
fell to the ground.
“The Axion Esti”
Πρώτη φορά σ’ ενός νησιού τα χώματα
δύο του Νοεμβρίου ξημερώματα
βγήκα να δω τον κόσμο και μετάνιωσα
τα “ζόρικα” που λεν αμέσως τα ‘νιωσα.
For the first time on an island’s soil
November the second early in the morning
I came out to see the world and I regretted it
I immediately felt the pain.
“Maria Nefeli”
7
In November 1935, on the eleventh volume of the avant – garde Greek literary
periodical Ta Nea Ghrammata (The New Word), a young poet, Odysseus Elytis, first
appeared with several poems.
Elytis was the nom de plume that Odysseus Alepoudelis chose to replace his
family name, in this first appearance. The choice of the name already reflects the
complexity and depth of perception, as its first part, the syllable “el-“, recalls classical
Greek themes and ideas, as Ellas (Hellas), elpidha (hope), eleftheria (freedom), Eleni
(Helen), and is combined with the general regional suffix “-ytis” in a rather unexpected
and therefore highly inventive and challenging way, creating a new and absolutely private
universe for the poet, who whishes to keep his distance from the family factory and from
any dependence on a job.
The family of Panagiotis Alepoudelis, in 1919. On the front, left, Odysseus Elytis
Odysseus Elytis, the youngest of six children, was born on the island of Crete, in
the neighborhood “Seven Axes” in Herakleion, on November 2nd, 1911. The name of the
neighborhood derives from the axes that symbolize the seven Turkish regiments, which
conquered the city of Herakleion in 1669, after a siege that lasted 24 years. In 1912,
shortly after the poet’s birth, Crete was united with Greece, and the axes were taken down
from the eastern wall of the city’s fortification.
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His parents, Panagiotis and Maria Alepoudelis, hailed from Lesvos, one of the
largest islands of the Aegean Sea, and home of ancient Greek poet Sappho. Panagiotis
Alepoudelis had settled in Crete since 1895, and he established there a successful soap
factory and a seed-oil factory.
Summer of 1921. Ten-years-old Odysseus Elytis on the island of Spetses
Although the family moved to Athens in 1914, they spent the summertime on the
islands of Lesvos, Crete and Spetses, where the contact with the sea and with the Greek
marine tradition shapes the cultural and spiritual origin of Elytis poetry.
After completing his formal training, Elytis attended the Athens Law School,
where he was connected with distinguished professors of the University, while the
association with Greek surrealist poets Andreas Embeirikos, Nicos Eggonoboulos and
Nicos Gatsos introduced him to the requests of a new poetic form, surrealism, which he
had already met at the age of 18, in 1929, through the verses Capitale de la douleur of the
French poet, Paul Elyard.
Elytis embraced surrealism, but with reservations concerning automatic writing,
as his writing has never been automatic but instead disciplined in its form and substance.
“Many facets of surrealism I cannot accept, such as its paradoxical side, its championing
of automatic writing”.
9
Albeit “never an orthodox surrealist”, Elytis acknowledged the gratifying,
liberating forms of surrealism, which freed him from rationalism, he considered
surrealism “to be the last available oxygen in a dying world, dying at least in Europe”,
and attributed his tendency to surrealism to the attempt to discover the true face of Greece
through the rejection of Western rationalism, which was till that time the dominant model
of the approach, and through a renewed, revolutionary, fresh contact with Greek truth.
“Surrealism contained a supernatural element, and this enabled us to form a kind of
alphabet out of purely Greek elements with which to express ourselves” (…) “It was the
only school of poetry – and, I believe, the last in Europe – which aimed at spiritual health
and reacted against the rationalist currents which had filled most Western minds. Since
surrealism had destroyed this rationalism like a hurricane, it had cleared the ground in
front of us, enabling us to link ourselves physiologically with our soil and to regard
Greek reality without the prejudices that have reigned since the Renaissance”.
Starting with the publication of his first poems, in 1935, and ending with “West of
Sorrow”, in 1995, the final full year of his life, Elytis published some fifteen collections
of verses in all. Apart from his poetry, Elytis also wrote theoretical and critical essays,
translated modern foreign literary masterpieces and produced gouaches and collages,
which reflect the pictorial quality of his poetry and give expression to his firm conviction
that “one must transform every moment into an image”.
Elytis’s poetry has gone through four major periods of development, of unceasing
creativity, unprecedented innovativeness, artistic quality, expressive richness.
Elytis characterized the first period, as illustrated in his debut volume
“Orientations”, as one wherein “nature and metamorphoses predominate (stimulated by
surrealism, which always believed in the metamorphosis of things)”.
The first two lines of the first poem of “Orientations” are:
Ο έρωτας
Eros
Το αρχιπέλαγος
The archipelago
As the poet himself once confined in an interview, “it is characteristic that the first
two verses of “Orientations” are ‘eros, the archipelago’. In a way this foreshadows the
entire evolution, in terms of content, of my poetry”.
10
In the poetry of Homer, of the earliest known Greek poet, Eros is the first active
force, who conquered the souls of human beings and gods, Eros is the source of beauty.
The archipelago is the world of the Aegean sea, which offers to the poet images.
Κι η πρώρα των αφρών του
And the prow of its foams
Κι οι γλάροι των ονείρων του
And the gulls of its dreams
Στο πιο ψηλό κατάρτι του ο ναύτης ανεμίζει
Ένα τραγούδι
On its highest mast the sailor waves¨
A song
The first strophe of the first Elytis’s poem closes with the image of a seavoyaging sailor singing to the wind and to the waves: it is the poet himself announcing
the course of his life, and sailing to Poetry.
With the poems of his first collection, the poet attempts to incorporate the
boldness of surrealism and his personal request for disciplined and simple expression in
the traditional norms and linguistic forms of Greek poetry, and to determine his own
point in a new lyric technique, through the orientation (as already mentioned with the title
of the collection) to the invention and creation of a universe of light and sea, of an hymn
to the adolescence and to the feast of senses.
Έχεις μια γεύση τρικυμίας στα χείλη – Μα πού γύριζες
Ολημερίς τη σκληρή ρέμβη της πέτρας και της θάλασσας
Αετοφόρος άνεμος γύμνωσε τους λόφους
Γύμνωσε την επιθυμία σου ως το κόκαλο
Κι οι κόρες των ματιών σου πήρανε τη σκυτάλη της Χίμαιρας
Ριγώνοντας μ’ αφρό τη θύμηση!
You have a taste of tempest on your lips – But
where did you wander?
All day long in the hard reverie of stone and sea?
An eagle-bearing wind stripped the hills
Stripped your longing to the bone
And the pupils of your eyes received the message of chimera
Spotting memory with foam!
11
“The element of surprise, which excites the mind and permits one to see the world
from a different angle” is present in these verses, while the absence of the explicit
development of a main theme combined with the dynamism invoked by the succession of
powerful images reveals the aim to discover the pure lyric substance of language and of
its expression in poetry.
12
In 1941 Elytis served as a second lieutenant
in the Greek army and fought on the front
line defending Greece against the attempted
invasion by Italian Fascist forces. There,
Elytis contracted typhus, from which he
recovered painfully. In April of 1941 Nazi
Germany
occupied
Greece,
and
this
occupation lasted till October 1944, and was
then followed by civil war.
