---------------------------------------------Aiming at further enhancing Sino Greek relations through the rich cultural feast of Greek creation, the Press

s & Communication Office communicates through with the ancient civilization of the East, the Chinese civilization, and consolidates the already strong Sino Greek bonds. The Greek word means communication, and it was chosen for the name of our cultural review, as it encompasses the four letters KINA, which form the Greek word for China. The name in the cover was designed so as to remind the traditional Chinese lantern, while the blue and the red color are typical of Greece and China, respectively.

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Odysseus Elytis : The Poet of Greece created for the young Korai and the Aegean islands, lover of the deers leaping, initiate in the Mystery of olive leaves.
The Axion Esti

The Poet of Aegean Sea, the Poet without borders, the gifted Poet of Greece, Odysseus Elytis, who dedicated his life to a love of hope, beauty, freedom, justice, and Greek tradition, in poems of captivating lyricism, surreal imaginary and a voice to the human consciousness, is - once more - invested with glory this year (2011), 100 years after his birth, the so called Year of Elytis. Elytis established himself as one of the leading voices of a generation of literary Greek giants, as the principal contributor to the renaissance that had been brought to Greek letters since the mid of 1930s. Elytiss lifetime work has been greatly influenced by the art, literature, philosophy, language and religion of pre-classical Greece, of Byzantium, of heroic years of Greeks against fascism during II World War. He was a Platonic idealist, without believing, however, that poetry is made of ideas, but rather of feelings. The Nobelist poet with his most ambitious poem as Elytis had characterized his AXION ESTI - which was described by the Swedish Academy as one of the 20th century literatures most concentrated and ritually faceted poems- recounts the world of E r o s, including his battle against the darkness created by misunderstanding and hatred, his victory, and the ultimate justification and praise. . !

A Solitary swallow and a costly spring, for the sun to turn it takes a job of work, It takes a thousand dead sweating at the wheels, it takes the living also giving up their blood. God my Master Builder, You built me into the mountains, God my Master Builder, You enclosed me in the sea ! The Axion Esti As one critic remarked: For the first time in centuries, an immortal Greek sea, which had once been the mother and nurse of the most creative forms in the history of the Arts regained its youthful vigour in Elytiss poetry. The Aegean Sea, not only as geographical area but chiefly as the reminder and vindication of a racial continuity, constituted for Elytis the source of novel visions where in life and dream, feeling and nostalgia, the present and the past, were once again reunited. Its mystical function, which often assumes a purely metaphysical extension, exists already even in the juvenilia, the early poems of Elytis. In 1972, Odysseus Elytis - describing the aims of his poetry - wrote: I consider poetry a source of innocence full of revolutionary forces. It is my mission to direct these forces against a world my conscience cannot accept, precisely so as to bring that world through continual metamorphoses more in harmony with my dreams. I am referring here to a contemporary kind of magic whose mechanism leads to the discovery of our true reality. It is for this reason that I believe, to the point of idealism, that I am moving in a direction which has never been attempted until now. In the hope of obtaining a freedom from all constraints and the justice which could be identified with absolute light, I am an idolater who, without wanting to do so, arrives at Christian sainthood. There was always the oriental side which occupied an important place in the Greek spirit. Throughout antiquity oriental values were assimilated. There exists an oriental side in the Greek which should not be neglected. It is for this reason that make the distinction Throughout his long career as a poet, Elytis remained true to his vision of a poetry that addresses the power of language and connects the history, the mythology of Greece to the physical

world and the realities of the modern age. Renowned for their astonishing lyricism and profound optimism, Elytis s poems capture the natural wonders of Greece and give voice to the contemporary Greek and to more universally human consciousness. The imagistic beauty in his poems derived from the natural world he had inhabited since birth and with which he was deeply and permanently enamoured. Elytis combines values of innocence, light and hope, a sense of living history whereby all elements and influences associated with Greece can be fused together to recover a restored sense of identity. He reflects the hope even in the tragedy, he emphasizes the energies of human being and his soul and the spirit of nature. He connects myth with history in order to confront good and evil. The Dionysian and Apollonian aspects of life blend together within the individual and the culture. The sound and smells of the open-air market places, the emphasis of sun light on the sea ever present, and all together represent a continuity in time and a celebration of life and death. The Poet created a synthesis of rich and visceral aspects of the Aegean landscape and culture, ideological elements of youth, warmth, beauty and all elements of Greeces tradition and complex history. He criticized the vulgarity of contemporary societys culture, reformulated the fundamental, minimal essentials of life, he brought to Greek literature a clarity and sharpness which it had not known since the national poet Dionysios Solomos, a century earlier. Master of powerful language, Elytis is together with Seferis, the starting point for the innovation of the neo-Hellenic poetic language. His language has an exceptional elegance, a lyrical voice, a diffuse richness. He is particularly sensitive to the distant echo of the myths of the Hellenic poetry, to the tone, to the interior speech ultimately to its ethical rhythm above history and style. The last quality, particularly in the poets later work, drew on the Greek language through the ages.

T , . . I was given the Greek language, a poor house on Homers beaches. y only care my tongue on the sandy shores of Homer... he Axion Esti In China, the Nobelist Greek poet is very popular among the Chinese intellectuals. Elytis s superior work THE AXION ESTI is translated in Chinese language ( 2007 ) in a very trustworthy translation by the Hellenist Mr. Liu Ruihong, with the Greek name Leonidas, awarded with the A Greek Prize of Best Translation for a Foreign Book by Greek Ministry of Culture. At the preface of the Chinese publication, the Elytiss poem is characterized by the translator as a great piece having the nature of music and architecture. Therefore, we can say without exaggeration that this poetry can be not only read, but also heard and seen. No matter which way you choose, you will have unique experience. In this poetry, the writer revealed the secret from birth-torture-death-revival to eternal life.

