Born: Giorgos Stylianou Seferiades in Smyrna (now Izmir), Turkey, 29 February 1900; emigrated to Athens in 1914. Education: Educated at Protypon Classical Gymnasium, Athens; University of Athens; the Sorbonne, Paris, law degree 1924; studied English in London, 1924-25. Family: Married Maria Zannos in 1941. Career: Entered Royal Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 1926: vice-consul, later consul, in London, 1931-34; in Athens, 1934-36; consul, Korytsa, Albania, 1936-38; press officer, Athens, 1938-41; worked for Free Greek Government in Crete, 1941, South Africa, 1941-42, Egypt, 1942-44, and Italy, 1944; in Athens, 1944-48, Ankara, 1948-50, and London, 1951-52; Ambassador to Lebanon and Minister to Syria, Iraq, and Jordan, 1953-56; Ambassador to the United Nations, 1956-57, and to Great Britain, 1957-62; retired 1962. Full-time writer, from 1962. Awards: Kostis Palamas prize, 1947; Foyle poetry prize (UK), 1961; Nobel prize for literature, 1963. Litt. D.: Cambridge University, 1960; Oxford University, 1964; Princeton University, New Jersey, 1965; D.Phil.: University of Salonica, 1964. Member, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, 1968; honorary member, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and American Academy,1971. Knight Commander of Order of George I; Grand Cross of Order of Phoenix; Order of Holy Sepulchre; Grand Cross of the Cedar;Grand Cross of Order of Merit (Syria). Died: 20 September 1971.
Publications
Collection
Collected Poems 1924-1955 (bilingual edition), edited and translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. 1967; revised edition, 1981; as Complete Poems, edited and translated by Keeley and Sherrard, 1990.
Verse
Strophe [Turning Point]. 1931.
I sterna [The Cistern]. 1932.
Mythistorema. 1935; as Mythistorima, with Gymnopaidia, translated by Mary Cooper Walton, 1977.
Gymnopedia. 1936; as Gymnopaidia, with Mythistorima, translated by Mary Cooper Walton, 1977.
Imerologio katastromatos A,B,C [Logbook I, II, III]. 3 vols., 1940-55.
Tetradio gymnasmaton [Exercise Book]. 1940.
Poiemata I [Poems]. 1940.
Six Poems from the Greek of Sikelianos and Seferis, translated by Lawrence Durrell. 1946.
Kichli [The Thrush]. 1947.
The King of Asine and Other Poems, translated by Bernard Spencer, Nanos Valaoritis, and Lawrence Durrell. 1948.
Poiemata [Poems]. 1950; 13th edition, 1981.
Poems, translated by Rex Warner. 1960.
Delphoi. 1963; as Delphi, translated by Philip Sherrard, 1963.
Tria kryfa poiemata. 1966; as Three Secret Poems, translated by Walter Kaiser, 1969.
Tetradio gymnasmaton B [Exercise Book II]. 1976.
Fiction
Eksi nychtes sten Akropole [Six Nights on the Acropolis], edited by G.P. Savidis. 1974.
Other
Dokimes [Essays]. 1944; revised edition, 1962; edited by G.P. Savidis, 2 vols., 1974.
On the Greek Style: Selected Essays in Poetry and Hellenism, translated by Rex Warner and T. Frangopoulos. 1966.
Cheirographo Sop. ’41 [Manuscript Sept. '41]. 1972.
Meres tou 1945-1951. 1973; as A Poet’s Journal: Days of 1945-1951, translated by Athan Anagnostopoulos, 1974.
Politiko imerologio [Political Diary], edited by Alexandrou Xydes. 2 vols., 1979-86.
Metagraphes, edited by Giorges Giatromanolakes. 1980.
Atlelographia 1953-1971 (correspondence), with Adamnatios Diamantes. 1985.
Meres 20 Aprili 1951-4 Avgoustou 1956 (journal). 1986.
George Seferis to Henry Miller: Two Letters from Greece. 1990.
