ABSTRACT
Despite his 1979 Nobel Prize, Odysseus Elytis (1911-1996) remains less known in English-speaking countries than C. P. Cavafy (1863-1933). No two poets could be more antithetical. The work of the latter is realistic, pessimistic, agnostic, ironic, emotionally sober, and limpid in style (though certain idiosyncratic spellings and syntactic originalities are masked by translations), while the poetry of Elytis is lyrical, optimistic, exuberantly erotic, surrealist in metaphor, cosmic in scope, often oracular and sometimes quite obscure. Moreover, whereas Cavafy revives minor historical figures, focuses on societal margins, and half-discloses his own experiences as a hesitant homosexual in turn-of-the-century Alexandria, Elytis’s jubilant “I” sings the “glittering sensations[s]” of the Aegean islands, exalts “korai beautiful and naked and smooth as a beach pebble,” and possesses that Whitmanesque quality of standing for all Greeks in all ages. When Elytis asks—with an exclamation point—in his masterpiece, The Axion Esti (1959), “where can I find my soul * the four-leaf teardrop!,” the narrator characteristically speaks as an Adamic figure: “he who I truly was He many aeons ago / He still green in the fire He uncut from the sky.” Even a pellucid phrase such as “secret syllables through which I strove to articulate my identity” refers only secondarily to the poet’s struggles with self and language (with the “huge crimson rose...tangled in my tongue,” as he puts it elsewhere) and more generally designates the toils of a Greek Everyman-Poet who recurs in, and unifies, a multifaceted lifework.
