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Commemorating ΕΠΕΤΕΙΟΣ (Anniversary) and the Elytis Centenary.
Another look at the reception of his early poetry in the English speaking world.
Jim Potts
Odysseas Elytis was born in 1911. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1979 "for his poetry, which, against the background of Greek tradition, depicts with sensuous strength and intellectual clear-sightedness modern man's struggle for freedom and creativeness".
So why have I found some of Elytis’ poetry lacking in the diaphanous clarity he and others claim for it?
One of his greatest admirers, Professor George Savidis, once wrote of the poem Maria Nepheli that it “seems to prove Elytis’ perennial ability to feel the heart-beat of every new generation of nubile girls (sic) and his will to respond to it, as well as his ear for the slogans and the vernacular of the Parisian May of 1968” (George Savidis, lecture given at Harvard, 4 December 1979; Athens 1980).
I’m not in a position to comment on this or, for instance, on Roderick Beaton’s observation (“An Introduction to Modern Greek Literature”, 2nd. Ed. 1999) about Elytis’ early poems:
“Physical health and vigour play a prominent part in these poems, to the point that they have even been linked to the quasi-fascist propaganda of the Metaxas regime under which most of them were written.”
Savidis reminds us (1980) that “After all, since August 1936, Greece was under a fascist dictatorship, which exiled its milder opponents to the Aegean islands”.
Peter Levi reminds us of the “sensory vigour of his earliest lyrics…the early lyrics were unforgettable for their musical phrasing. They had the freshness of summer waves and the perfect motionabilty of the sea” (introduction to The Axion Esti, 1979); but in an earlier work (“The Hill of Kronos”, 1980) he writes of his first discovery of Elytis and the poem “Tou Aegaio”: “The best modern Greek writing is as pure as lemon juice. It is also highly critical. I was not able to isolate all that was best at once. The language was still difficult, so I liked simple lyric poems, not all of which look so wonderful today.”
Another challenging comments comes from David Ricks:
“In his late poems, Elytis becomes increasingly (and sometimes irritatingly) preoccupied with the poetic pantheon in which he seeks enshrinement”.
In this article I wish to discuss some of Elytis’s early poems.
One of Elytis’s most enduringly popular and accessible poems (and my personal favourite) is ΕΠΕΤΕΙΟΣ (“Anniversary”), first published as part of Orientations in Nea Grammata, July-August 1936 (cf. D. Daskalopoulos, Bibliografia Odysea Elyti (1971-1992), Athens, 1993), not long before Elytis came to Corfu’s National Officer Cadet School in the Old Fortress (for eight months in 1937). It first appeared in book form in 1940 (December 1939). Since then it has been much translated, much anthologised. Robert Levesque selected it as the first poem to appear in his French translation of Elytis (Poèmes, 1945), under the slightly misleading title Commémoration. Misleading, according to Saltapidas, because it lends the poem a morbid tone and atmosphere, with its association of the commemoration of the death of a person in the past. It is interesting to note that in “Six Poets of Modern Greece” (1960) and “Four Greek Poets” (1966), Keeley and Sherrard follow Levesque, entitling their English translation “Commemoration”, but that the title has been changed to “Anniversary” by the time of the publication of “Odysseus Elytis, Selected Poems”, 1981. Saltapidas describes it as “not the most representative” of Elytis, being the most Seferis-like of his poems. If this is the case, it is not surprising that Seferis picked out this poem as “a good one” and read it aloud when Elytis first went to his house (according to the poet himself, this was some time before November 1935 when Elytis’ first efforts were published in Nea Grammata). So we are also celebrating the 75th anniversary of the writing of “Anniversary”.
But here are some dilemmas:
Does this poem tend more towards the Apollonian or the Dionysian (whatever that distinction might mean to you, notwithstanding Nietzsche’s definitions)? Is it about Life or about Death? Or is it about something in between, about reaching a significant milestone or stage in life (e.g. a birthday)? Is it in fact a melancholic poem, or a contrapuntal interplay between the poles of hope and despair, happiness and remorse? I’ve never read it as overly melancholic, in spite of lines like “Bitter furrow in the sand that will vanish”. Maybe I was just projecting my own experiences and perceptions following my first joyful, if bittersweet, discovery of a Greek island, especially in relation to the first stanza (I was almost the same age as Elytis was when he wrote the poem).