Translator, T.S. Eliot (selection). 1936; revised edition, as The Waste Land and Other Poems, 1949.
Translator, Phoniko sten Ekklesia [Murder in the Cathedral], by T.S. Eliot. 1963.
Translator, Antigraphes [Copies]. 1965.
Translator, Asma asmaton [Song of Songs]. 1965.
Translator, E apokalypse tou loanne [The Apocalypse of St. John].1966.
Critical Studies:
”Seferis and the ‘Mythical Method’,” in Comparative Literature Studies, 6, 1969, and A Conversation with George Seferis (bilingual edition), 1982, both by Edmund Keeley; George Seferis, 1900-1971 (by National Book League and British Council), 1975; War in the Poetry of George Seferis by C. Capri-Karka, 1986; George Seferis by Roderick Beaton, 1991; Seferis and Friends by George Thaniel, 1994.
It can be said with hindsight that George Seferis was the foremost of a generation of Greek poets and prose writers who in different ways introduced modernism into Greek letters, the so-called ”Generation of the Thirties.” His early career developed under the influence of French symbolism, but additional formative influences on him were an urgent awareness of the Greek cultural tradition stretching back to antiquity, and, from the end of 1931, the poetry and critical ideas of T.S. Eliot.
These three strands first come together in the integrated and highly innovative work, Mythistorema (Mythistorima); the title, which means ”a novel,” also alludes to the poem’s main theme, the juxtaposition of ancient myth and contemporary history. In this sequence of 24 short poems Seferis attempts, through the mouthpieces of different, anonymous characters and through the evocation of their changing moods—heroic aspiration, frustrated love, fear, resignation—to come to terms as a modern Greek with the past tradition of his country, which he sees as both an inspiration and a burden. The poem alludes to the mythical voyage of the Argonauts in search of the Golden Fleece, a quest that Seferis sees repeated throughout history up to the present, and for the most part futile thanks to man’s inadequacy and weakness.
Mythistorima portrays modern man, and more particularly the modern Greek, as cut off from the creative power that inspired the artistic achievements of the classical past, but weighed down by the burden of the relics it has left behind, represented by the worn statues and the ”old stones.” This theme continues to be prominent throughout his poetry of the 1930s and 1940s, culminating in the longer poem Kichli [The Thrush], in which he imagines a modern Odysseus striving to return, not to Ithaca, but to a symbolic home which he calls merely ”the light.”
New refinements and differences of emphasis appear in Seferis’s collections of poems of the 1950s and 1960s, respectively Imerologio katastromatos C [Logbook III], based on his experience of Cyprus in 1953 and 1954, and Tria kryfa poiemata (Three Secret Poems), in which the poet retreats into a fragmented world, a world that ”must burn / This noon when the sun is nailed / To the heart of the centifoliate rose.” The poems of Seferis’s last decade show a new pessimism, and an even sparser style that almost literally fades out into silence in the posthumously published late poems and fragments.
Seferis was not only a poet but also one of Greece’s most lucid essayists and critics. Many of his essays on older figures in modern Greek literature (essays on Kalvos, Makriyannis, Erotokritos) have become classics and have helped to shape the contemporary perspective on modern Greek literary history, while others deal perceptively with the issues of tradition and modernism which also preoccupied him in his poetry. Poetry and essays alike are permeated by Seferis’s deeply held humanist convictions.
Seferis was largely responsible for introducing modern English poetry to Greece, through his acclaimed translations of Eliot, Pound, and Yeats. He also translated the Apocalypse into modern Greek.
Before embarking on his career as a poet, he wrote a novel, Eksi nychtes sten Akropole [Six Nights on the Acropolis], which was substantially complete and published posthumously. In this novel, written chiefly in 1928 and reworked in 1954, Seferis first tried to work out many of the themes which came to dominate his poetry, but without the novelist’s grasp of narration and character Eksi nychtes is a failure, though a remarkable literary experiment.
