Odysseas Elytis

Odysseas Elytis                            ΟΔΥΣΣΕΑΣ ΕΛΥΤΗΣ

Born Nov 2, 1911                                Died March 18, 1996

Section 7, Number 435

Nobel Prize winner Odysseas Elytis has been called a romantic modernist, a surrealist, a partial surrealist, a poet of sensuous strength and intellectual clear sightedness (the last two by the Nobel Committee), a writer of astonishing lyricism, energy, and transcendence – and the greatest modern poet in Greece. This last accolade is quite a compliment considering the range and quality of poetry in Greece today.

His poetry is so dense, so imagistic, and often just so surprising that trying to describe it in prose is a challenge. So many influences came together to create the unique style and content of his work. His appreciation of surrealism helps to explain the free associations and stunning shifts in perspective so prevalent in his poems: the constant juxtaposition of dream and reality to achieve a higher, purer reality is right out of the surrealists’ playbook.  His early love of literature and his exposure to fellow Greek poets such as Cavafy,George Seferis, Angelos Sikelianos and others in their circle were important as was his introduction to modern painters such as Picasso, Braque, and Nikos Hatzikyriakos -Ghikas. Then there was his innate appreciation of the scope and the minutiae of nature that was every bit as precise and perceptive as that of a Gerard Manly Hopkins.

Finally, there was Greece

Greece’s long history, its myths, and its dazzling sun-drenched landscape inspired and informed all of his work as did the impact of his experiences there in ‘real time’ as a young man during the Metaxas dictatorship, a lieutenant on the Albanian front, and a survivor of the Nazi occupation and the civil war which followed.

Greece was the crucible in which the poet formed his art and struggled to come to terms with life in ‘this small world’. In the process, he re-imagined Greece and the flow of its history for an entire generation.

A beautiful and strange homeland

I’ve never seen a homeland more strange and beautiful

Than this one which fell to my lot

Throws a line to catch a fish catches birds instead

Sets up a boat on land garden in the waters

Weeps kisses the ground emigrates

Becomes a pauper gets brave

Tried for a stone gives up

Tries to carve it works miracles

Goes into a boat reaches the ocean

Looks for revolutions wants tyrants

or

Do not, I implore you, do not forget my country
It has high mountains eagle shaped and rows of vines on its volcanoes
And houses very white for neighbouring the blue
Though touching Asia on one side and brushing Europe on the other
It stands there all alone in aether and in sea (1)

An Elytis collage (2)

His Life

Odysseas, the youngest of six children, was born in Crete in 1911, to the wealthy Alepoudelis family, who had parlayed their soap manufacturing skills into the largest company in Greece. The Alepoudelis brand was popular at home and exported to many European countries as well.

At age three his family moved to Athens in order to manage their factory in Piraeus. He had an advantaged childhood, appreciating nature, travel, sports and literature. In 1923, the family toured Europe, quite an adventure for a 12 year old and in Lausanne he even met the great Eleftherios Venizelos, who was a family friend.

The family in 1917. Odysseas is on the left

Elytis experienced his share of sorrow and loss. His beloved older sister died at age 20 in 1918, his father in 1925.  He suffered first from glandular fever and then depression for some time after his father’s death.

Not surprisingly, his family had hoped he would study chemistry and enter the family business but, although he finally chose Law in 1930, his heart was not there either. He enjoyed participating in the University based literary societies during those years (3), far more than attending to his Law studies (which he finally abandoned all together in 1939). While a ‘student’ he met the likes of George Seferis, Georgos Katsimbalis and their circle of writers who were introducing the work of contemporary western poets to a Greek readership as well as their own works in the journal New Letters.

The Name Elytis Emerges

In 1935 Elytis published his first poems using the pseudonym Elytis which he would continue to use for the rest of his life. He had used other aliases before, perhaps to separate himself from the well known family name. He would later say that he chose Elytis because words beginning with ελ in Greek exerted a magical power: Greece (Ελλάδα), freedom (ελευθερία), hope (ελπίδα), and Eleni (Ελενη) a girl he once fell in lοve with.    

