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Odysseus Elytis (1911-1996) - also spelled Odysseas Elytes, original surname Alepoudhelis |
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Greek poet and winner of the 1979 Nobel Prize for Literature. Odysseus 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. As a young man he had seen gold glittering and gleaming on the shoulders of the great -And one night -he remembers -during a great storm the neck of the sea roared so it turned murky -but he would not submit it Odysseus
Elytis (pseudonym of Odysseas Alepoudhelis) was born in Iráklion,
Crete, into a prosperous Cretan family. He was the sixth child of Maria
and Panayiotis Alepoudellis. His parents and ancestors came
from the island of Lesbos, home of the ancient Greek poet Sappho. From
there the family business moved to Athens. During his summer vocations,
Elytis went to the islands. He often said that the Agean indelibly
stamped his mind. Elytis's father died of pneumonia in 1925. Following
a nervous
breakdown Elytis spent two months in bed. After
attending the Makris Private School, he entered Athens
University, where he studied law from 1930 to 1935 without
taking a degree. At the time, the most popular poet among the Greek
youth was Kostas Karyotakis, who had committed suicide in 1928. "Pale,
seized by dreams, they all wrote similar poems that confessed their
faith to the one and only god: Karyotakis," said Elytis of his fellow
students. Periodically he worked in the family's soap
manufacturing business. Inspired by Freudian theory, French Surrealism
and especially Paul Éluard, Elytis also tried his hand at poetry. All his poems, which he composed, he destroyed in 1934. Elytis's first poems appeared in 1935 in magazine Ta Nea Grammata, which
also published George Seferis's works - he
won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1963. The poet Andreas
Empeirikos, who had recently returned from France and was close to the
French surrealistic circle, became Elytis's lifelong friend. Along with
Empeirokos and the painter Stratis Eleftheriadis-Teriade, he traveled to
Lesbos, where he was involved in the discovery and promotion of the art
of the folk painter Theophilos Hadjimichael (1897-1934). Orientations
(1940),
Elytis's first collection, combined themes of Eros
and beauty with the timelessness of the world of the Aegean Sea: "Love / The
archipelago / And the prow of its foam / And the seagull of its dream / On its highest mast te sailor weaves / A song". (from 'Of the Aegean,' The Sovereign Sun: Selected Poems, p. 47). During WW II when Nazis occupied Greece, Elytis joined the resistance movement and served as a second lieutenant in Albania in 1940-41. After a long campaign, he contracted typhus. Asma iroiko ke penthimo ghia ton hameno anthipolochago tis Alvanias (1943, Heroic and Elegiac Song for the Lost Second Lieutenant of the Albanian Campaign) was published during the Nazi occupation of Greece. Elytis's joyful visions of youth and the sun-drenched Aegean nature had changed into acknowlegmenet of violence and sudden death. The hero of the poem is killed on the battlefield and miraculously resurrected throught his youth and heroism. Like many other leftist intellectuals, Elytis was denied a passport during the civil war between communists and royalistst. He wrote critics for the newspaper Kathimerini and worked for the National Broadcasting Institute in Athens in 1945-46 and again 1953-54. When he was given permission to travel outside the country 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 was a member of the Greek critical and
prize-awarding Group of the Twelve, and served as 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. A kind of spiritual autobiography, it is reminiscent of Walt Whitman's Song of
Myself,
a celebtation of the diversity of American landscapes and people. It is
believed, that Elytis was proficient enough in English to read Whitman
while in France. "Greek the language they gave me; / poor the house on
Homer's shores. / My only care my language on Homer's shores. / There
bream and perch / windbeaten verbs, / green sea currents in the blue, /
all I saw light up in my entrails, / sponges, jellyfish / with the
first words of the Sirens, / rosy shells with the first black shivers."
(from 'The Genesis,' in The Axion Esti,
translated and annotated by Edmund Keeley and George Savidis, London:
Anvil Press Poetry in association with R. Collings, 1974, p. 11) 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,
'The 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 a separate personal Paradise exists for each of us," Elytis
wrote, "I reckon mine must be irreparable planted with trees of words
the wind silvers like poplars, by people who see their confiscated
justice given back, and by birds that even in the midst of truth of
death insist on singing in Greek and saying eros, eros, eros." (Eros, Eros, Eros: Selected and Last Poems by Odysseus Elytis, translated from the Greek by Olga Broumas, Port Townsend, Wash.: Copper Canyon Press, 1998, p. xviii) Much
of his life,
Elytis spent in semiseclusion, focusing only on his art. For many years
he lived in the same apartment in Athens, frequented the Café Dexameni (a
statue of Elytis stands in Dexameni Square), and wrote on the desk he
had had since childhood. After the Nobel Prize followed a period of busy traveling. His final collection was Dytika tis Lypis (1995). Elytis never married; during his last years his companion was the poet Ioulita Iliopoulou. Elytis died of a heart attack on March 18, 1996, at his home in Kolonaki. The bulk of his books Elytis donated to libraries. His collected poems, translated into English by Jeffrey Carson and Nikos Sarris, came out posthumously in 1997. Elytis was also a talented painter and produced illustrations of his lyrical world in gouaches and collages. For further reading: Da Omero a Elytis: la metafora del mito dall'epos antico alle letterature moderne, a cura di Matteo Miano, Sophie Zambalou, Anna Zimbone (2019); Mediterranean Modernisms: The Poetic Metaphysics of Odysseus Elytis by Marinos Pourgouris (2011); Seferis and Elytis as Translators by Irene Loulakaki-Moore (2010); God and the Poetic Ego: the Appropriation of Biblical and Liturgical Language in the Poetry of Palamas, Sikelianos, and Elytis by Anthony Hirst (2004) Odysseus Elytis: From the Golden to the Silver Poem by Adonis Decavalles (1994); Eliot and Elytis: Poet of Time, Poet of Space by Karl Malkoff (1984); Odysseus Elytis: Analogies of Light by Ivar Ivask (1981); '"Elytis," Odysseus,' in World Authors 1950-1970, edited by John Wakeman (1975); Books Abroad, special Elytis issue (Autumn 1975); Modern Greek Poetry: Voice and Myth by Edmund Keeley (1973) - "Odysseus Elytis is first of all a poet whose unique strength is the celebration of a landscape that is his protean theme, his finest invention. This terrain is both his beloved Greece and the human body, a vision r ooted in the past and passionately imagined in a kind of floating, timeless present." (Rachel Hadas, in The New York Times, February 7, 1982) Selected works:
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