For the poet, this era is the second
period of his poetry, one of “greater historic
and moral awareness, yet without the loss of
vision of the world, which marks my first period”.
Occupied Athens will feel in November 1943 the surprise of hope and certainty,
as with the publication of his second collection, “Sun the First”, Elytis uses his myth –
making power and arrays an imaginary universe against the sufferings of the war and the
occupation. In a myth with sun and life as dominant elements, the poet expresses his
resistance to the war and gives shape to his firm belief that “the war should not prevail
over us, make our physical or intellectual inclinations silent and leave nothing but
Necessity in the first level of our interest”.
In poems shimmering with transparent light, Elytis reveals his commitment to
repose in his work his views on life and world, combined with his personal aesthetic
theory, and confirms his firm belief that the poet, with a high sense of responsibility
towards his work, makes the choice of reaction to the dire conditions of the war, so as to
console and to encourage, while at the same time to give the form of artistic expression to
History and to assure the survival of historical events through a highly differentiated
point of view.
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Entering a phase of self-consciousness, the poet states
Δίνω το χέρι στη δικαιοσύνη
I give my hand to justice
Διάφανη κρήνη κορυφαία πηγή
Transparent fountain source at the peak
Ο ουρανός μου είναι βαθύς κι ανάλλαχτος My sky is deep and unaltered
Ό,τι αγαπώ γεννιέται αδιάκοπα
What I love is always being born
Ό,τι αγαπώ βρίσκεται στην αρχή του πάντα. What I love is beginning always.
Elytis believes that “along whatever path man searches for truth, he is bound to
arrive at nature”. So, nature, unaffected by History, incessantly present as a stable point
of reference for the human existence, is revealed in these poems as an eternal power of
certainty and safety.
The view of this nature in all its details, with sound, light, colors, voices, songs,
under the dominant presence of sun,
Αυτός ο αγέρας που χαζεύει μεσ’ στις κυδωνιές This wind that loiters among the quinces
Το ζουζούνι αυτό που πιπιλάει τα κλήματα
This insect that sucks the vines
Η πέτρα που ο σκορπιός φοράει κατάσαρκα
The stone that the scorpion wears next to his skin
Κι αυτές οι θημωνιές μέσα στ’ αλώνια
And these sheaves on the threshing floor
Που καμώνονται το γίγα σε μωρά παιδιά ξυπόλητα. That play the giant to small barefoot children.
Οι ζωγραφιές του ανάστα ο Θεός
The images of the Resurrection
Στον τοίχο που έξυσαν τα πεύκα με τα δάχτυλά τους On walls that the pines trees scratched with their fingers
Ο ασβέστης που βαστάει στη ράχη του τα μεσημέρια
This whitewash that carries the noonday on its back
Και τα τζιτζίκια τα τζιτζίκια μεσ’ στα αυτιά των δέντρων. And the cicadas, the cicadas in the ears of the trees.
Μεγάλο καλοκαίρι από κιμωλία
Great summer of chalk
Μεγάλο καλοκαίρι από φελλό
Great summer of cork
Τα κόκκινα πανιά λοξά στα σαγανάκια
The red sails slanting in guts of wind
Στον πάτο ζώα κατάξανθα σφουγγάρια
On the sea-floor white creatures, sponges
Των βράχων φυσαρμόνικες
Accordions of the rocks
Πέρκες από τις δαχτυλιές ακόμη του κακού ψαρά
Perch from the fingers even of bad fishermen
Ξέρες περήφανες στις πετονιές του ήλιου.
Proud reefs on the fishing lines of the sun.
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inspires the poet courage and the firm belief that
Ένα και δυο: τη μοίρα μας δεν θα την πει κανένας
Ένα και δυο: τη μοίρα του ήλιου θα την πούμ’ εμείς.
No one will tell our fate, and that is that,
We ourselves will tell the sun’s fate, and that is that.
15
The experience of the war and the spirit of bravely enduring and overcoming the
darkness of this period inspire the poem “Song Heroic and Mourning for the Lost Second
Lieutenant of the Albanian Campaign”, published in 1945.
Elytis describes the concept of the poem: “The virtues I found embodied and
living in my comrades formed in synthesis a brave young man of heroic stature, one
whom I saw in every period of our history. They had killed him a thousand times, and a
thousand times he had sprung up again, breathing and alive. He was no doubt the measure
of our civilization, compounded of his love not of death but of life. It was with his love of
Freedom he recreated life out of the stuff of death”.
The initially elegiac tone of the poem, already stated in the title with the adjective
“mourning”, the mournful lament over the passing of the sun and the coming of the
darkness, gradually becomes ecstatic laudation and reveals the passion for life and the
obstinate resistance to the forces that violate human freedom, as the poem ends with the
hope of regeneration.
Κείνοι που επράξαν το κακό – τους πήρε μαύρο σύγνεφο
Μα εκείνος που τ’ αντίκρυσε στους δρόμους του ουρανού
Ανεβαίνει τώρα μοναχός και ολόλαμπρος!
Those who committed the evil – a black cloud took them
But he who confronted it in the sky’s roads
Ascends now alone and resplendent!
Τώρα χτυπάει πιο γρήγορα τ’ όνειρο μεσ’ στο αίμα
Του κόσμου η πιο σωστή στιγμή σημαίνει:
Ελευθερία,
Έλληνες μεσ’ στα σκοτεινά δείχνουν το δρόμο:
ΕΛΕΥΘΕΡΙΑ
Για σένα θα δακρύσει από χαρά ο ήλιος
Now the dream beats faster in the blood
The world’s rightest moment rings out:
Freedom,
Greeks show the way in the darkness:
FREEDOM
For you the sun will weep with joy
16
17
Following the end of World War II, Elytis remained in Greece until 1948, and
then he went to Paris. He returned to Athens in 1951.
During the ‘50s Elytis worked on and published two major collections: “The
Axion Esti” (“Worthy it is” – a refrain familiar to all Greeks from Greek Orthodox
liturgy), published in 1959, after a long silence that lasted more than a decade after the
“Song Heroic and Elegiac for the Lost Second Lieutenant of the Albanian Campaign”,
and “Six and One Remorses for the Sky”, in 1960.
With the monumental “The Axion Esti”, the most ambitious poem of modern
Greek poetry, “a kind of spiritual autobiography which attempts to dramatize the national
and philosophical extensions of a highly personal sensibility”, and “to present an image
of the contemporary Greek consciousness through the developing perspective of a firstperson persona, who is at once the poet himself and the voice of his country”, Elytis won
wide national and international appreciation.
Drawing from a wide range of sources of the historical, cultural and literary Greek
tradition, from Homer, Heraclitus, Pindar, Herodotus, Thucydides, Pythagoras, from the
Byzantine hymnography and the Greek Orthodox liturgy, from the folk songs of the 19th
century, from the poems of Dionysios Solomos and the surrealist poets of the 20th century,
and with the evocation of the history of the Albanian campaign, the German occupation,
and the civil war, along with the Ottoman occupation and the War of Independence, the
poem is divided into three sections, bearing hymnological titles: “Genesis”, “Passion”,
“Gloria”.
In “Genesis”, seven free-verse hymns describe the birth of the poet and his
growing awareness of this “small world the Great” along with the depiction of the stages
in the creation of the world and of the Greek landscape.