Before I had eyes you were light, Before Eros love And when the kiss took you A woman. Orientations 4

Love is free. Eros is triumphant. Thought is free too. Eros has a permanent and insistent presence in Elytiss work, concurrent with his love of life. Blessed by the wind the poet seems to summon us to a world of universal brotherhood serving beauty and poetry. Elytiss Eros flaps the wings under the sea and the lands, the beaches and the rocks, showing us the Greek Archipelago, with its boats and sea-shells under the Greek light unfolding before us a world of Elytiss memories and visions in this world so small, this world so great. Elytis publicizing that My countrys spatial area is one of the smallest; but its temporal extension is infinite (Nobel Prize Speech, 1979) never forgets to come at the end with the - so opportune today - invocation : *

O sun of Justice in the mind * and you O glorifying myrtle do not oh I implore you * do not forget my country The xion Esti

Christos G. Failadis Press & Communication Counsellor Embassy of Greece in Beijing

The small world the great of Odysseus Elytis . In the beginning is the light. And the first hour when lips still in clay try out the things of the world. And the sea, so exquisite in her sleep, spread unbleached gauze of sky under the carob trees and the great upright palms . First the Seven Axes, wrenched with force, Pried loose from high up in the battlements, fell to the ground. The Axion Esti . For the first time on an islands soil November the second early in the morning I came out to see the world and I regretted it I immediately felt the pain. Maria Nefeli

In November 1935, on the eleventh volume of the avant garde Greek literary periodical Ta Nea Ghrammata (The New Word), a young poet, Odysseus Elytis, first appeared with several poems. Elytis was the nom de plume that Odysseus Alepoudelis chose to replace his family name, in this first appearance. The choice of the name already reflects the complexity and depth of perception, as its first part, the syllable el-, recalls classical Greek themes and ideas, as Ellas (Hellas), elpidha (hope), eleftheria (freedom), Eleni (Helen), and is combined with the general regional suffix -ytis in a rather unexpected and therefore highly inventive and challenging way, creating a new and absolutely private universe for the poet, who whishes to keep his distance from the family factory and from any dependence on a job.

The family of Panagiotis Alepoudelis, in 1919. On the front, left, Odysseus Elytis Odysseus Elytis, the youngest of six children, was born on the island of Crete, in the neighborhood Seven Axes in Herakleion, on November 2nd, 1911. The name of the neighborhood derives from the axes that symbolize the seven Turkish regiments, which conquered the city of Herakleion in 1669, after a siege that lasted 24 years. In 1912, shortly after the poets birth, Crete was united with Greece, and the axes were taken down from the eastern wall of the citys fortification.

His parents, Panagiotis and Maria Alepoudelis, hailed from Lesvos, one of the largest islands of the Aegean Sea, and home of ancient Greek poet Sappho. Panagiotis Alepoudelis had settled in Crete since 1895, and he established there a successful soap factory and a seed-oil factory.

Summer of 1921. Ten-years-old Odysseus Elytis on the island of Spetses Although the family moved to Athens in 1914, they spent the summertime on the islands of Lesvos, Crete and Spetses, where the contact with the sea and with the Greek marine tradition shapes the cultural and spiritual origin of Elytis poetry. After completing his formal training, Elytis attended the Athens Law School, where he was connected with distinguished professors of the University, while the association with Greek surrealist poets Andreas Embeirikos, Nicos Eggonoboulos and Nicos Gatsos introduced him to the requests of a new poetic form, surrealism, which he had already met at the age of 18, in 1929, through the verses Capitale de la douleur of the French poet, Paul Elyard. Elytis embraced surrealism, but with reservations concerning automatic writing, as his writing has never been automatic but instead disciplined in its form and substance. Many facets of surrealism I cannot accept, such as its paradoxical side, its championing of automatic writing.

Albeit never an orthodox surrealist, Elytis acknowledged the gratifying, liberating forms of surrealism, which freed him from rationalism, he considered surrealism to be the last available oxygen in a dying world, dying at least in Europe, and attributed his tendency to surrealism to the attempt to discover the true face of Greece through the rejection of Western rationalism, which was till that time the dominant model of the approach, and through a renewed, revolutionary, fresh contact with Greek truth. Surrealism contained a supernatural element, and this enabled us to form a kind of alphabet out of purely Greek elements with which to express ourselves () It was the only school of poetry and, I believe, the last in Europe which aimed at spiritual health and reacted against the rationalist currents which had filled most Western minds. Since surrealism had destroyed this rationalism like a hurricane, it had cleared the ground in front of us, enabling us to link ourselves physiologically with our soil and to regard Greek reality without the prejudices that have reigned since the Renaissance. Starting with the publication of his first poems, in 1935, and ending with West of Sorrow, in 1995, the final full year of his life, Elytis published some fifteen collections of verses in all. Apart from his poetry, Elytis also wrote theoretical and critical essays, translated modern foreign literary masterpieces and produced gouaches and collages, which reflect the pictorial quality of his poetry and give expression to his firm conviction that one must transform every moment into an image. Elytiss poetry has gone through four major periods of development, of unceasing creativity, unprecedented innovativeness, artistic quality, expressive richness. Elytis characterized the first period, as illustrated in his debut volume Orientations, as one wherein nature and metamorphoses predominate (stimulated by surrealism, which always believed in the metamorphosis of things). The first two lines of the first poem of Orientations are: Eros The archipelago

As the poet himself once confined in an interview, it is characteristic that the first two verses of Orientations are eros, the archipelago. In a way this foreshadows the entire evolution, in terms of content, of my poetry.

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In the poetry of Homer, of the earliest known Greek poet, Eros is the first active force, who conquered the souls of human beings and gods, Eros is the source of beauty. The archipelago is the world of the Aegean sea, which offers to the poet images. And the prow of its foams And the gulls of its dreams On its highest mast the sailor waves A song

The first strophe of the first Elytiss poem closes with the image of a seavoyaging sailor singing to the wind and to the waves: it is the poet himself announcing the course of his life, and sailing to Poetry. With the poems of his first collection, the poet attempts to incorporate the boldness of surrealism and his personal request for disciplined and simple expression in the traditional norms and linguistic forms of Greek poetry, and to determine his own point in a new lyric technique, through the orientation (as already mentioned with the title of the collection) to the invention and creation of a universe of light and sea, of an hymn to the adolescence and to the feast of senses. ! You have a taste of tempest on your lips But where did you wander? All day long in the hard reverie of stone and sea? An eagle-bearing wind stripped the hills Stripped your longing to the bone And the pupils of your eyes received the message of chimera Spotting memory with foam!

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The element of surprise, which excites the mind and permits one to see the world from a different angle is present in these verses, while the absence of the explicit development of a main theme combined with the dynamism invoked by the succession of powerful images reveals the aim to discover the pure lyric substance of language and of its expression in poetry.