According to Christos Saltapidas (Oi Gallikes Metafraseis tou Ergou tou Odyssea Elyti, Corfu, 2001), it was probably written in the Autumn of 1935, around the time of his birthday in November 1935, but the poet himself, in “Cards on the Table” (Anoichta Hartia), makes it clear that Seferis read the manuscript before the publication and circulation of Elytis’ first poems in Nea Grammata on 1st November 1935.
In the UK, Anniversary appeared in Greek in Trypanis’ “Medieval and Modern Greek Poetry, An Anthology”, 1951, at the time that Edmund Keeley was discovering Greek poetry while studying at Oxford.
It’s strange that I’ve never read it as “an Apollonian meditation on death” as Jeffrey Carson describes it, “with eros and thanatos as his theme”. Andreas Karantonis once commented that “a desire for life… springs up from every moment of Elytis’s verses” (1971).
Elytis might later have been ready to criticise his own early poems as “touristic” (cf Edmund Keeley’s obituary, 19.3.1996: “ in his late years he became rather sarcastic about some of his finest early verse, calling it “touristic" and he was especially critical of what is perhaps his best known early poem, “The Mad Pomegranate Tree”, which in fact still remains among his most popular celebrations of the light-rich landscape and hedonistic spirit of contemporary Greece”. NB the obituary also contained a section from the poem “Anniversary”).”
In “Cards on the Table” (p. 302) Elytis admits that in his first two books he was trying to revolutionise poetry and to escape from thematic subjects, and seems to regret that the poems that survived, such as “Anniversary”, “Marina of the Rocks” and “Form of Boeotia”, stick to the more traditional poetic format of a central inspirational motif.
Elytis defended himself against charges that he was a Dionysian poet:
“It has been said that I am a Dionysian poet, particularly in my first poems. I do not think this is correct. I am for clarity. As I wrote in one of my poems, “I have sold myself for clearness”.
Nevertheless, it can be difficult to orientate oneself when reading and trying to interpret Elytis, because of an element of obscurity attributable to the influence of French surrealism, as well as his own unwillingness to explain his poems (although Anthony Hirst, 2004, cites the notes that Elytis made about The Axion Esti and circulated privately; subsequently published by Yorgos Kechiagioglou, 1995).
Maybe I have an Anglo-Saxon taste for a relatively rational and accessible mode of expression, which Elytis rejected. Edmund Keeley, in Elytis and the Greek Tradition (“Modern Greek Poetry, Voice and Myth”, Princeton, 1983) suggests that England is “the Western country that has been slowest to appreciate Elytis” because of our distorted presupposition that Elytis is more French than Greek. “Robert Graves is reported to have said some years ago: “Elytis is just Eluard pronounced with a Greek accent. Just another French surrealist really”.
To be fair, he stated elsewhere:
“Many facets of surrealism I cannot accept, such as its paradoxical side, its championing of automatic writing” (interview with Ivar Ivask, Autumn 1975, quoted by George Savidis, 1980).
In Greece, Elytis is considered a poet of the 1930s Generation; but for the English-speaking world, he’s a poet of the 40s, or even of the 1960s (Four Greek Poets, Penguin Modern European Poets, 1966: belated translations and popular anthologies can play havoc with generational classifications and concepts of modernity!). Maybe I am as guilty as Keeley holds one of my favourite English poets to be (Bernard Spencer, also a translator of some Elytis poems). Keeley mentions the ‘distorted image’ of Elytis and of Greece that some nostalgic Philhellenes held in their hearts and which may indeed have misrepresented both Elytis and Greece:
“….upon this table
Elytis’s poems lie
Uttering the tangle of sea, the ‘breathing caves’
And the fling of Aegean waves.”
(“A Spring Wind”, first published in The Windmill, vol. 1, no.1 (1946).