ΚΑΙ ΑΥΤΟΣ αλήθεια που ήμουνα Ο πολλούς αιώνες πριν
Ο ακόμη χλωρός μες στη φωτιά Ο Αχειροποίητος
με το δάχτυλο έσυρε τις μακρινές
γραμμές
ανεβαίνοντας κάποτε ψηλά με οξύτητα
και φορές πιο χαμηλά οι καμπύλες απαλές
μία μέσα στην άλλη
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στεριές μεγάλες που ένιωσα
να μυρίζουνε χώμα όπως η νόηση
AND THE ONE I really was, the One of many centuries ago,
the One still verdant in the midst of fire, the One not made by human hand,
drew with his finger the distant
lines
sometimes rising sharply to a height
sometimes lower: the curves gentle
one inside the other
land masses that made me feel
the smell of earth like understanding
«Η ειρήνη θέλει δύναμη να την αντέξεις» είπε
και στροφή γύρω του κάνοντας μ’ ανοιχτές παλάμες έσπειρε
φλόμους κρόκους καμπανούλες
όλων των ειδών της γης τ’ αστέρια
τρυπημένα στο ένα φύλλο τους για σημείο καταγωγής
και υπεροχή και δύναμη
ΑΥΤΟΣ
ο κόσμος ο μικρός, ο μέγας!
19
“To endure peace you need strength”, he said
and swinging around with palms open he sowed
mullein, crocuses, bluebells
all variety of earthy stars
and cut into one leaf of each, as a mark of their origin,
their superiority and strength:
THIS WORLD
this small world the great!
Structured in 3 parts, the 18 psalms, 12 odes and 6 readings of the “Passion”
describe the poet’s experience from the World War II and its tragic aftermath. The poet
suffers the agonies of its nation, overcomes evil and affirms his tradition.
ΙΔΟΥ εγώ λοιπόν,
ο πλασμένος για τις μικρές Κόρες και τα νησιά του Αιγαίου
ο εραστής του σκιρτήματος των ζαρκαδιών
και μύστης των φύλλων της ελιάς
ο ηλιοπότης και ακριδοκτόνος.
HERE then am I
created for the young Korai and the Aegean islands
lover of the deer’s leaping
initiate in the Mystery of olive leaves
sun-drinker and locust-killer.
Ο καθείς και τα όπλα του, είπα:
Στα Στενά τα ρόδια μου θ’ ανοίξω
Στα Στενά φρουρούς τους ζέφυρους θα στήσω
τα φιλιά τα παλιά θ’ απολύσω που η λαχτάρα μου άγιασε!
Λύνει αέρας τα στοιχεία και βροντή προσβάλλει τα βουνά.
Μοίρα των αθώων, είσαι η δική μου Μοίρα!
20
Each to his own weapons, I said:
In the Straits I’ll open my pomegranates
In the Straits I’ll post Zephyrs as sentries
I’ll unleash the old kisses canonized by my longing!
Wind releases the elements and thunder assaults the mountains.
Fate of the innocent, you are my own Fate!
The three sections of “Gloria” celebrate “in a long hymn of praise the sensual
and spiritual vitality the enlightened persona finds in the world that still remains open to
him after he had gained the knowledge of human evil and human sacrifice in his
country’s recent history”.
ΤΑ ΚΟΡΙΤΣΙΑ η πόα της ουτοπίας
τα κορίτσια οι παραπλανημένες Πλειάδες
τα κορίτσια τ’ Αγγεία των Μυστηρίων
τα γεμάτα ως πάνω και τ’ απύθμενα
Τα στυφά στο σκοτάδι και όμως θαύμα
τα γραμμένα στο φως και όμως μαυρίλα
τα στραμμένα επάνω τους όπως οι φάροι
The girls the bluegrass of utopia
the girls the Pleiades led astray
the girls Vessels of Mysteries
filled to the brim yet bottomless
Acrid in darkness yet miraculous
painted in white and yet all black
turned on themselves like lighthouse beams
τα ηλιοβόρα και τα σεληνοβάμονα
sun-devouring and moon-strolling
Η Έρση, η Μυρτώ, η Μαρίνα
Ersi, Myrto, Marina
η Ελένη, η Ρωξάνη, η Φωτεινή
η Άννα, η Αλεξάνδρα, η Κύνθια
Helen, Roxanne, Photeine
Anna, Alexandra, Cynthia
Set to music in 1964 by the famous Greek composer, Mikis Theodorakis, “The
Axion Esti” became so popular that every Greek can sing some of its verses.
21
22
Composed almost simultaneously with “The Axion Esti”, the seven
poems of the “Six and One Remorses for the Sky” are characterized
by a completely different style, by a discreet, personal, thoughtful
lyricism, partly related to the epic events of “The Axion Esti”,
which seem to be reconsidered in a framework of afterthoughts. A
different journey to a “new awareness” begins, under a sky “which
had lost its earlier innocence through the poet’s and world war’s
and postwar experience”. In poems that are “inner questions and
efforts to pass from a common and personal sense of guilt to a new
and liberated awareness”, the poet tries “to draw from experience a
new knowledge and hope and so help a new sky – now more
emphatically an inner one – attain a new purity on a higher and more conscious spiritual
level”.
Μυρίζουν ακόμη λιβανιά, κι έχουν την όψη καμένη από
το πέρασμά τους στα Σκοτεινά Μεγάλα Μέρη.
Κει που μεμιάς τους έριξε το Ασάλευτο
Μπρούμυτα, σ’ ένα χώμα που κι η πιο μικρή ανεμώνα
του θα’ φτανε να πικράνει τον αέρα του Άδη
Ο Ύπνος των Γενναίων
They will smell of incense, and their faces are burnt
by their crossing through the Great Dark Places.
There where they were suddenly flung by the Immovable
Face-down, on ground whose smallest anemone
would suffice to turn the air of Hades bitter
The Sleep of the Brave
23
24
The third period of Elytis’s work is characterized by that what the poet called his
“solar metaphysics”. As he said, “when I speak of solar metaphysics, I mean the
metaphysics of light. Since the sun had always had a central place in my poetry, I called it
solar metaphysics. All this characterizes the third period of my poetry, my third cycle, if
you wish, which is represented by the collection “The Light Tree and the Fourteenth
Beauty” (1971).
Dominated by the quality of an astonishing limpidity, by the idea that “behind a
given thing something different can be seen and behind that still something else, and so
on and so an”, and attempting to transpose into poetry “the limpidity which exists in
nature from the physical point of view”, the poet enters this new stage of his creation with
the painful realization that the sun of life is gradually approaching the moon of the dark
night sky, and the “light tree” of youth is difficult to discover. Still, the poet tries to
reconcile the light with the coming darkness, the sun with the moon, and to mitigate the
sorrow for the loss that time had brought.
The collection concludes with “Gift Silver Poem” - poetry being the only lasting
final gain from life, and silver depicting the coloring of the trees of paradise.