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In 1941 Elytis served as a second lieutenant in the Greek army and fought on the front line defending Greece against the attempted invasion by Italian Fascist forces. There, Elytis contracted typhus, from which he recovered painfully. In April of 1941 Nazi Germany occupied Greece, and this occupation lasted till October 1944, and was then followed by civil war. For the poet, this era is the second period of his poetry, one of greater historic and moral awareness, yet without the loss of vision of the world, which marks my first period. Occupied Athens will feel in November 1943 the surprise of hope and certainty, as with the publication of his second collection, Sun the First, Elytis uses his myth making power and arrays an imaginary universe against the sufferings of the war and the occupation. In a myth with sun and life as dominant elements, the poet expresses his resistance to the war and gives shape to his firm belief that the war should not prevail over us, make our physical or intellectual inclinations silent and leave nothing but Necessity in the first level of our interest. In poems shimmering with transparent light, Elytis reveals his commitment to repose in his work his views on life and world, combined with his personal aesthetic theory, and confirms his firm belief that the poet, with a high sense of responsibility towards his work, makes the choice of reaction to the dire conditions of the war, so as to console and to encourage, while at the same time to give the form of artistic expression to History and to assure the survival of historical events through a highly differentiated point of view.

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Entering a phase of self-consciousness, the poet states , I give my hand to justice Transparent fountain source at the peak What I love is always being born

My sky is deep and unaltered , . What I love is beginning always. Elytis believes that along whatever path man searches for truth, he is bound to arrive at nature. So, nature, unaffected by History, incessantly present as a stable point of reference for the human existence, is revealed in these poems as an eternal power of certainty and safety. The view of this nature in all its details, with sound, light, colors, voices, songs, under the dominant presence of sun, This wind that loiters among the quinces This insect that sucks the vines The stone that the scorpion wears next to his skin And these sheaves on the threshing floor

. That play the giant to small barefoot children. The images of the Resurrection This whitewash that carries the noonday on its back

On walls that the pines trees scratched with their fingers . And the cicadas, the cicadas in the ears of the trees. . Great summer of chalk Great summer of cork The red sails slanting in guts of wind On the sea-floor white creatures, sponges Accordions of the rocks Perch from the fingers even of bad fishermen Proud reefs on the fishing lines of the sun.

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inspires the poet courage and the firm belief that : : . No one will tell our fate, and that is that, We ourselves will tell the suns fate, and that is that.

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The experience of the war and the spirit of bravely enduring and overcoming the darkness of this period inspire the poem Song Heroic and Mourning for the Lost Second Lieutenant of the Albanian Campaign, published in 1945. Elytis describes the concept of the poem: The virtues I found embodied and living in my comrades formed in synthesis a brave young man of heroic stature, one whom I saw in every period of our history. They had killed him a thousand times, and a thousand times he had sprung up again, breathing and alive. He was no doubt the measure of our civilization, compounded of his love not of death but of life. It was with his love of Freedom he recreated life out of the stuff of death. The initially elegiac tone of the poem, already stated in the title with the adjective mourning, the mournful lament over the passing of the sun and the coming of the darkness, gradually becomes ecstatic laudation and reveals the passion for life and the obstinate resistance to the forces that violate human freedom, as the poem ends with the hope of regeneration. ! Those who committed the evil a black cloud took them But he who confronted it in the skys roads Ascends now alone and resplendent! : , : Now the dream beats faster in the blood The worlds rightest moment rings out: Freedom, Greeks show the way in the darkness: FREEDOM For you the sun will weep with joy

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Following the end of World War II, Elytis remained in Greece until 1948, and then he went to Paris. He returned to Athens in 1951. During the 50s Elytis worked on and published two major collections: The Axion Esti (Worthy it is a refrain familiar to all Greeks from Greek Orthodox liturgy), published in 1959, after a long silence that lasted more than a decade after the Song Heroic and Elegiac for the Lost Second Lieutenant of the Albanian Campaign, and Six and One Remorses for the Sky, in 1960. With the monumental The Axion Esti, the most ambitious poem of modern Greek poetry, a kind of spiritual autobiography which attempts to dramatize the national and philosophical extensions of a highly personal sensibility, and to present an image of the contemporary Greek consciousness through the developing perspective of a firstperson persona, who is at once the poet himself and the voice of his country, Elytis won wide national and international appreciation. Drawing from a wide range of sources of the historical, cultural and literary Greek tradition, from Homer, Heraclitus, Pindar, Herodotus, Thucydides, Pythagoras, from the Byzantine hymnography and the Greek Orthodox liturgy, from the folk songs of the 19th century, from the poems of Dionysios Solomos and the surrealist poets of the 20th century, and with the evocation of the history of the Albanian campaign, the German occupation, and the civil war, along with the Ottoman occupation and the War of Independence, the poem is divided into three sections, bearing hymnological titles: Genesis, Passion, Gloria. In Genesis, seven free-verse hymns describe the birth of the poet and his growing awareness of this small world the Great along with the depiction of the stages in the creation of the world and of the Greek landscape.

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 AND THE ONE I really was, the One of many centuries ago, the One still verdant in the midst of fire, the One not made by human hand, drew with his finger the distant lines sometimes rising sharply to a height sometimes lower: the curves gentle one inside the other land masses that made me feel the smell of earth like understanding

, !

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To endure peace you need strength, he said and swinging around with palms open he sowed mullein, crocuses, bluebells all variety of earthy stars and cut into one leaf of each, as a mark of their origin, their superiority and strength: THIS WORLD this small world the great! Structured in 3 parts, the 18 psalms, 12 odes and 6 readings of the Passion describe the poets experience from the World War II and its tragic aftermath. The poet suffers the agonies of its nation, overcomes evil and affirms his tradition. , . HERE then am I created for the young Korai and the Aegean islands lover of the deers leaping initiate in the Mystery of olive leaves sun-drinker and locust-killer. , : ! . , !

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Each to his own weapons, I said: In the Straits Ill open my pomegranates In the Straits Ill post Zephyrs as sentries Ill unleash the old kisses canonized by my longing! Wind releases the elements and thunder assaults the mountains. Fate of the innocent, you are my own Fate! The three sections of Gloria celebrate in a long hymn of praise the sensual and spiritual vitality the enlightened persona finds in the world that still remains open to him after he had gained the knowledge of human evil and human sacrifice in his countrys recent history. , , , , , , The girls the bluegrass of utopia the girls the Pleiades led astray the girls Vessels of Mysteries filled to the brim yet bottomless Acrid in darkness yet miraculous painted in white and yet all black turned on themselves like lighthouse beams sun-devouring and moon-strolling Ersi, Myrto, Marina Helen, Roxanne, Photeine Anna, Alexandra, Cynthia

Set to music in 1964 by the famous Greek composer, Mikis Theodorakis, The Axion Esti became so popular that every Greek can sing some of its verses.

