Born: Odysseus Alepoudelis in Heraklion, Crete, 2 November 1911. Education: Studied law at the University of Athens, 1930-33, no degree; studied literature at the Sorbonne, Paris, 1948-52. Military Service: Served in the First Army Corps, in Albania, 1940-41: Lieutenant. Career: Programme director, National Broadcasting Institution, 1945-47, 1953-54; art and literary critic, Kathimerini newspaper, 1946-48, adviser to Art Theatre, 1955-56, and Greek National Theatre, 1965-68. President of the Governing Board, Greek Ballet, 1956-58, and Greek Broadcasting and Television, 1974; member of the Administrative Board, Greek National Theatre, 1974-76. Member: Order of the Phoenix, 1965; Grand Commander, Order of Honour, 1979; Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (France), 1984; Commandeur, Legion d’honneur (France), 1989. Awards: National prize for poetry, 1960; Nobel prize for literature, 1979; Royal Society of Literature Benson medal (UK), 1981. D.Litt.: University of Salonica, 1976; the Sorbonne, 1980; University of London, 1981. Died: 18 March 1996.
Publications
Collections
The Collected Poems of Odysseus Elytis, translated by Jeffrey Carson and Nikos Sarris. 1997.
Eros, Eros, Eros: Selected and Last Poems, translated by Olga Broumas. 1998.
Verse
Prosanatolismi [Orientations]. 1936.
O Ilios o Protos, mazi me tis Parallayespano se mian Ahtida [Sun the First Together with Variations on a Sunbeam]. 1943.
Asma Iroiko ke Penthimo yia ton Hameno Anthipolohago tisAlvanias [Heroic and Elegiac Song for the Lost Second Lieutenant of the Albanian Campaign]. 1945.
IKalosini stis Likopories [Kindness in the Wolfpasses]. 1946.
To Axion Esti. 1959; as The Axion Esti, translated by Edmund Keeley and G.P. Savidis, 1974.
Exi ke Mia Tipsis yia ton Ourano [Six and One Regrets for the Sky]. 1960.
To Fotodendro ke i Dekati Tetarti Omorfia [The Light Tree and the Fourteenth Beauty]. 1971.
O Ilios o Iliatoras [The Sovereign Sun]. 1971.
Thanatos ke Anastasis tou Konstantinou Paleologou [Death and Resurrection of Constantine Palaiologos]. 1971.
To Monogramma [The Monogram]. 1972.
To Ro tou Erota [The Ro of Eros] (songs). 1972.
Clear Days: Poems by Palamas and Elytis, in Versions by Nikos Tselepides, edited by Kenneth O. Hanson. 1972.
Villa Natacha. 1973.
O Fillomantis [The Leaf Diviner]. 1973.
Ta Eterothali [The Stepchildren]. 1974.
The Sovereign Sun: Selected Poems, translated by Kimon Friar. 1974.
Maria Nefeli. 1978; as Maria Nefeli, translated by Athan Anagnostopoulos, 1981.
Selected Poems, edited and translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. 1981.
Tria Poemata me Simea Evkerias [Three Poems under a Flag of Convenience]. 1982.
Hemerologio henos atheatou Apriliou [Diary of an Unseen April]. 1984.
O Mikros Naftilos. 1985; as The Little Mariner, translated by Olga Broumas, 1988.
What I Love: Selected Poems of Odysseas Elytis, translated by Olga Broumas. 1986.
Krinagoras. 1987.
Ta Elegia tis Oxopetras [The Elegies of Oxopetras]. 1991.
Other
O Zografos Theofilos [The Painter Theophilos]. 1973.
Anoichta Hartia [Open Book]. 1974; as Open Papers, translated by Olga Broumas and T. Begley, 1995.
He Mageia tou Papadiamanti [The Magic of Papadiamantis]. 1976.
AnaforastonAndreaEmbiriko [Report to Andreas Embirikos]. 1980.
To Domatio me tis Ikones [The Room of Images]. 1986.
Ta Dimosia ke ta Idiotika [Public and Private Matters]. 1990.
IIdiotiki Odos [Private Way]. 1990.
En Lefko [In White]. 1992.
Translator, Defteri Graphi [Second Writing] (poems of Lorca, Rimbaud, Eluard, Maiakovskii, and others). 1976.
Translator, Ioannis, IApokalipsi [St. John, Apocalypse]. 1985.
Translator, Sappho—Anasinthesi ke Apodosi [Sappho—Synthesis and Rendering]. 1985.
Critical Studies:
Elytis issue of Books Abroad, Autumn 1975;Odysseus Elytis: Anthologies of Light, edited by Ivar Ivask, 1981;”Maria Nefeli and the Changeful Sameness of Elytis: Variations on a Theme” by Andonis Decavalles, and ”Elytis and the Greek Tradition” by Edmund Keeley, both in Charioteer, 1982-83; ”Odysseus Elytis and the Discovery of Greece” by Philip Sherrard, in Journal of Modern Greek Studies, 1(2), 1983; ”Eliot and Elytis: Poet of Time, Poet of Space” by Karl Malkoff, in Comparative Literature, 36(3), 1984; ”Odysseus Elytis in the 1980s” by Andonis Decavalles, in World Literature Today, 62(1), 1988.