Ξέρω πως είναι τίποτε όλ’ αυτά
και πως η γλώσσα
που μιλώ δεν έχει αλφάβητο
Αφού και ο ήλιος και τα κύματα είναι μια γραφή συλλαβική
που την αποκρυπτογραφείς μονάχα στους καιρούς
της λύπης και της εξορίας
I know that all this is worthless and that the language
that I speak doesn’t have an alphabet
Since the sun and the waves are a syllabic script
which can be deciphered only in the years of sorrow and exile
25
In the seven poems of pure love lyric “The Monogram” – first published in
Brussels, in 1971, and then in Athens, in 1972 – love, addressed to an aetherial and
absent beloved, sings the hope of its continuation and fulfillment in Paradise.
Θα πενθώ πάντα – μ’ ακούς – για σένα, I shall mourn always – hear me? – for you
μόνος, στον Παράδεισο.
alone, in Paradise.
In 1971, the “Sovereign Sun”, a cantata loaded with island
imagery infiltrated by the sun and describing the destiny of Greece, and
in 1972, the “Rhos of Eros”, a collection of charming song lyrics,
decorated with collages and gouaches of the poet, were published.
In 1974, an important collection of poems
was published: “Stepchildren”, comprising two
series of seven poems, the earliest dated 1939
(“Psalm and Mosaic for Spring in Athens”), and
the latest 1972 (“Mystic Versicles”). In one of
the most interesting poems of the collection,
“Death
and
Resurrection
of
Constantine
Paleologus” (1968), inspired by an old legend
for the last, tragic emperor of the Byzantine
Empire, the poet reworks the motif of “Song
Heroic and Mourning for the Lost Second
Lieutenant of the Albanian Campaign”, and
reveals one of the major elements of his poetry:
“a kind of meteorism; there are creatures who have a tendency to mount up into the sky,
to rise toward the heights. The Second Lieutenant in the Albanian campaign is dead, but
yet he rises; Constantine Paleologus falls but he always rises again”. An antidote against
despair, this meteorism lifts the poetry above worldly reality and stresses the idea of
poetic sensibility’s triumph in eternal reality.
26
Μεσημέρι από νύχτα Και μήτ’ ένας πλάι του Μονάχα
οι λέξεις του οι πιστές που’ σμιγαν όλα τους τα χρώματα
ν’ αφήσουν μέσ’ στο χέρι του μια λόγχη από άσπρο φως
Noon out of night And not one person by his side Only
his faithful words that mingled all their colors
to leave in his hand a lance of white light
The world is an oppressive place to live through yet with a little pride
it’s worth it
In 1978, “Maria Nefeli”, a single long poem in dramatic form, which expresses the
word and mind of postwar youth, was published. The poet explains: “Maria Nefeli means
‘Maria Cloud’. Both names have a mythological connotation. But in my poem Maria is a
young woman, a modern radical of our age. My poems are usually rooted in my own
experience, yet they do not directly transcribe actual events. ‘Maria Nefeli’ constitutes an
exception. Having finished “The Axion Esti” (this was sixteen years ago), I met this
young woman in real life, and I suddenly wanted to write something very different from
“The Axion Esti”. Therefore I made the young woman speak in my poem and express her
world view, which is that of the young generation of today. I am not against her, for I try
to understand her viewpoint and that of her generation. I attempt to understand her by
having us speak in parallel monologues. My conclusion in this poem is that we search
basically for the same things but along different routes”.
Elytis confides that “it is a strange kind of poem” and describes the structure of the
poem, in which “a girl speaks. Her words are on the left side of the page and the poet’s
27
reaction is on the right. Yet it is not a dialogue, but two monologues side by side”, adding
that “it will be my first poem which takes place in an urban environment”.
The poem is arranged in 3 sections of twice 7 poems. Each section has an
introductory and a closing poem and two intermediary songs; apothegms are appended to
each poem.
In an effort to establish a dialogue with the younger generation, the poet redefines
the terms of his poetry, through a variety of styles – colloquial rhythms, urban imagery,
ironies, jokes, parodies and neologisms, in a poem characterized by an intense lyricism.
Κοιταζόμασταν μες απ’ την πέτρα We were looking at each other trough the stone
Elytis states: “Maria Nefeli is the other half of me; it is as if you would see the
reverse of me. Already in an early poem, ‘The Concert of Hyacinths’, I wrote ‘On the
other side I am the same’. So, here I am showing the other side of myself. Perhaps this
poem does constitute the synthesis of my third period”.
In October of 1979, the secretary of the Swedish Academy announced the awarding
of the 1979 Nobel Prize in Literature to Odysseus Elytis “for his poetry, which, against
the background of Greek tradition, depicts with sensuous strength and intellectual clearsightedness modern man’s struggle for freedom and creativeness”.
28
In the very productive fourth and final period of Elytis’s poetic word, the perception
of time as decay and death, and the awareness of death and of its increasing proximity
become the central issue of Elytis’s collections.
“The Little Seafarer”, composed between 1970 and
1974 and published in 1985, consists of fifty-eight
pieces and a short “Entrance” and “Exit”, which
frame the poem not only physically but also
emotionally. Perceiving time as a “dark historical
inheritance”, the poet views Greek History from a
completely different angle, compared to the sunlit and
hopeful approach of “The Axion Esti”, as now the
focus is on major political crimes – injustices and
murders – in all periods of Greek History, from the
antiquity and the classical era to the Hellenistic and
Byzantine period and to the present.
The “Entrance” reads:
ΚΑΠΟΤΕ ΔΕΝ
είναι παρά μια λάμψη πίσω απ’ τα
βουνά – κει κατά το μέρος του πελάγου. Κάποτε πάλι
ένας αέρας δυνατός που άξαφνα σταματάει όξω απ’ τα
λιμάνια. Κι όσοι νογούν, το μάτι τους βουρκώνει
Χρυσέ ζωής αέρα γιατί δε φτάνεις ως εμάς;
Κανένας δεν ακούει, κανένας. Όλοι τους πάνε κρατώντας
ένα εικόνισμα και πάνω του η φωτιά. Κι ούτε μια μέρα,
μια στιγμή στον τόπο αυτόν που να μη γίνεται άδικο και φονικό κανένα
SOMETIMES IT’S
no more than a glow behind the mountains – there toward the sea.
Sometimes again a strong wind that stops suddenly just outside the harbors. And
those who know, their eyes fill with tears
Golden wind of life why don’t you reach us?
No one hears, no one. They all go holding an icon and on it
fire. And not one day, one moment in this place when
29
injustice doesn’t occur or some murder
The “Exit” concludes:
ΑΛΛ’ ΑΚΑΤΑΝΟΗΤΑ ΔΕΝ
ακούει κανένας. Πάει
ψηλά ολοένα καιούμενο του Παραδείσου το πουλί. Κι όλες
οι Παναγίες οι ασημένιες, τίποτε. Αλλού γυρίστηκε η
φωνή και αθαυματούργητα έμειναν τα μάτια.
Έρμα ‘ν’ τα μάτια
BUT INCOMPREHENSIBLY
no one hears. The burning bird of Paradise goes ever higher.
The voice was turned elsewhere and the eyes remained unmiracled.
Helpless are the eyes
It is the first time that a poem by Elytis ends in despair.
The next step in this gradual confrontation with the decay
of time comes in the “Three Poems under a Flag of
Convenience” (1982), as the poet uses a language of “stark and
hopeless pragmatism” to describe time’s advance and the
accompanying physical, mental and moral decline.