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Composed almost simultaneously with The Axion Esti, the seven poems of the Six and One Remorses for the Sky are characterized by a completely different style, by a discreet, personal, thoughtful lyricism, partly related to the epic events of The Axion Esti, which seem to be reconsidered in a framework of afterthoughts. A different journey to a new awareness begins, under a sky which had lost its earlier innocence through the poets and world wars and postwar experience. In poems that are inner questions and efforts to pass from a common and personal sense of guilt to a new and liberated awareness, the poet tries to draw from experience a new knowledge and hope and so help a new sky now more emphatically an inner one attain a new purity on a higher and more conscious spiritual level. , . , They will smell of incense, and their faces are burnt by their crossing through the Great Dark Places. There where they were suddenly flung by the Immovable Face-down, on ground whose smallest anemone would suffice to turn the air of Hades bitter The Sleep of the Brave

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The third period of Elytiss work is characterized by that what the poet called his solar metaphysics. As he said, when I speak of solar metaphysics, I mean the metaphysics of light. Since the sun had always had a central place in my poetry, I called it solar metaphysics. All this characterizes the third period of my poetry, my third cycle, if you wish, which is represented by the collection The Light Tree and the Fourteenth Beauty (1971). Dominated by the quality of an astonishing limpidity, by the idea that behind a given thing something different can be seen and behind that still something else, and so on and so an, and attempting to transpose into poetry the limpidity which exists in nature from the physical point of view, the poet enters this new stage of his creation with the painful realization that the sun of life is gradually approaching the moon of the dark night sky, and the light tree of youth is difficult to discover. Still, the poet tries to reconcile the light with the coming darkness, the sun with the moon, and to mitigate the sorrow for the loss that time had brought. The collection concludes with Gift Silver Poem - poetry being the only lasting final gain from life, and silver depicting the coloring of the trees of paradise. I know that all this is worthless and that the language that I speak doesnt have an alphabet Since the sun and the waves are a syllabic script which can be deciphered only in the years of sorrow and exile

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In the seven poems of pure love lyric The Monogram first published in Brussels, in 1971, and then in Athens, in 1972 love, addressed to an aetherial and absent beloved, sings the hope of its continuation and fulfillment in Paradise. , I shall mourn always hear me? for you , . alone, in Paradise.

In 1971, the Sovereign Sun, a cantata loaded with island imagery infiltrated by the sun and describing the destiny of Greece, and in 1972, the Rhos of Eros, a collection of charming song lyrics, decorated with collages and gouaches of the poet, were published.

In 1974, an important collection of poems was published: Stepchildren, comprising two series of seven poems, the earliest dated 1939 (Psalm and Mosaic for Spring in Athens), and the latest 1972 (Mystic Versicles). In one of the most interesting poems of the collection, Death and Resurrection of Constantine Paleologus (1968), inspired by an old legend for the last, tragic emperor of the Byzantine Empire, the poet reworks the motif of Song Heroic and Mourning for the Lost Second Lieutenant of the Albanian Campaign, and reveals one of the major elements of his poetry: a kind of meteorism; there are creatures who have a tendency to mount up into the sky, to rise toward the heights. The Second Lieutenant in the Albanian campaign is dead, but yet he rises; Constantine Paleologus falls but he always rises again. An antidote against despair, this meteorism lifts the poetry above worldly reality and stresses the idea of poetic sensibilitys triumph in eternal reality.

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 Noon out of night And not one person by his side Only his faithful words that mingled all their colors to leave in his hand a lance of white light

The world is an oppressive place to live through yet with a little pride its worth it In 1978, Maria Nefeli, a single long poem in dramatic form, which expresses the word and mind of postwar youth, was published. The poet explains: Maria Nefeli means Maria Cloud. Both names have a mythological connotation. But in my poem Maria is a young woman, a modern radical of our age. My poems are usually rooted in my own experience, yet they do not directly transcribe actual events. Maria Nefeli constitutes an exception. Having finished The Axion Esti (this was sixteen years ago), I met this young woman in real life, and I suddenly wanted to write something very different from The Axion Esti. Therefore I made the young woman speak in my poem and express her world view, which is that of the young generation of today. I am not against her, for I try to understand her viewpoint and that of her generation. I attempt to understand her by having us speak in parallel monologues. My conclusion in this poem is that we search basically for the same things but along different routes. Elytis confides that it is a strange kind of poem and describes the structure of the poem, in which a girl speaks. Her words are on the left side of the page and the poets

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reaction is on the right. Yet it is not a dialogue, but two monologues side by side, adding that it will be my first poem which takes place in an urban environment. The poem is arranged in 3 sections of twice 7 poems. Each section has an introductory and a closing poem and two intermediary songs; apothegms are appended to each poem. In an effort to establish a dialogue with the younger generation, the poet redefines the terms of his poetry, through a variety of styles colloquial rhythms, urban imagery, ironies, jokes, parodies and neologisms, in a poem characterized by an intense lyricism. We were looking at each other trough the stone Elytis states: Maria Nefeli is the other half of me; it is as if you would see the reverse of me. Already in an early poem, The Concert of Hyacinths, I wrote On the other side I am the same. So, here I am showing the other side of myself. Perhaps this poem does constitute the synthesis of my third period. In October of 1979, the secretary of the Swedish Academy announced the awarding of the 1979 Nobel Prize in Literature to Odysseus Elytis for his poetry, which, against the background of Greek tradition, depicts with sensuous strength and intellectual clearsightedness modern mans struggle for freedom and creativeness.

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In the very productive fourth and final period of Elytiss poetic word, the perception of time as decay and death, and the awareness of death and of its increasing proximity become the central issue of Elytiss collections. The Little Seafarer, composed between 1970 and 1974 and published in 1985, consists of fifty-eight pieces and a short Entrance and Exit, which frame the poem not only physically but also emotionally. Perceiving time as a dark historical inheritance, the poet views Greek History from a completely different angle, compared to the sunlit and hopeful approach of The Axion Esti, as now the focus is on major political crimes injustices and murders in all periods of Greek History, from the antiquity and the classical era to the Hellenistic and Byzantine period and to the present. The Entrance reads: . . , ; , . . , SOMETIMES ITS no more than a glow behind the mountains there toward the sea. Sometimes again a strong wind that stops suddenly just outside the harbors. And those who know, their eyes fill with tears Golden wind of life why dont you reach us? No one hears, no one. They all go holding an icon and on it fire. And not one day, one moment in this place when

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injustice doesnt occur or some murder The Exit concludes: . . , . . BUT INCOMPREHENSIBLY no one hears. The burning bird of Paradise goes ever higher. The voice was turned elsewhere and the eyes remained unmiracled. Helpless are the eyes It is the first time that a poem by Elytis ends in despair. The next step in this gradual confrontation with the decay of time comes in the Three Poems under a Flag of Convenience (1982), as the poet uses a language of stark and hopeless pragmatism to describe times advance and the accompanying physical, mental and moral decline. Ad libitum. my unfortunate allalone one whats become of you five or six zeroes on the side will eat you up and it is finished there already now Authority dresses as Fate and whistles to you