His first volume of poetry, Orientations was published in 1940. He was 29. 

 

In these all-white courtyards where the south wind blows
Whistling through vaulted arcades, tell me, is it the mad pomegranate tree
That leaps in the light, scattering its fruitful laughter
With windy willfulness and whispering, tell me, is it the mad
pomegranate tree
That quivers with foliage newly born at dawn
Raising high its colours in a shiver of triumph?
(translated into English by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard).

Italy invaded Albania and the war began in 1940. Elytis joined the army and was sent to the front lines in Albania. A serious bout of typhoid brought him to a hospital in Ioannina where he almost lost his life. During the terrible German Occupation he lived in Athens and was a founding member of the Palamas Circle, and in 1943, he published his collection Ο Έλιος ο Πρώτος, a work which gave him a new epithet: sun-worshipper. Then in 1944, on the advice of George Seferis, he was appointed Programme Director of the Greek National Radio, a post which he held for two years until 1946.

Paris

In 1948, Elytis went to Paris to attend lectures in philosophy and literature at the Sorbonne. This abrupt transfer from a down trodden and demoralized Greece to a recovering Europe affected him profoundly. He would later say that the contrast between Greek children playing in rags in a garbage strewn field when he took off from a Greek airport with the happy well fed children playing in Switzerland where he first landed was one of the motivations for his great work, Axion Esti . He believed that the story of Greece’s sacrifices during the Second World War were not known or understood in Europe.

During his  time in Paris he became friends with the influential publisher  and fellow Greek Stratis Eleftheriadis (Στρατής Ελευθεριάδης),  better known as Teriade  who introduced him to Matisse, Chagall, Picasso and their circle. During this period he travelled to Spain and even worked for a time at the BBC in London.

1953 saw him back in Greece as Programme Director for The Greek National Radio, a post which he held until 1954. While never seeking personal publicity and avoiding overt political commitments, he was still very much a part of the social scene: he participated in literary groups, art exhibitions (some of the work was his own). He was a member of the European Society of the Culture and also an advisor on the administration board of the Karolos Koun theatre. Although many of his poems could be construed as nationalistic, he was, in fact, an internationalist where art was concerned and throughout his career he acknowledged his appreciation and debt to poets and writers from abroad. He translated many of them into Greek.(4)

Worthy It Is

Meanwhile, the plan for a long poem dealing with the war had been gaining shape and in 1960, after a fifteen year hiatus, Elytis published Axion Esti  (Worthy it is). He was 49.  Axion Esti is a complex poem of truly breath-taking range, length and stylistic components. It is separated into three parts: The Genesis, The Passions and The Gloria and culminates in a glorification of all ephemeral things, of what is Axion or Worthy in what the poet calls this small, this great world.

  The poem's greatness was immediately recognized; Elytis received the First State Poetry Prize in 1960. Still, it would be fair to say that when Mikis Theodorakis, composed music for Axion Esti, Elytis was catapulted into genuine stardom. The Theodorakis - Elytis collaboration had its ups and downs because Theodorakis realized that to present the entire poem would have required 10 hours. Cuts were necessary, cuts that would have been anathema to any poet.  But Theodorakis’ musical intuition was sound and the work was presented at the Rex Theatre in 1964 with readings, a chorus, and a core of 5 poems or ‘songs’. The words and music truly struck a sympathetic chord in the Greek national psyche. It was immediately well received by the public and has remained popular today. If you enjoy Greek music, you have probably been humming Elytis’ poetry for years without realizing it.

  

The album cover was created by Elytis’ friend Yannis Tsarouchis

Many honours followed including the Nobel Prize in 1979. His acceptance speech was memorable. In it he spoke of what he hoped his poetry would accomplish:

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.

Elytis continued to write for the rest of his life.

