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A Paradise of One’s Own
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120 Avocations A Paradise of One’s Own Odysseas Elytis in English Odysseas Elytis (the modern a replacing the older u in his first name at his suggestion) is a poet like no other in this world. Neither the leading figure in a literary movement nor a famous teacher of younger poets, he follows a line of individualistic visionary ecstatic poets leading all the way back to Sappho in the 6th century BCE. He credits his art primarily to two moments of supreme insight. The first came one night in 1929 when the eighteen-year-old Elytis chanced upon a book by Paul Eluard, a moment reified in 1935 when Elytis, then a student at the School of Law, University of Athens, attended a lecture on surrealism by Andréas Embirícos. He left the university without his degree, and began a long friendship with Embirícos and association with other new Greek poets such as George Seferis and Nikos Gatsos. With publication of Orientations in 1939 and Sun the First in 1943, Elytis established himself as one of the great lyric voices of modern poetry. What had attracted the young Elytis to surrealism was not its revolutionary rejection of traditional versification nor its stream-ofconsciousness , but its faith in intuition and passionate exploration of the subconscious imagination. Imagination is as much “reality” as the temporal physical world around us. Surrealism was a means by which to return to the original source, a poetics that would reject the conventions of rational discourse in traditional verse, admitting dream, reverie, and dissociative imagery. The early poems shimmer with transparent light. Kimon Friar, in his brilliant introduction to The Sovereign Sun: Selected Poems (Temple University Press, 1974) called them a “Dionysian exaltation not heard since the outpourings of Sikelianós, or the erotic optimism of Embirícos. Elytis showed himself in finer control of his technique, more translucent in his images, clearer in his expression. In Orientations and Sun the First, he became the foremost lyric poet of his generation; in him the deification of youth amid the legendary landscape and sweet reveries of the Aegean Sea received its apotheosis.” The second great revelation came after Mussolini invaded Greece in October, 1940, and the fall of Elytis’s homeland, Crete, in 1941, beginning more than three years of Axis occupation. Elytis, a lieutenant in the First Army Corps, says in an interview with Ivar Ivask, “It became necessary for me to proceed toward that spear-point where life and death, light and darkness cease to be contraries. . . . Fear, the physical fear of war, the material fear of bombs and shells, annihilated within me all aspects of false literature and left naked the meaning of a true need for poetry. Fear was in turn annihilated in me by the salvation brought me, as a man, by a poetry made of nakedness and truth.” In the harsh Greek landscape, splendid as it may be, youth passes quickly, and the eighteen-year-old sun-dazzled boy-god was to convey the countenance of middle age by thirty. In 1943, Elytis composed Heroic and Elegiac Song for the Lost Second Lieutenant of the Albanian Campaign, a symphonic tour de force drawing on the powers of traditional demotic poetry, surrealist elements introduced with even greater restraint as the poet began to find a voice that would speak for an entire nation. His lyric was not of liquid sunlight on Aegean shores, but of how “agony stoops with bony hands.” Years later, he would write in a letter to Kimon Friar, “I believe in the restitution of justice, which I identify with light. And together with a glorious and ancient ancestor of mine, that ‘I do not care for those gods whose worship is practiced in the dark.’” During the late nineteen forties and early fifties, he translated the poetry of Garcia Lorca, Brecht, Eluard, and Ungaretti, and wrote criticism, especially articles on surrealist art including pieces on Matisse, Picasso, Giacometti, and de Chirico. While living in Paris, he was associated with Breton, Eluard, Char, and others. Upon his return to Greece in 1953, he became a national figure in the cultural arena. The poet would review the early part of that era in his only major prose statement on his art, Open Papers (a generous selection from Open Papers has been translated by Olga Broumas and T Begley, Copper Canyon Press, 1994). In “First Things First,” he observes, “And yet from what is to what could be, you...