Δύστυχο καταμόναχο ένα μου
τι θ’ απογίνεις
θα σε φάνε από το πλάι πέντε – εξ μηδενικά
και πάει τετέλεσται
να τηνε από τώρα κιόλας
ντύνεται Μοίρα η Εξουσία και σου σφυράει
Ad libitum.
my unfortunate allalone one
what’s become of you
five or six zeroes on the side will eat you up
and it is finished
there already now
Authority dresses as Fate and whistles to you
30
Ad libitum
Both “The Little Seafarer” and “Three Poems under a Flag of Convenience” end
in doubt as to the success of the poet’s lifelong effort to become enlightener.
In 1984, critics greet with surprise the “Diary of an Invisible April”, a collection
of forty-nine poems – some in verse and some in poetic prose – perceived as “a marginal
work in Elytis’s poetry which has no precedent in his oeuvre”, as the poet, in this private
and intimate confession “does not simply reveal the dark side of his luminous itself, i.e.
he does not let what is repressed in him come out, but he goes deeper, he questions and
even negates in a way what he has accomplished, thus giving it its true meaning”.
According to the poet, April, containing Holy Week, implies the notions of death
and resurrection. The poet develops in this poem a new structure, as “the motions of
things are given the way a camera lens would record and project them. Such a technique
has helped me, thanks to a bold decoupage, to maintain the notions of lastingness which
does not coincide with the current time”.
Μάνα που’ σαι να με δεις, όπως γεννήθηκα, έφυγα.
Παραήμουνα λίγος – άλλωστε ποιος νογάει – και
πολλά τα σερνάμενα τέρατα με τα πλάγια, λιπαρά πόδια.
Έτσι, στο μάκρος μιας ζωής με τόση δυσκολία στημένης
δεν έχουν απομείνει παρά μια μισοκαταστραμμένη πόρτα
και πολλές μεγάλες σάπιες ανεμώνες του νερού.
Κείθε περνάω και πάω – πού ξέρεις; - για
μια κοιλιά γλυκύτερη από την πατρίδα.
If only mother you could see me: as I was born, I departed.
I was far too little – besides who understands? – and far too many
were the creeping monsters with the lateral, slimy legs.
So, from the length of a life constructed with such difficulty
all that remains is a half-ruined door
and a lot of large decaying water anemones. Therefrom I pass
and proceed – who knows? – to a womb sweeter than my country.
31
In the “Diary of an Invisible April”, viewed as “the darkest, most painful and
most desperate” of Elytis’s poetic oeuvre, death is met face to face, as imminent and
inescapable fate, which demands from the poet his share of mortality.
In 1991, the collection “The Elegies of Jutting Rock” was
published for Elytis’s 80th birthday. Eros and death are the
themes of the fourteen elegies, which start with the
announcement of a sea voyage – similar to and yet different
from the one announced with the first verses of the
“Orientations”, continue with childhood and eros memories,
approach the infinity of the human soul, which is greeted both
by life and death, and affirm the essence of poetry.
Άοσμος κι όμως πιάνεται
Odourless yet like blossom
Όπως άνθος από τα ρουθούνια Ο θάνατος.
Death is grasped through the Nostrils.
Μεσολαβούνε κτίρια σιωπηλά, τετράγωνα
Square silent buildings with
Με απέραντους διαδρόμους αλλ’ επίμονα
Endless corridors come between but the odour
Η οσμή περνά πτυχές από λευκά σεντόνια ή βυσσινιά Persistently passes folds in white sheets or crimson
Παραπετάσματα σ’ όλο του δωματίου το μάκρος Curtains throughout the room’s length.
The last verse of the “Elegies” is “Ο θάνατος ο ήλιος ο χωρίς βασιλέματα”
“Death the sun without sunsets”
In summer 1995, in the harbor town of Porto Rafti, not far from
Athens, Elytis completed a collection of seven new poems,
“West of Sorrow”. As he stated, “they are poems more dense
and for this reason more difficult, but closer to my ideal”.
Containing “the dreams of a lifetime”, the poems recall the
sunlit Aegean world, “even west of the sun’s setting” and evoke memories and feelings from
Greece.
In March 18th, 1996, Odysseus Elytis, the poet of life and freedom, of light and sun, of
the Greek sea and the Greek passion, the voice of dignity and of endurance, the poet of Greece,
passed away, in the age of eighty – four years.
32
Now that he has left,
Ποίηση μόνον είναι κείνο που απομένει. Ποίηση What remains is poetry alone
as the last poem of “West of Sorrow” confirms.
In 1998, a collection of posthumous poems, “From Close by”, was published. If we
perceive “The Elegies of Jutting Rock” as the Approach to death, and the “West of Sorrow”
poems as the Confrontation with death, then this collection can be considered as the conclusion
of a trilogy and of Elytis’s work, as the Entry and Look Back.
At the end of this journey,
Ανθ’ ημών η αγάπη – Instead of us is Love
“This is why I write. Because poetry starts where death does not have the last word.
It is the end of one life and the beginning of another, which is similar to the first one, but
it goes very deep, to the utmost point that the soul could trace, at the borders of
antitheses, there where the Sun and Hades touch each other. The endless impetus toward
the physical light which is the Word and the non-created light which is God”.
Odysseus Elytis
33
The inventive power of language in Elytis’s poetic universe
“I consider poetry a source of innocence full of revolutionary forces. It is my mission to
direct these forces against a world my conscience cannot accept, precisely so as to bring
that world through continual metamorphoses more in harmony with my dreams. I am
referring here to a contemporary kind of magic whose mechanisms leads to the discovery
of our true reality. It is for this reason that I believe, to the point of idealism, that I am
moving in a direction which has never been attempted until now. In the hope of obtaining
a freedom of all constraints and the justice which could be identified with absolute light, I
am an idolater who, without wanting to do so, arrives at Christian sainthood”.
Odysseus Elytis
Accepting the Poetry Nobel Prize in Stockholm, on December 8th, 1979, Odysseus
Elytis reveals in his speech the essence of poetry as “the art of approaching that which
surpasses us”, and expresses his position on the issue of poetic language as “an
instrument of magic”, which “acquires a certain way of being” and “becomes a lofty
speech”, as “carrier of moral values”.
This idea of surpassing reality and creating a new poetic universe of truth,
“luminosity and transparency” emerges as dominant element and necessary precondition
of a poetry, which goes back to the initial source of the word – from the ancient Greek
verb “ποιώ: create” – and “is a creation from within language and not from without it”,
because “ideas are born at the same time as their verbal expression” and “hence, the
language factor plays an important role”.
34
For the poet, the language becomes the means to lead and initiate us into his
world, his reality through words like “clusters of images, strings of objects, bundles of
memory quirks”, through “butterfly – words, rocket – words, grenade – words”, which
allow a process of approach to an unseen side of the world.
Seeking “an intervention in the real, both penetrating and metamorphosing, which
has always been the lofty vocation of poetry, not limiting itself to what it is, but
stretching itself to what can be”, Elytis breaks the barriers of conventional linguistic
communication, abolishes the limits of the language, develops an almost mystic love
relationship with language and establishes a new relationship between the poet and the
reader of the text, as he creates new forms of relationship between words and their
meanings.