Translations of Elytis first appeared in England in the 1940s, in New Writing and in Orpheus (both of which I have in front of me) and in Daylight. Nanos Valaoritis did much to make his name known (he also collaborated with Bernard Spencer, whom he calls “ a dear friend and collaborator” in his online memoir). In France, Robert Levesque’s bilingual selection, “ Poèmes” (1945), marked a similar turning point, although Christos Saltapidas has his criticisms of the selection, which he feels was influenced by the tastes of Katsimbalis and Karantonis.
The Anglo-Hellenic Review (Anglo-Elliniki Epitheorisi, edited by George Katsimbalis until c. 1953, was supported by The British Council, Athens and launched in March 1945) also helped to make Elytis’ name better known.
The Review’s office was in the same building as the British Council, Plateia Filikis Etairias 17. Series 1 (1945) contained an articles by Odysseas Elytis (on “The 28th of October”), Series 2 (1946) featured an article by Elytis on the paintings of General Makryjannis by P. Zografos), Volume 3 (1947) featured George Seferis and Odysseas Elytis on Theophilos (May). Elytis also contributed an article about the artist, Nikos Hatzikyriakos-Ghikas.
Translators of Elytis’ poetry into English have included Nanos Valaoritis; Bernard Spencer; Philip Sherrard and Edmund Keeley (Six Poets of Modern Greece,1960; Four Greek Poets, 1966; Selected Poems of Odysseus Elytis, 1981); Kimon Friar (Modern Greek Poetry from Cavafis to Elytis, 1973; The Sovereign Sun, 1974); Constantine Trypanis; John Stathatos; George Savidis; Olga Broumas; Rae Delven; David Connolly; Stuart Montgomery; Athan Anagnostopoulos; Martin Johnston; Jeffrey Carson and Nikos Sarris (Collected Poems of Odysseus Elytis, 2004. Others have made their contributions too: Amy Mims & George Niketas (cited by Keeley and Savidis); Marios Dikaiakos; G. A. Stathis.
Andonis Decavelles, reviewing Olga Broumas’s selection, “What I Love, Selected Poems of Odysseas Elytis” (1986) in Journal of Modern Greek Studies, October 1987, writes:
“There is presently no point for attempting comparisons with precedents, though those will certainly be undertaken by interested bilingual readers and previous translators. Such comparisons did in the past show Friar’s translations as being more conservative in their style while Keeley’s has been more modernistically Americanized, while both have been remarkably faithful and accurate and masterful.”
Broumas, in her Translator’s Note, claims to give Elytis’s voice in English, “true to the man whose sensibility is born of and flowers in a cultural and syntactical grammar foreign to a world shaped and expressed by English.”
But it was the translations of Sherrard, Keeley and Friar between them that certainly helped Elytis to secure the Nobel Prize (1979).
Is it true, as David Ricks comments (quoted above), that “In his late poems, Elytis becomes increasingly (and sometimes irritatingly) preoccupied with the poetic pantheon in which he seeks enshrinement”?
Elytis certainly saw himself as part of the great tradition from Sappho to Solomos (his “master” – although of the Ionian rather than the Aegean Sea).
Edmund Keeley writes of the suggestion of “pagan mysticism, a pantheism, a worship of the gods of water and light”.
What better way to end this “anniversary” article than to quote Odysseus Elytis' speech at the Nobel Banquet, December 10, 1979 (in French)
“En me consacrant, à mon tour, pendant plus de quarante ans, à la poésie, je n'ai rien fait d'autre. Je parcours des mers fabuleuses, je m'instruis en diverses haltes. Et me voici, aujourd'hui, à l'escale de Stockholm avec pour seul capital, dans mes mains, quelques mots helléniques. Ils sont modestes, mais vivants puisqu'ils se trouvent sur les lèvres de tout un peuple.
Ils sont âgés de trois mille ans, mais aussi frais que si l'on venait de les tirer de la mer. Parmi les galets et les algues des rives de l'Egée. Dans les bleus vifs et l'absolue transparence de l'éther. C'est le mot "ciel", c'est le mot "mer", c'est le mot "soleil", c'est le mot "liberté". Je les dépose respectueusement à vos pieds...”
("Odysseus Elytis - Banquet Speech". Nobelprize.org. 9 Sep 2010 http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1979/elytis-speech.html)
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