A01=Odysseus Elytis
Author_Odysseus Elytis
Category=DCF
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Greek
Translation
Product details
- ISBN 9780856463563
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 20 Dec 2007
- Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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When Odysseus Elytis was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, the Swedish Academy’s citation singled out The Axion Esti, first published in 1959, as ‘one of twentieth-century literature’s most concentrated and richly faceted poems.’ It can be seen both as a secular oratorio, reflecting the Greek heritage and the country’s revolutionary spirit, and also as a kind of autobiography, in which the spiritual roots of the poet’s very individual sensibility are set in the wider philosophical context of the Greek tradition. In his evocation of eternal Greece, his vision of the war and its aftermath, and his concluding celebration of human life, Elytis is a true voice of our age – a deeply personal lyric poet who speaks for humanity at large.
Odysseus Elytis, born in Crete in 1911, began to publish his poetry in the 1930s. He took part in the campaign against the Italian fascists in Albania in 1940–41. He was one of the most prominent poets of the Greek resistance during the Nazi occupation. The Nobel Prize was awarded to him 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’. He died in Athens in 1996.
George Savidis was Professor of Modern Greek at the University of Thessaloniki and a Visiting Professor at Harvard. He edited the standard Greek editions of the poetry of Cavafy, Seferis, Sikelianos and Karyotakis, and with Edmund Keeley translated a selection of Cavafy’s ‘unpublished’ poems. He died in 1995.
Edmund Keeley translated the poetry of Cavafy, Seferis and Sikelianos with the late Philip Sherrard. His translations of Yannis Ritsos received the Academy of American Poets’ Landon Award and the EU’s First European Prize. He is a novelist whose non-fiction works include Cavafy’s Alexandria and Inventing Paradise. He lives in Princeton, NJ.