The Monogram, was written in Paris when he was in self exile from 1969 to 1971 because of the dictatorship in Greece. In this most lyrical of poems, the lover faces the invincible element of time and the poem follows his efforts to come to terms with that without despair. It is not a new theme for Elytis, but it is just so superbly done. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5-lLovnV3E has the poem being read aloud in Greek but with English subtitles. It is accompanied by musical interludes as a shadowy figure slowly writes out, in  candles, a leitmotif of the poem: Do you hear? (Μ'ακους;).

Elytis’ poetry has been translated into 29 languages and counting. He wrote ten collections of poems, many essays, paintings and illustrations and collages.  He was an intensely private person. His constant companion for his last 13 years was the young poetess Ioulita Iliopoulou (Ιουλίτα Ηλιοπούλου) to whom he bequeathed his entire artistic legacy.

Odysseus Elytis died in Athens on March 18^th, 1996, of heart failure and is buried in the Alepoudelis (ΑΛΕΠΟΥΔΕΛΗΣ) family plot in the First Cemetery.

I wondered about those small stones placed above his name until I read this line from The Monogram:

The day will come - do you hear? - to bury us and later the thousands of years will make us shiny stones, do you hear me?

Two Excerpts

The Autopsy

Now then...

Gold from the olive root was found dripping into the chambers of his heart.

And from all the times he remained watchful by candlelight, waiting for the dawn to break, a strange heat has gripped his gut.

Just under the skin, the blue line of the horizon is sharply defined... ample azure traces throughout the blood.

It looks as if the cries of birds which he had memorized in hours of great loneliness spilled out en mass, so the knife could not proceed with ease to any great depth.

Probably the intention was sufficient for the harm

which met him – it’s obvious in the fearsome posture of the innocent.

His eyes... open and proud...  an entire forest is still stirring on the unblemished retina.

In the brain – nothing except a ravaged echo of the sky.

Only in the hollow of his left ear, a thin film of fine sand, like that inside a shell.

This indicates that he had walked by the sea alone with the heartache of love and the roar of the wind.

As for those flecks of fire in his groin, they show he pushed time several hours ahead whenever he was with a woman.

We will have early fruit this year. (5)

Here then am I

Here then am I
created for the young Korai and the Argean Islands,
lover of deers leaping, intitiate of the Mystery of the olive leaves,
sun drinker and locust-killer.
Here am I, face to face with the black raiment of the single-minded
And the empty belly of the years which aborts it own children, in rut.
Wind releases the elements and thunder assaults the mountains.
Fate of the innocents - alone again - here you are - in the Narrows.
In the Narrows I opened my hands. In the Narrows I emptied my hands
And saw no other riches, heard no other riches
but cool fountains running Pomagranates or Zephyrs, or Kisses.
Each to his own weapon, I said:
In the Narrows I’ll open my pomegranates.
In the narrows I’ll erect the Zephyrs as guards.
I’ll unleash the old kisses canonized by my longing.
Wind releases the elements and thunder assaults the mountains.
Fate of the innocents, you are my own fate. (6)

The Map

Footnotes

(1) (From Axion Esti. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r03lXgteyxo for Theodorakis composition of the poem with English subtitles. Like so much Greek poetry, Elytis lyrics were perfect for musical accompaniment.

(2)  From ΤΟ ΔΩΜΑΤΙΟ ΜΕ ΤΙΣ ΕΙΚΟΝΕΣ.
(3) His influences there were intellectuals like Constantinos Tsatsos and Panagiotis Kannelopoulos.

(4)  In his nobel speech he comments on the difficulty of translation: We know you and you know us through the 20 or 30 per cent that remains of a work after translation. We are suffering from the absence of a common language.

 (5) I imagine that it is a poet’s body spread out on the table as the coroner begins ...  But there are echoes of ancient sacrifice – a reading of entrails, a fertility rite and more... (I used the Keely translations but made a few changes)

 (6) Here Then am I is the beginning of Part two of Axion Esti when the ‘hero’ comes face to face with the world of experience. There are Minoan, and Mycenean echoes, and then the confrontation with “the determined” which Keely translated as ‘fascists’. The poet releases his treasure in the Narrows (Charybdis and Scylla?) because that is all he can do.