Ever since Odysseus Elytis first appeared on the Greek literary scene in 1935, critical attention has focused on the new world his poetry created: a world of sun and sea, the Aegean landscape, love, and communion with nature. Yet the world of Elytis, consistently developed since the poet’s earliest collection, Prosanatolismi [Orientations], would seem to be rather more complex than some critics have allowed. His subsequent work indicates that this world is correlative to his view of poetry as an alternative to reality. Within this world, as Elytis has said with reference to a fellow poet, Andreas Embirikos, actual problems may not be solved, but something more radical occurs: the logic that created these problems is abolished.
One of the methods Elytis has employed for the creation of his world is surrealism. Together with Embirikos, Nikos Engonopoulos, and Nikos Gatsos, he introduced surrealism into Greek literary life in the 1930s and 1940s. Having experimented with surrealism before publishing anything, Elytis finally rejected certain surrealist techniques, such as automatic writing, but adopted some aspects of its philosophy, viewing surrealism as a quest for spiritual health and a reaction against the rationalism prevalent in Western thought. Another method he used is the establishing of connections between the natural elements of his poetic world and attitudes to life; as he says in O Mikros Naftilos (The Little Mariner), the exploration of the hidden relationships between meanings leads to poetry which, like one’s view of the sky, depends on one’s vantage point.
The ”Greekness” of Elytis’s poetic landscape has frequently been the subject of critical commentary. If, however, at the beginning of his poetic career, this landscape was a celebration of love, in To Axion Esti (The Axion Esti) it also becomes a place where the joy and pain of existence and creation combine with the historical adventures of the Greek nation, where good fights against evil, universal values are established, and death is defeated. This world, created by and simultaneously with poetry, is proclaimed in the end to be eternal, while the poet states that ”WORTHY is the price paid.” The tragic aspects of this sunlit world are also confronted in Exi ke Mia Tipsis yia ton Ourano [Six and One Regrets for the Sky]. There, the poet affirms ”the lawfulness of the Unhoped-For,” and at the same time states: ”Well then, he whom I sought I am"—an achievement that Elytis has elsewhere characterized as the most difficult thing in the world, defining the process of becoming what one is as poetry.
When the components of Elytis’s world have acquired these new dimensions, some of which are explored through the dialogue of a girl called Maria Nefeli [Maria Cloud] and her interlocutor who seems to represent the poet, in Maria Nefeli, they manage to incorporate death too. Aspects of death are explored in Hemerologio henos atheatou Apriliou [Diary of an Unseen April] and in Ta Elegia tis Oxopetras [The Elegies of Oxopetras].Through its polymorphous connections with sun, sea, gardens, and love, death is proclaimed in the latter collections to be the blue, endless sea and the unsetting sun, while in the former ones, the poet contemplates the ”Unknown” and declares that he has worked there for years and that his fingers were scorched just as he was about to see Paradise opening. Thus, death is not presented as the reverse of love, since antitheses in the world of Elytis are often resolved into a synthesis; as the poet said about himself in Prosanatolismi, from the other side he is the same.
This sameness persists in the ”other side” of Elytis’s main poetic work, that is, in his songs and essays. His songs were published in 1972 under the general title To Ro tou Erota [The Ro of Eros] and many of them were set to music, as also was a large part of The Axion Esti, by Mikis Theodorakis. Apart from the subject matter, one of the obvious resemblances between these songs and Elytis’s poems is found in the insistence on magic numbers: most of these songs are grouped in sevens or multiples of seven, a number which occurs both in titles of collections (Exi ke Mia Tipsis yia ton Ourano, To Fotodendro ke i Dekati Tetarti Omorfia [The Light Tree and the Fourteenth Beauty]) and in the structure of his collections and compositions. His preoccupation with numbers is probably related to his preoccupation with the metrical forms of his poems. Although his verse usually falls under the general heading of ”free verse,” Elytis has himself commented on the strict metrical and formal rules he imposes on his verse. Most of his essays have been collected in a book entitled Anoichta Hartia (Open Papers), where he gives a chronicle of his literary generation (the ”Generation of the 1930s”), describes their explorations and poetics, and deals with surrealism and dreams, painters, and poets. One of his other, separately published, essays takes the form of Anafora ston Andrea Embiriko [Report to Andreas Embirikos], combining memories of his friend and fellow poet with an account of surrealist poetics. The integral position which Elytis’s translations occupy in his work is apparent from the titles he gives them: Defteri Graphi [Second Writing] for translations of Lorca, Rimbaud, Eluard, Maiakovskii, and others; Sappho—Anasinthesi ke Apodosi [Sappho—Synthesis and Rendering] for his arrangement and translation of the Sapphic fragments.
The creation of the poetic world, adjacent to the real one, both dependent on and independent from it, makes the poet’s role a dangerous one, quite different from the image of the ”carefree Elytis” projected by critics of his early work. In To Fotodendro ke i Dekati Tetarti Omorfia the poet defines his position as painful but unshakeable (”still standing firm with burnt fingers”) in a world of his own creation.