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Ad libitum Both The Little Seafarer and Three Poems under a Flag of Convenience end in doubt as to the success of the poets lifelong effort to become enlightener. In 1984, critics greet with surprise the Diary of an Invisible April, a collection of forty-nine poems some in verse and some in poetic prose perceived as a marginal work in Elytiss poetry which has no precedent in his oeuvre, as the poet, in this private and intimate confession does not simply reveal the dark side of his luminous itself, i.e. he does not let what is repressed in him come out, but he goes deeper, he questions and even negates in a way what he has accomplished, thus giving it its true meaning. According to the poet, April, containing Holy Week, implies the notions of death and resurrection. The poet develops in this poem a new structure, as the motions of things are given the way a camera lens would record and project them. Such a technique has helped me, thanks to a bold decoupage, to maintain the notions of lastingness which does not coincide with the current time. , , . , . , . ; - . If only mother you could see me: as I was born, I departed. I was far too little besides who understands? and far too many were the creeping monsters with the lateral, slimy legs. So, from the length of a life constructed with such difficulty all that remains is a half-ruined door and a lot of large decaying water anemones. Therefrom I pass and proceed who knows? to a womb sweeter than my country.

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In the Diary of an Invisible April, viewed as the darkest, most painful and most desperate of Elytiss poetic oeuvre, death is met face to face, as imminent and inescapable fate, which demands from the poet his share of mortality. In 1991, the collection The Elegies of Jutting Rock was published for Elytiss 80th birthday. Eros and death are the themes of the fourteen elegies, which start with the announcement of a sea voyage similar to and yet different from the one announced with the first verses of the Orientations, continue with childhood and eros memories, approach the infinity of the human soul, which is greeted both by life and death, and affirm the essence of poetry. Odourless yet like blossom Death is grasped through the Nostrils. Square silent buildings with Endless corridors come between but the odour . ,

Persistently passes folds in white sheets or crimson Curtains throughout the rooms length. The last verse of the Elegies is Death the sun without sunsets In summer 1995, in the harbor town of Porto Rafti, not far from Athens, Elytis completed a collection of seven new poems, West of Sorrow. As he stated, they are poems more dense and for this reason more difficult, but closer to my ideal. Containing the dreams of a lifetime, the poems recall the sunlit Aegean world, even west of the suns setting and evoke memories and feelings from Greece. In March 18th, 1996, Odysseus Elytis, the poet of life and freedom, of light and sun, of the Greek sea and the Greek passion, the voice of dignity and of endurance, the poet of Greece, passed away, in the age of eighty four years.

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Now that he has left, . What remains is poetry alone as the last poem of West of Sorrow confirms. In 1998, a collection of posthumous poems, From Close by, was published. If we perceive The Elegies of Jutting Rock as the Approach to death, and the West of Sorrow poems as the Confrontation with death, then this collection can be considered as the conclusion of a trilogy and of Elytiss work, as the Entry and Look Back. At the end of this journey, Instead of us is Love This is why I write. Because poetry starts where death does not have the last word. It is the end of one life and the beginning of another, which is similar to the first one, but it goes very deep, to the utmost point that the soul could trace, at the borders of antitheses, there where the Sun and Hades touch each other. The endless impetus toward the physical light which is the Word and the non-created light which is God. Odysseus Elytis

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The inventive power of language in Elytiss poetic universe I consider poetry a source of innocence full of revolutionary forces. It is my mission to direct these forces against a world my conscience cannot accept, precisely so as to bring that world through continual metamorphoses more in harmony with my dreams. I am referring here to a contemporary kind of magic whose mechanisms leads to the discovery of our true reality. It is for this reason that I believe, to the point of idealism, that I am moving in a direction which has never been attempted until now. In the hope of obtaining a freedom of all constraints and the justice which could be identified with absolute light, I am an idolater who, without wanting to do so, arrives at Christian sainthood. Odysseus Elytis

Accepting the Poetry Nobel Prize in Stockholm, on December 8th, 1979, Odysseus Elytis reveals in his speech the essence of poetry as the art of approaching that which surpasses us, and expresses his position on the issue of poetic language as an instrument of magic, which acquires a certain way of being and becomes a lofty speech, as carrier of moral values. This idea of surpassing reality and creating a new poetic universe of truth, luminosity and transparency emerges as dominant element and necessary precondition of a poetry, which goes back to the initial source of the word from the ancient Greek verb : create and is a creation from within language and not from without it, because ideas are born at the same time as their verbal expression and hence, the language factor plays an important role.

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For the poet, the language becomes the means to lead and initiate us into his world, his reality through words like clusters of images, strings of objects, bundles of memory quirks, through butterfly words, rocket words, grenade words, which allow a process of approach to an unseen side of the world. Seeking an intervention in the real, both penetrating and metamorphosing, which has always been the lofty vocation of poetry, not limiting itself to what it is, but stretching itself to what can be, Elytis breaks the barriers of conventional linguistic communication, abolishes the limits of the language, develops an almost mystic love relationship with language and establishes a new relationship between the poet and the reader of the text, as he creates new forms of relationship between words and their meanings. I want the text to be completely virginal and far removed from everyday usage of words. I would go as far as to say I want it to be contrary to colloquial usage. The tone of my poetry is always somewhat elevated. I situate the words in such a way as to bring out their rarity Trying to conceive the essence of poetry and striving for something which is pure, Elytis renews literary language through a poetic grammar and syntax, which intentionally ignore the restrictions of common language and purify communication in terms of new possibilities to understand and to express reality. The creation of enigmatic words, new meanings and new semantic nuances, the innovative combination of words, the synthesis of subtle phrases, the use of metaphors, metonymies, alliterations lead to an element of surprise which excites the mind and permits one to see the world from a

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different angle, to revolutionary multidimensional associations, and evoke pictures, feelings, emotion, and imagination, while extending in a unique personal way the expressive limits of language, while pushing language to a new level not only of understanding the world but of discovering the very essence of the human nature and of its polysemy.

