The Nobel Prize in Literature for 1979 is awarded to odysseus
Elytis (Greece, 1911-1996) "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." ...
Apropos early critical reception is the virulent reaction of the "generation of the thirties," the Athenian avant-garde that would produce two Nobel Prize winners in poetry (George Seferis and Odysseus
Elytis).
'Poems dance': Children listened to poems by
Elytis and Ritsos set to music and became aware that poetry can be a source of inspiration for musical compositions.
Here's an example from the middle of "Birth, Mud, Hyacinth":
Elytis writes, "it is correct to give The unknown its due." This morning at a curve in the road The cows stood together Around a blinking newborn calf Slick with astonishment.
Sing to us about
Elytis' small world the great, Vallego's big-hatted verse, the laughing lemons of Darwish, victims of a map, who turned friend of the corn the day his poems were made of earth Sing to us about Huidobro, about the magic lyre of Octavio Paz, Zapata's arrow in the bow of flying ballads; about Czeslaw Milosz, "Child of Europe," walking through the malignant wisdom of broken cities Sing to us about bards, troubadours, griots, towncriers Who joined the earth but left their voices behind.
Poems are arranged by historical period, from classical antiquity to the twentieth century, and include 185 poets, such as Homer, Sappho, Pindar, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Vitsentzos Kornaros, Andreas Kalvos, Dionysios Solomos, Georgios Souris, George Seferis, Odysseus
Elytis, C.P.
I recall one of my favourite poems (which I know by heart) by the Greek poet Odysseus
Elytis (1998: xxvii in Anoint the Ariston) and think about the way a Western logic does not nurture vulnerability or gentleness:
Greek poet and Nobel Laureate Odysseus
Elytis (1911-1996) wrote that "poetry begins there where death has not the final word" (qtd.
(1.) The analogy of "parallel monologues" drawn upon Odysseus
Elytis's Maria Nephele--with which the book opens--refers to the fact that the "nationalist projects...relentlessly emphasizing their differences [are] yet painfully aware of their similarities" (2).