What I Love: Selected Poems (review)

Reviews 269 Odysseas Elytis, What I Love: Selected Poems, translated from the Greek by Olga Broumas, with Translator's Note and Afterword . Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press. 1986. Pp. 96. $15.00. A young and promising poet herself, whose book Beginning with 0 was "the winning volume of the 1977 Yale Series of Younger Poets," Olga Broumas has devoted her skill to translating Odysseas Elytis whose poetry, as she states, "has been a homeland to me since my arrival in this country in 1967. " She felt the need "to give Elytis' voice in English, and being true to his voice is to create an English with an accent, idiosyncratic, true to the man whose sensibility is born and flowers in a cultural and syntactical grammar foreign to a world shaped and expressed in English." Little, if any, biographical information as to the poet is provided in this nicely printed and shaped volume, but an Afterword does succintly and perceptively sketch the poet's intellectual and poetic identity and world. There we read of his central concern with "justice, liquidity, liquid lights, Beauty," of his notion of "otherness and glimpses of the perpetual 'other side' of experiences and things," of his drawing "from the deepest wells of practical classicism," of his interest in the "origins and sources of mythology" and its mechanism, of his resemblance with Camus "in tone and stance," and with "the poets of the classical Orient" in his "search of Paradise," a Paradise , as he wrote, "made of precisely the same materials of which Hell is made," and of his "finding hope even in tragedy, and heroism in the Beautiful.' ' To him "imagination and reality are not separate ," but "two faces of one being." He has been "a poet of enormous charity and hope." Certainly these notions have long been familiar to Elytis' readers , but they are here well summarized and expressed. For some 50 years—since the annus mirabilis 1935, when Elytis first appeared—his scintillating Aegean lyricism, with its bright youthfulness and freshness , its unceasing changeless changefulness, has acted as a renovating force upon Greek poetry and conscience, having a lasting appeal upon the young and the youthfully and idealistically minded readers and poets. Of Broumas' desire and effort to render Elytis' poetry into English there have been the several and outstanding precedents in the last 40 years. Known are the renderings of Nanos Valaorititis, Kimon Friar, Edmund Keeley, Philip Sherrard and George Savidis, among others, the success of which has earned the poet his wider appreciation, recognition and fame crowned by the Nobel Prize of 270 Reviews 1978. What, in her turn, Broumas selected to translate of him does not aspire at a comprehensive representation of the poet's overall accomplishment . What I Love is the title of her selection, which, quoted probably from the poet himself, is apparently indicative also of the translator's own personal preference as that ranges from the Orientations of 1935-1939 to Maria Nefeli of 1978. The Axion Esti, widely deemed as his masterpiece, is left out. No longer poem of his appears in its entirety, except for The Monogram of 1972, his love poem. The most extensive coverage is that of Maria Nefeli. The prevalent theme in her selection seems to be that of eros or love to which the translator 's youth and gender lends special warmth, freshness and coloring. Rendering again mostly what had already been rendered in English , and in fact with considerable success, does not seem to have discouraged this new translator in her difficult task. Instead, she bravely met the challenge, and in this she thoroughly deserves a warm welcome. Quite obviously, these translations have been instigated by a genuine enthusiastic affection and admiration felt by a younger poet for an older and major one. 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' own versions also have their gratifying, brilliant, powerful...