Since across the centuries, language has acquired a certain ethos, and this ethos entails responsibilities, Elytis attributes to the Greek language, which has been used in poetry for more than 25 centuries, the quality of a moral power, rejects the idea that language is just the mere sum of words, and surpasses the utilitarian understanding of language as simple means of communication. Moreover, as Elytis is convinced that every language elicits a certain content and believes that every language makes a poet express definite things, and the Greek language insists on a noble attitude toward the phenomenon of life, he considers the Greek language a value, which he uses as raw material so as to create a universe free of all constraints, and to shape from the beginning the universe, which responds to that what he describes as his Greekness, and is not a national or local thing, but rather the manifestation of the idea that Greece represents certain values and elements, which can enrich universal spirits everywhere. In this value framework, Elytis develops the major elements of his poetry and determines his attempt to find the true face of Greece. Nature especially sea, the Aegean, as indispensable part of the Hellenic tradition and as a kind of personal

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domain, the sanctity of the senses, an original myth-making mechanism, which personifies abstract ideas, yet without turning them into recognizable figures, and a dominant limpidity transposed from nature into poetry, form a sort of framework like that which holds up a building.

For Elytis, the Aegean is not merely a part of nature, but rather a kind of signature, something very familiar, which possesses all the values of the Aegean world. The poet incorporates in a natural element the values of a civilization in its historic process, and develops a familiarity, which permits him to consider the sea as the heir of the Hellenic tradition. In Elytiss poetry, senses constitute a method of apprehending the world, in the same way that the ancient Greeks did, but the difference is that senses are elevated to a level that is sacred, since they do not necessarily possess erotic connotations for the poet, and they appear harmonized with a notion of sanctity, which only appeared with the arrival of Christianity. Infiltrated by the astonishing limpidity of the Sovereign Sun, Elytiss poetry offers a new identity to Greece, encompassing and harmonizing purely Greek natural, spiritual and moral elements, which form a kind of alphabet with which to express ourselves, and are combined with a genuine word making innocence, leading to a powerful depiction of a world full of light and darkness, of sounds and silence.

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Perceiving language as a mental process with deep intellectual substance, which is not limited to the signification of things, but is rather designated to rediscover and redefine the meanings of things, and, ultimately, to give meaning to the world, Elytis makes the precious choice of a personal interpretation and recreation of the world and asserts with his stance on language his firm conviction that writing is always an experiment. Landscapes of memory: The imagery and collages of Odysseus Elytis Eltyiss poetry has a high pictorial quality, which derives from the imagistic language of the poet, who attempts to discover with his senses and to impress with this visualizing language the physical, mental and emotional phenomena. Forerunner of this strong visual aspect in Elytiss poetry can be considered his fascination, already at a young age, of collage, and his passionate creation of such puzzles, pasting together cutouts from various periodicals, letters of different colored inks, strings, pebbles and wood. After the publication of his first collection, Orientations, Elytis devoted himself exclusively to the imagery of poetry and not to the one of painting. Many years later, in 1966, Elytis returned to pictorial expression and painted several gouache, which reflect the limpidity and freshness of his sunlit poetry, while during the seven years (1967 1974) of the dictatorship in Greece Elytis experimented again with collage and created a series of about forty works. Kimon Friar roughly divides Elytiss collages into two groups: those that are abstract and modern, and those that are poetically and Hellenically centered, with common characteristic an opposition to the contorted and the entangled and a tendency toward the Greek and the composed. With these collages, Elytis associates Greece, the known and recognizable land, with a certain mystery that constitutes his original and authentic contribution to surrealist poetry. The amalgamation of times in the coexistence of past and present, the harmonious combination of archaic and modern elements, give shape to a new identity of things, which are now identified not as symbols but as self-existent entities in a dream-like environment.

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In the creation Votive Offering (1973), the cubical houses of the Aegean island of Skyros are positioned in the middle of a deep blue sea and surrounded by a flat sky. The original topography of the island a mountain with the village on its slope has disappeared, and only rocks are visible against the houses. On the left side, an angel, a typical figure of Byzantine iconography, emerges from the sea, extending a hand as in a votive offering, which may be the cluster of seashells and reddish flowers. The synthesis is framed by two colorful stripes of Greek folk embroidery, while the Byzantine carved woodwork completes the sea landscape.

Eleni P. Moutsaki Embassy of Greece in Beijing Press & Communication Office

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December 8th, 1979. Nobel Lecture by Odysseus Elytis

May I be permitted, I ask you, to speak in the name of luminosity and transparency. The space I have lived in and where I have been able to fulfill myself is defined by these two states. States that I have also perceived as being identified in me with the need to express myself. It is good, it is right that a contribution be made to art, from that which is assigned to each individual by his personal experience and the virtues of his language. Even more so, since the times are dismal and we should have the widest possible view of things. I am not speaking of the common and natural capacity of perceiving objects in all their detail, but of the power of the metaphor to only retain their essence, and to bring them to such a state of purity that their metaphysical significance appears like a revelation. I am thinking here of the manner in which the sculptors of the Cycladic period used their material, to the point of carrying it beyond itself. I am also thinking of the Byzantine icon painters, who succeeded, only by using pure color, to suggest the "divine". It is just such an intervention in the real, both penetrating and metamorphosing, which has always been, it seems to me, the lofty vocation of poetry. Not limiting itself to what is, but stretching itself to what can be. It is true that this step has not always been received with respect. Perhaps the collective neuroses did not permit it. Or perhaps because utilitarianism did not authorize men to keep their eyes open as much as was necessary. Beauty, Light, it happens that people regard them as obsolete, as insignificant. And yet! The inner step required by the approach of the Angel's form is, in my opinion, infinitely more painful than the other, which gives birth to Demons of all kinds.