“I want the text to be completely virginal and far removed from everyday usage of
words. I would go as far as to say I want it to be contrary to colloquial usage. The tone of
my poetry is always somewhat elevated. I situate the words in such a way as to bring out
their rarity”
Trying to conceive the essence of poetry and striving “for something which is
pure”, Elytis renews literary language through a poetic grammar and syntax, which
intentionally ignore the restrictions of common language and purify communication in
terms of new possibilities to understand and to express reality. The creation of enigmatic
words, new meanings and new semantic nuances, the innovative combination of words,
the synthesis of subtle phrases, the use of metaphors, metonymies, alliterations lead to
“an element of surprise which excites the mind and permits one to see the world from a
35
different angle”, to revolutionary multidimensional associations, and evoke pictures,
feelings, emotion, and imagination, while extending in a unique personal way the
expressive limits of language, while pushing language to a new level not only of
understanding the world but of discovering the very essence of the human nature and of
its polysemy.
Since “across the centuries, language has acquired a certain ethos, and this ethos
entails responsibilities”, Elytis attributes to the Greek language, which has been used in
poetry for more than 25 centuries, the quality of a moral power, rejects the idea that
language is just the mere sum of words, and surpasses the utilitarian understanding of
language as simple means of communication.
Moreover, as Elytis is “convinced that every language elicits a certain content”
and believes that “every language makes a poet express definite things”, and “the Greek
language insists on a noble attitude toward the phenomenon of life”, he considers the
Greek language a value, which he uses as raw material so as to create a universe free of
all constraints, and to shape from the beginning the universe, which responds to that what
he describes as his “Greekness”, and “is not a national or local thing”, but rather the
manifestation of the idea that “Greece represents certain values and elements, which can
enrich universal spirits everywhere”.
In this value framework, Elytis develops the major elements of his poetry and
determines his attempt “to find the true face of Greece”. Nature – especially sea, the
Aegean, as indispensable part of the Hellenic tradition and as a kind of “personal
36
domain”, “the sanctity of the senses”, an original myth-making mechanism, which
personifies “abstract ideas, yet without turning them into recognizable figures”, and a
dominant “limpidity” transposed from nature into poetry, “form a sort of framework like
that which holds up a building”.
For Elytis, “the Aegean is not merely a part of nature, but rather a kind of
signature”, “something very familiar”, which “possesses all the values of the Aegean
world”. The poet incorporates in a natural element the values of a civilization in its
historic process, and develops a familiarity, which permits him to consider the sea as “the
heir of the Hellenic tradition”.
In Elytis’s poetry, senses constitute “a method of apprehending the world”, in the
same way that the ancient Greeks did, but the difference is that senses “are elevated to a
level that is sacred”, since they “do not necessarily possess erotic connotations” for the
poet, and they appear harmonized with “a notion of sanctity, which only appeared with
the arrival of Christianity”.
Infiltrated by the astonishing limpidity of the “Sovereign Sun”, Elytis’s poetry
offers a new identity to Greece, encompassing and harmonizing purely Greek natural,
spiritual and moral elements, which “form a kind of alphabet with which to express
ourselves”, and are combined with a genuine word making innocence, leading to a
powerful depiction of a world full of light and darkness, of sounds and silence.
37
Perceiving language as a mental process with deep intellectual substance, which is
not limited to the signification of things, but is rather designated to rediscover and
redefine the meanings of things, and, ultimately, to give meaning to the world, Elytis
makes the precious choice of a personal interpretation and recreation of the world and
asserts with his stance on language his firm conviction that “writing is always an
experiment”.
Landscapes of memory: The imagery and collages of Odysseus Elytis
Eltyis’s poetry has a high pictorial quality, which derives from the imagistic
language of the poet, who attempts to discover with his senses and to impress with this
visualizing language the physical, mental and emotional phenomena.
Forerunner of this strong visual aspect in Elytis’s poetry can be considered his
fascination, already at a young age, of collage, and his passionate creation of such puzzles,
pasting together cutouts from various periodicals, letters of different colored inks, strings,
pebbles and wood.
After the publication of his first collection, “Orientations”, Elytis devoted
himself exclusively to the imagery of poetry and not to the one of painting. Many years
later, in 1966, Elytis returned to pictorial expression and painted several gouache, which
reflect the limpidity and freshness of his sunlit poetry, while during the seven years (1967
– 1974) of the dictatorship in Greece Elytis experimented again with collage and created
a series of about forty works.
Kimon Friar roughly divides Elytis’s collages into two groups: those that are
abstract and modern, and those that are poetically and Hellenically centered, with
common characteristic “an opposition to the contorted and the entangled and a tendency
toward the Greek and the composed”. With these collages, Elytis associates Greece, “the
known and recognizable land”, with “a certain mystery that constitutes his original and
authentic contribution to surrealist poetry”. The amalgamation of times in the coexistence of past and present, the harmonious combination of archaic and modern
elements, give shape to a new identity of things, which are now identified not as symbols
but as self-existent entities in a dream-like environment.
38
In the creation “Votive Offering” (1973), the cubical houses of the Aegean island
of Skyros are positioned in the middle of a deep blue sea and surrounded by a flat sky.
The original topography of the island – a mountain with the village on its slope – has
disappeared, and only rocks are visible against the houses. On the left side, an angel, a
typical figure of Byzantine iconography, emerges from the sea, extending a hand as in a
votive offering, which may be the cluster of seashells and reddish flowers. The synthesis
is framed by two colorful stripes of Greek folk embroidery, while the Byzantine carved
woodwork completes the sea landscape.
Eleni P. Moutsaki
Embassy of Greece in Beijing
Press & Communication Office
39
December 8th, 1979. Nobel Lecture by Odysseus Elytis
May I be permitted, I ask you, to speak in the name of luminosity and transparency. The
space I have lived in and where I have been able to fulfill myself is defined by these two
states. States that I have also perceived as being identified in me with the need to express
myself.
It is good, it is right that a contribution be made to art, from that which is assigned to each
individual by his personal experience and the virtues of his language. Even more so, since
the times are dismal and we should have the widest possible view of things.
I am not speaking of the common and natural capacity of perceiving objects in all their
detail, but of the power of the metaphor to only retain their essence, and to bring them to
such a state of purity that their metaphysical significance appears like a revelation.
I am thinking here of the manner in which the sculptors of the Cycladic period used their
material, to the point of carrying it beyond itself. I am also thinking of the Byzantine icon
painters, who succeeded, only by using pure color, to suggest the "divine".
It is just such an intervention in the real, both penetrating and metamorphosing, which
has always been, it seems to me, the lofty vocation of poetry. Not limiting itself to what is,
but stretching itself to what can be. It is true that this step has not always been received
with respect. Perhaps the collective neuroses did not permit it. Or perhaps because
utilitarianism did not authorize men to keep their eyes open as much as was necessary.
Beauty, Light, it happens that people regard them as obsolete, as insignificant. And yet!
The inner step required by the approach of the Angel's form is, in my opinion, infinitely
more painful than the other, which gives birth to Demons of all kinds.
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Certainly, there is an enigma. Certainly, there is a mystery. But the mystery is not a stage
piece turning to account the play of light and shadow only to impress us.
It is what continues to be a mystery, even in bright light. It is only then that it acquires
that refulgence that captivates and which we call Beauty. Beauty that is an open path--the
only one perhaps--towards that unknown part of ourselves, towards that which surpasses
us. There, this could be yet another definition of poetry: the art of approaching that which
surpasses us.