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Certainly, there is an enigma. Certainly, there is a mystery. But the mystery is not a stage piece turning to account the play of light and shadow only to impress us. It is what continues to be a mystery, even in bright light. It is only then that it acquires that refulgence that captivates and which we call Beauty. Beauty that is an open path--the only one perhaps--towards that unknown part of ourselves, towards that which surpasses us. There, this could be yet another definition of poetry: the art of approaching that which surpasses us. Innumerable secret signs, with which the universe is studded and which constitute so many syllables of an unknown language, urge us to compose words, and with words, phrases whose deciphering puts us at the threshold of the deepest truth. In the final analysis, where is truth? In the erosion and death we see around us, or in this propensity to believe that the world is indestructible and eternal? I know, it is wise to avoid redundancies. The cosmogonic theories that have succeeded each other through the years have not missed using and abusing them. They have clashed among themselves, they have had their moment of glory, then they have been erased. But the essential has remained. It remains. The poetry that raises itself when rationalism has laid down its arms, takes its relieving troops to advance into the forbidden zone, thus proving that it is still the less consumed by erosion. It assures, in the purity of its form, the safeguard of those given facts through which life becomes a viable task. Without it and its vigilance, these given facts would be lost in the obscurity of consciousness, just as algae become indistinct in the ocean depths. That is why we have a great need of transparency. To clearly perceive the knots of this thread running throughout the centuries and aiding us to remain upright on this earth. These knots, these ties, we see them distinctly, from Heraclitus to Plato and from Plato to Jesus. Having reached us in various forms they tell us the same thing: that it is in the inside of this world that the other world is contained, that it is with the elements of this world that the other world is recombined, the hereafter, that second reality situated above the one where we live unnaturally. It is a question of a reality to which we have a total right, and only our incapacity makes us unworthy of it. It is not a coincidence that in healthy times, Beauty is identified with Good, and Good with the Sun. To the extent that consciousness purifies itself and is filled with light, its dark portions retract and disappear, leaving empty spaces--just as in the laws of physics-are filled by the elements of the opposite import. Thus what results of this rests on the two aspects, I mean the "here" and the "hereafter". Did not Heraclitus speak of a harmony of opposed tensions? It is of no importance whether it is Apollo or Venus, Christ or the Virgin who incarnate and personalize the need we have to see materialized what we experience as an intuition. What is important is the breath of immortality that penetrates us at that moment. In my humble opinion, Poetry should, beyond all doctrinal argumentation, permit this breath. 41

Here I must refer to Hlderlin, that great poet who looked at the gods of Olympus and Christ in the same manner. The stability he gave a kind of vision continues to be inestimable. And the extent of what he has revealed for us is immense. I would even say it is terrifying. It is what incites us to cry out--at a time when the pain now submerging us was just beginning--: "What good are poets in a time of poverty". Wozu Dichter in drftiger Zeit? For mankind, times were always drftig, unfortunately. But poetry has never, on the other hand, missed its vocation. These are two facts that will never cease to accompany our earthly destiny, the first serving as the counter-weight to the other. How could it be otherwise? It is through the Sun that the night and the stars are perceptible to us. Yet let us note, with the ancient sage, that if it passes its bounds the Sun becomes "uBpls". For life to be possible, we have to keep a correct distance to the allegorical Sun, just as our planet does from the natural Sun. We formerly erred through ignorance. We go wrong today through the extent of our knowledge. In saying this I do not wish to join the long list of censors of our technological civilization. Wisdom as old as the country from which I come has taught me to accept evolution, to digest progress "with its bark and its pits". But then, what becomes of Poetry? What does it represent in such a society? This is what I reply: poetry is the only place where the power of numbers proves to be nothing. Your decision this year to honor, in my person, the poetry of a small country, reveals the relationship of harmony linking it to the concept of gratuitous art, the only concept that opposes nowadays the all-powerful position acquired by the quantitative esteem of values. Referring to personal circumstances would be a breach of good manners. Praising my home, still more unsuitable. Nevertheless it is sometimes indispensable, to the extent that such interferences assist in seeing a certain state of things more clearly. This is the case today. Dear friends, it has been granted to me to write in a language that is spoken only by a few million people. But a language spoken without interruption, with very few differences, throughout more than two thousand five hundred years. This apparently surprising spatial-temporal distance is found in the cultural dimensions of my country. Its spatial area is one of the smallest; but its temporal extension is infinite. If I remind you of this, it is certainly not to derive some kind of pride from it, but to show the difficulties a poet faces when he must make use, to name the things dearest to him, of the same words as did Sappho, for example, or Pindar, while being deprived of the audience they had and which then extended to all of human civilization. If language were not such a simple means of communication there would not be any problem. But it happens, at times, that it is also an instrument of "magic". In addition, in the course of centuries, language acquires a certain way of being. It becomes a lofty speech. And this way of being entails obligations. Let us not forget either that in each of these twenty-five centuries and without any interruption, poetry has been written in Greek. It is this collection of given facts which makes the great weight of tradition that this instrument lifts. Modern Greek poetry gives 42

an expressive image of this. The sphere formed by this poetry shows, one could say, two poles: at one of these poles is Dionysios Solomos, who, before Mallarm appeared in European literature, managed to formulate, with the greatest rigor and coherency, the concept of pure poetry: to submit sentiment to intelligence, ennoble expression, mobilize all the possibilities of the linguistic instrument by orienting oneself to the miracle. At the other pole is Cavafy, who like T. S. Eliot reaches, by eliminating all form of turgidity, the extreme limit of concision and the most rigorously exact expression. Between these two poles, and more or less close to one or the other, our other great poets move: Kostis Palamas, Angelos Sikelianos, Nikos Kazantzakis, George Seferis. Such is, rapidly and schematically drawn, the picture of neo-Hellenic poetic discourse. We who have followed have had to take over the lofty precept which has been bequeathed to us and adapt it to contemporary sensibility. Beyond the limits of technique, we have had to reach a synthesis, which, on the one hand, assimilated the elements of Greek tradition and, on the other, the social and psychological requirements of our time. In other words, we had to grasp today's European-Greek in all its truth and turn that truth to account. I do not speak of successes, I speak of intentions, efforts. Orientations have their significance in the investigation of literary history. But how can creation develop freely in these directions when the conditions of life, in our time, annihilate the creator? And how can a cultural community be created when the diversity of languages raises an unsurpassable obstacle? We know you and you know us through the 20 or 30 per cent that remains of a work after translation. This holds even more true for all those of us who, prolonging the furrow traced by Solomos, expect a miracle from discourse and that a spark flies from between two words with the right sound and in the right position. No. We remain mute, incommunicable. We are suffering from the absence of a common language. And the consequences of this absence can be seen--I do not believe I am exaggerating--even in the political and social reality of our common homeland, Europe. We say--and make the observation each day--that we live in a moral chaos. And this at a moment when--as never before--the allocation of that which concerns our material existence is done in the most systematic manner, in an almost military order, with implacable controls. This contradiction is significant. Of two parts of the body, when one is hypertrophic, the other atrophies. A praise-worthy tendency, encouraging the peoples of Europe to unite, is confronted today with the impossibility of harmonization of the atrophied and hypertrophic parts of our civilization. Our values do not constitute a common language. For the poet--this may appear paradoxical but it is true--the only common language he 43

still can use is his sensations. The manner in which two bodies are attracted to each other and unite has not changed for millennia. In addition, it has not given rise to any conflict, contrary to the scores of ideologies that have bloodied our societies and have left us with empty hands. When I speak of sensations, I do not mean those, immediately perceptible, on the first or second level. I mean those which carry us to the extreme edge of ourselves. I also mean the "analogies of sensations" that are formed in our spirits. For all art speaks through analogy. A line, straight or curved, a sound, sharp or lowpitched, translate a certain optical or acoustic contact. We all write good or bad poems to the extent that we live or reason according to the good or bad meaning of the term. An image of the sea, as we find it in Homer, comes to us intact. Rimbaud will say "a sea mixed with sun". Except he will add: "that is eternity." A young girl holding a myrtle branch in Archilochus survives in a painting by Matisse. And thus the Mediterranean idea of purity is made more tangible to us. In any case, is the image of a virgin in Byzantine iconography so different from that of her secular sisters? Very little is needed for the light of this world to be transformed into supernatural clarity, and inversely. One sensation inherited from the Ancients and another bequeathed by the Middle Ages give birth to a third, one that resembles them both, as a child does its parents. Can poetry survive such a path? Can sensations, at the end of this incessant purification process, reach a state of sanctity? They will return then, as analogies, to graft themselves on the material world and to act on it. It is not enough to put our dreams into verse. It is too little. It is not enough to politicize our speech. It is too much. The material world is really only an accumulation of materials. It is for us to show ourselves to be good or bad architects, to build Paradise or Hell. This is what poetry never ceases affirming to us--and particularly in these drftiger times--just this: that in spite of everything our destiny lies in our hands. I have often tried to speak of solar metaphysics. I will not try today to analyse how art is implicated in such a conception. I will keep to one single and simple fact: the language of the Greeks, like a magic instrument, has--as a reality or a symbol--intimate relations with the Sun. And that Sun does not only inspire a certain attitude of life, and hence the primeval sense to the poem. It penetrates the composition, the structure, and-- to use a current terminology-- the nucleus from which is composed the cell we call the poem. It would be a mistake to believe that it is a question of a return to the notion of pure form. The sense of form, as the West has bequeathed it to us, is a constant attainment, represented by three or four models. Three or four moulds, one could say, where it was suitable to pour the most anomalous material at any price. Today that is no longer conceivable. I was one of the first in Greece to break those ties. What interested me, obscurely at the beginning, then more and more consciously, was the edification of that material according to an architectural model that varied each time. To understand this there is no need to refer to the wisdom of the Ancients who conceived the Parthenons. It is enough to evoke the humble builders of our houses and of our chapels in the Cyclades, finding on each occasion the best solution. Their solutions. Practical and 44

beautiful at the same time, so that in seeing them Le Corbusier could only admire and bow. Perhaps it is this instinct that woke in me when, for the first time, I had to face a great composition like "Axion Esti." I understood then that without giving the work the proportions and perspective of an edifice, it would never reach the solidity I wished. I followed the example of Pindar or of the Byzantine Romanos Melodos who, in each of their odes or canticles, invented a new mode for each occasion. I saw that the determined repetition, at intervals, of certain elements of versification effectively gave to my work that multifaceted and symmetrical substance which was my plan. But then is it not true that the poem, thus surrounded by elements that gravitate around it, is transformed into a little Sun? This perfect correspondence, which I thus find obtained with the intended contents, is, I believe, the poet's most lofty ideal. To hold the Sun in one's hands without being burned, to transmit it like a torch to those following, is a painful act but, I believe, a blessed one. We have need of it. One day the dogmas that hold men in chains will be dissolved before a consciousness so inundated with light that it will be one with the Sun, and it will arrive on those ideal shores of human dignity and liberty.

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Manuscript of Odysseus Elytis, From Close By

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References
The poems of Odysseus Elytis (Edited by Ikaros Publishing Company) Orientations, 1935 Sun the First, 1943 Song Heroic and Mourning for the Lost Second Lieutenant of the Albanian Campaign, 1945 The Axion Esti, 1959 Six and One Remorses for the Sky, 1960 The Light Tree and the Fourteenth Beauty, 1971 The Sovereign Sun, 1971 The Monogram, 1972 Rhos of Eros, 1972 Stepchildren, 1974 Maria Nefeli, 1978 Three poems under a flag of convenience, 1982 Diary of an Invisible April, 1984 The Little Seafarer, 1985 The Elegies of Jutting Rock, 1991 West of Sorrow, 1995 From Close By, 1998 Jeffery Carson and Nikos Sarris, The Collected Poems of Odysseus Elytis. Revised and Expanded Edition. Translated by Jeffrey Carson and Nikos Sarris, Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1997 Olga Broumas, Eros, Eros, Eros. Selected and Last Poems by Odysseas Elytis. Translated from the Greek by Olga Broumas, Port Townsend Washington: Copper Canyon Press, 1998 Edmund Keely and George Savidis, The Axion Esti. Translated and Annotated by Edmund Keely and George Savidis, Pittsburgh and London: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1974 Tassos Lignadis, The Axion Esti by Odysseus Elytis, Athens: Library of Moraitis School, 1971 Marinos Pourgouris, Mediterranean Modernisms: The poetic metaphysics of Odysseus Elytis, Cyprus: University of Cyprus, 47

Mario Vitti, Odysseus Elytis, Athens: Ermis, 1984 Mario Vitti (ed.), Introduction to Elytiss Poetry, Irakleio: Crete University Press, 1999 Museum of Contemporary Art, Andros, Odysseus Elytis, Andros: 1992 Christoforos Charalambakis, The language of Odysseas Elytis, Speech in the European University Cyprus, Nicosia, March 2011 Andonis Decavalles, Time versus Eternity, World Literature Today, Vol.62, No.1 (Winter,1988), pp. 22-32 Andonis Decavalles, The Collected Poems of Odysseus Elytis: A Commentary Review, World Literature Today, Vol.72, No.1 (Winter,1998), pp. 79-82 Ivar Ivask and Astrid Ivask, Odysseus Elytis on His Poetry, Books Abroad, Vol.49, No.4, (Autumn, 1975), pp.631-645 Kimon Friar, The Imagery and Collages of Odysseus Elytis, Books Abroad, Vol.49, No.4, (Autumn, 1975), pp.703-711 Lawrence Durrell, The Poetry of Elytis, Books Abroad, Vol.49, No.4, (Autumn, 1975), p. 660 Robert Jouanny and Seymour Feiler, Aspects of Surrealism in the Works of Odysseus Elytis, Books Abroad, Vol.49, No.4, (Autumn, 1975), pp.685-689 Newspaper KATHIMERINI, Volume on Odysseus Elytis, March 24th, 1996 Newspaper , Volume on Odysseus Elytis, May 2011 www.poetryinternational.org, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/odysseus-alepoudelis-elytis http://www.philology.gr/subjects/nef_elytis.html http://www.babiniotis.gr/wmt/webpages/index.php?lid=1&pid=7&catid=M

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