Innumerable secret signs, with which the universe is studded and which constitute so
many syllables of an unknown language, urge us to compose words, and with words,
phrases whose deciphering puts us at the threshold of the deepest truth.
In the final analysis, where is truth? In the erosion and death we see around us, or in this
propensity to believe that the world is indestructible and eternal? I know, it is wise to
avoid redundancies. The cosmogonic theories that have succeeded each other through the
years have not missed using and abusing them. They have clashed among themselves,
they have had their moment of glory, then they have been erased.
But the essential has remained. It remains.
The poetry that raises itself when rationalism has laid down its arms, takes its relieving
troops to advance into the forbidden zone, thus proving that it is still the less consumed
by erosion. It assures, in the purity of its form, the safeguard of those given facts through
which life becomes a viable task. Without it and its vigilance, these given facts would be
lost in the obscurity of consciousness, just as algae become indistinct in the ocean depths.
That is why we have a great need of transparency. To clearly perceive the knots of this
thread running throughout the centuries and aiding us to remain upright on this earth.
These knots, these ties, we see them distinctly, from Heraclitus to Plato and from Plato to
Jesus. Having reached us in various forms they tell us the same thing: that it is in the
inside of this world that the other world is contained, that it is with the elements of this
world that the other world is recombined, the hereafter, that second reality situated above
the one where we live unnaturally. It is a question of a reality to which we have a total
right, and only our incapacity makes us unworthy of it.
It is not a coincidence that in healthy times, Beauty is identified with Good, and Good
with the Sun. To the extent that consciousness purifies itself and is filled with light, its
dark portions retract and disappear, leaving empty spaces--just as in the laws of physics-are filled by the elements of the opposite import. Thus what results of this rests on the
two aspects, I mean the "here" and the "hereafter". Did not Heraclitus speak of a harmony
of opposed tensions?
It is of no importance whether it is Apollo or Venus, Christ or the Virgin who incarnate
and personalize the need we have to see materialized what we experience as an intuition.
What is important is the breath of immortality that penetrates us at that moment. In my
humble opinion, Poetry should, beyond all doctrinal argumentation, permit this breath.
41
Here I must refer to Hölderlin, that great poet who looked at the gods of Olympus and
Christ in the same manner. The stability he gave a kind of vision continues to be
inestimable. And the extent of what he has revealed for us is immense. I would even say
it is terrifying. It is what incites us to cry out--at a time when the pain now submerging us
was just beginning--: "What good are poets in a time of poverty". Wozu Dichter in
dürftiger Zeit?
For mankind, times were always dürftig, unfortunately. But poetry has never, on the other
hand, missed its vocation. These are two facts that will never cease to accompany our
earthly destiny, the first serving as the counter-weight to the other. How could it be
otherwise? It is through the Sun that the night and the stars are perceptible to us. Yet let
us note, with the ancient sage, that if it passes its bounds the Sun becomes "uBpls". For
life to be possible, we have to keep a correct distance to the allegorical Sun, just as our
planet does from the natural Sun. We formerly erred through ignorance. We go wrong
today through the extent of our knowledge. In saying this I do not wish to join the long
list of censors of our technological civilization. Wisdom as old as the country from which
I come has taught me to accept evolution, to digest progress "with its bark and its pits".
But then, what becomes of Poetry? What does it represent in such a society? This is what
I reply: poetry is the only place where the power of numbers proves to be nothing. Your
decision this year to honor, in my person, the poetry of a small country, reveals the
relationship of harmony linking it to the concept of gratuitous art, the only concept that
opposes nowadays the all-powerful position acquired by the quantitative esteem of values.
Referring to personal circumstances would be a breach of good manners. Praising my
home, still more unsuitable. Nevertheless it is sometimes indispensable, to the extent that
such interferences assist in seeing a certain state of things more clearly. This is the case
today.
Dear friends, it has been granted to me to write in a language that is spoken only by a few
million people. But a language spoken without interruption, with very few differences,
throughout more than two thousand five hundred years. This apparently surprising
spatial-temporal distance is found in the cultural dimensions of my country. Its spatial
area is one of the smallest; but its temporal extension is infinite. If I remind you of this, it
is certainly not to derive some kind of pride from it, but to show the difficulties a poet
faces when he must make use, to name the things dearest to him, of the same words as
did Sappho, for example, or Pindar, while being deprived of the audience they had and
which then extended to all of human civilization.
If language were not such a simple means of communication there would not be any
problem. But it happens, at times, that it is also an instrument of "magic". In addition, in
the course of centuries, language acquires a certain way of being. It becomes a lofty
speech. And this way of being entails obligations.
Let us not forget either that in each of these twenty-five centuries and without any
interruption, poetry has been written in Greek. It is this collection of given facts which
makes the great weight of tradition that this instrument lifts. Modern Greek poetry gives
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an expressive image of this.
The sphere formed by this poetry shows, one could say, two poles: at one of these poles is
Dionysios Solomos, who, before Mallarmé appeared in European literature, managed to
formulate, with the greatest rigor and coherency, the concept of pure poetry: to submit
sentiment to intelligence, ennoble expression, mobilize all the possibilities of the
linguistic instrument by orienting oneself to the miracle. At the other pole is Cavafy, who
like T. S. Eliot reaches, by eliminating all form of turgidity, the extreme limit of
concision and the most rigorously exact expression.
Between these two poles, and more or less close to one or the other, our other great poets
move: Kostis Palamas, Angelos Sikelianos, Nikos Kazantzakis, George Seferis.
Such is, rapidly and schematically drawn, the picture of neo-Hellenic poetic discourse.
We who have followed have had to take over the lofty precept which has been
bequeathed to us and adapt it to contemporary sensibility. Beyond the limits of technique,
we have had to reach a synthesis, which, on the one hand, assimilated the elements of
Greek tradition and, on the other, the social and psychological requirements of our time.
In other words, we had to grasp today's European-Greek in all its truth and turn that truth
to account. I do not speak of successes, I speak of intentions, efforts. Orientations have
their significance in the investigation of literary history.
But how can creation develop freely in these directions when the conditions of life, in our
time, annihilate the creator? And how can a cultural community be created when the
diversity of languages raises an unsurpassable obstacle? We know you and you know us
through the 20 or 30 per cent that remains of a work after translation. This holds even
more true for all those of us who, prolonging the furrow traced by Solomos, expect a
miracle from discourse and that a spark flies from between two words with the right
sound and in the right position.
No. We remain mute, incommunicable.
We are suffering from the absence of a common language. And the consequences of this
absence can be seen--I do not believe I am exaggerating--even in the political and social
reality of our common homeland, Europe.
We say--and make the observation each day--that we live in a moral chaos. And this at a
moment when--as never before--the allocation of that which concerns our material
existence is done in the most systematic manner, in an almost military order, with
implacable controls. This contradiction is significant. Of two parts of the body, when one
is hypertrophic, the other atrophies. A praise-worthy tendency, encouraging the peoples
of Europe to unite, is confronted today with the impossibility of harmonization of the
atrophied and hypertrophic parts of our civilization. Our values do not constitute a
common language.
For the poet--this may appear paradoxical but it is true--the only common language he
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still can use is his sensations. The manner in which two bodies are attracted to each other
and unite has not changed for millennia. In addition, it has not given rise to any conflict,
contrary to the scores of ideologies that have bloodied our societies and have left us with
empty hands.
When I speak of sensations, I do not mean those, immediately perceptible, on the first or
second level. I mean those which carry us to the extreme edge of ourselves. I also mean
the "analogies of sensations" that are formed in our spirits.
For all art speaks through analogy. A line, straight or curved, a sound, sharp or lowpitched, translate a certain optical or acoustic contact. We all write good or bad poems to
the extent that we live or reason according to the good or bad meaning of the term. An
image of the sea, as we find it in Homer, comes to us intact. Rimbaud will say "a sea
mixed with sun". Except he will add: "that is eternity." A young girl holding a myrtle
branch in Archilochus survives in a painting by Matisse. And thus the Mediterranean idea
of purity is made more tangible to us. In any case, is the image of a virgin in Byzantine
iconography so different from that of her secular sisters? Very little is needed for the light
of this world to be transformed into supernatural clarity, and inversely. One sensation
inherited from the Ancients and another bequeathed by the Middle Ages give birth to a
third, one that resembles them both, as a child does its parents. Can poetry survive such a
path? Can sensations, at the end of this incessant purification process, reach a state of
sanctity? They will return then, as analogies, to graft themselves on the material world
and to act on it.
It is not enough to put our dreams into verse. It is too little. It is not enough to politicize
our speech. It is too much. The material world is really only an accumulation of materials.
It is for us to show ourselves to be good or bad architects, to build Paradise or Hell. This
is what poetry never ceases affirming to us--and particularly in these dürftiger times--just
this: that in spite of everything our destiny lies in our hands.
I have often tried to speak of solar metaphysics. I will not try today to analyse how art is
implicated in such a conception. I will keep to one single and simple fact: the language of
the Greeks, like a magic instrument, has--as a reality or a symbol--intimate relations with
the Sun. And that Sun does not only inspire a certain attitude of life, and hence the
primeval sense to the poem. It penetrates the composition, the structure, and-- to use a
current terminology-- the nucleus from which is composed the cell we call the poem.
It would be a mistake to believe that it is a question of a return to the notion of pure form.
The sense of form, as the West has bequeathed it to us, is a constant attainment,
represented by three or four models. Three or four moulds, one could say, where it was
suitable to pour the most anomalous material at any price. Today that is no longer
conceivable. I was one of the first in Greece to break those ties.
What interested me, obscurely at the beginning, then more and more consciously, was the
edification of that material according to an architectural model that varied each time. To
understand this there is no need to refer to the wisdom of the Ancients who conceived the
Parthenons. It is enough to evoke the humble builders of our houses and of our chapels in
the Cyclades, finding on each occasion the best solution. Their solutions. Practical and
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beautiful at the same time, so that in seeing them Le Corbusier could only admire and
bow.
Perhaps it is this instinct that woke in me when, for the first time, I had to face a great
composition like "Axion Esti." I understood then that without giving the work the
proportions and perspective of an edifice, it would never reach the solidity I wished.
I followed the example of Pindar or of the Byzantine Romanos Melodos who, in each of
their odes or canticles, invented a new mode for each occasion. I saw that the determined
repetition, at intervals, of certain elements of versification effectively gave to my work
that multifaceted and symmetrical substance which was my plan.
But then is it not true that the poem, thus surrounded by elements that gravitate around it,
is transformed into a little Sun? This perfect correspondence, which I thus find obtained
with the intended contents, is, I believe, the poet's most lofty ideal.
To hold the Sun in one's hands without being burned, to transmit it like a torch to those
following, is a painful act but, I believe, a blessed one. We have need of it. One day the
dogmas that hold men in chains will be dissolved before a consciousness so inundated
with light that it will be one with the Sun, and it will arrive on those ideal shores of
human dignity and liberty.
45
Manuscript of Odysseus Elytis, “From Close By”
46
References
The poems of Odysseus Elytis (Edited by Ikaros Publishing Company)
Orientations, 1935
Sun the First, 1943
Song Heroic and Mourning for the Lost Second Lieutenant of the Albanian Campaign, 1945
The Axion Esti, 1959
Six and One Remorses for the Sky, 1960
The Light Tree and the Fourteenth Beauty, 1971
The Sovereign Sun, 1971
The Monogram, 1972
Rhos of Eros, 1972
Stepchildren, 1974
Maria Nefeli, 1978
Three poems under a flag of convenience, 1982
Diary of an Invisible April, 1984
The Little Seafarer, 1985
The Elegies of Jutting Rock, 1991
West of Sorrow, 1995
From Close By, 1998
Jeffery Carson and Nikos Sarris, The Collected Poems of Odysseus Elytis. Revised and
Expanded Edition. Translated by Jeffrey Carson and Nikos Sarris, Baltimore: The John
Hopkins University Press, 1997
Olga Broumas, Eros, Eros, Eros. Selected and Last Poems by Odysseas Elytis. Translated
from the Greek by Olga Broumas, Port Townsend Washington: Copper Canyon Press,
1998
Edmund Keely and George Savidis, The Axion Esti. Translated and Annotated by
Edmund Keely and George Savidis, Pittsburgh and London: University of Pittsburgh
Press, 1974
Tassos Lignadis, The Axion Esti by Odysseus Elytis, Athens: Library of Moraitis School,
1971
Marinos Pourgouris, Mediterranean Modernisms: The poetic metaphysics of Odysseus
Elytis, Cyprus: University of Cyprus,
47
Mario Vitti, Odysseus Elytis, Athens: Ermis, 1984
Mario Vitti (ed.), Introduction to Elytis’s Poetry, Irakleio: Crete University Press, 1999
Museum of Contemporary Art, Andros, Odysseus Elytis, Andros: 1992
Christoforos Charalambakis, “The language of Odysseas Elytis”, Speech in the European
University Cyprus, Nicosia, March 2011
Andonis Decavalles, “Time versus Eternity”, World Literature Today, Vol.62, No.1
(Winter,1988), pp. 22-32
Andonis Decavalles, “The Collected Poems of Odysseus Elytis: A Commentary Review”,
World Literature Today, Vol.72, No.1 (Winter,1998), pp. 79-82
Ivar Ivask and Astrid Ivask, “Odysseus Elytis on His Poetry”, Books Abroad, Vol.49,
No.4, (Autumn, 1975), pp.631-645
Kimon Friar, “The Imagery and Collages of Odysseus Elytis”, Books Abroad, Vol.49,
No.4, (Autumn, 1975), pp.703-711
Lawrence Durrell, “The Poetry of Elytis”, Books Abroad, Vol.49, No.4, (Autumn, 1975),
p. 660
Robert Jouanny and Seymour Feiler, “Aspects of Surrealism in the Works of Odysseus
Elytis”, Books Abroad, Vol.49, No.4, (Autumn, 1975), pp.685-689
Newspaper KATHIMERINI, Volume on Odysseus Elytis, March 24th, 1996
Newspaper ΤΑ ΝΕΑ, Volume on Odysseus Elytis, May 2011
www.poetryinternational.org, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/odysseus-alepoudelis-elytis
http://www.philology.gr/subjects/nef_elytis.html
http://www.babiniotis.gr/wmt/webpages/index.php?lid=1&pid=7&catid=M
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