When Odysseus Elytis was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, the Swedish Academy's citation singled out The Axion Esti, first published in 1959, as 'one of twentieth-century literature's concentrated and richly faceted poems.'
In awarding Odysseus Elytis the 1979 Nobel Prize in literature, the Swedish Academy praised him "for his poetry, which, against the background of Greek tradition, depicts with sensuous strength and intellectual clearsightedness modern man's struggle for freedom and creativeness." Throughout his long career as a poet, Elytis (1911--1996) remained true to his vision of a poetry that addresses the power of language and connects the history and mythology of Greece to the physical world and to 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 a more universally human -- consciousness. Originally published in 1997, The Collected Poems of Odysseus Elytis, translated into English by Jeffrey Carson and Nikos Sarris, was the first complete collection of Elytis's poems in any language. Included in this landmark volume were Elytis's early poems, influenced in equal parts by surrealism and the natural world Song Heroic and Mourning for the Lost Second Lieutenant of the Albanian Campaign, his epic poem connecting Greece's -- and his own -- Second World War experience to the myth of the eternal Greek hero his most ambitious work, The Axion Esti; and his mature poetry, from Maria Nephele to West of Sorrow. For this expanded new edition, Carson and Sarris have added sixty free verse and prose poems first published in Greek in the posthumous 1998 volume From Close By, as well as a set of song lyrics, The Rhos of Eros, and a cantata, The Sovereign Sun, previously omitted. All have been translated with the same care and elegance as the rest of Elytis's oeuvre, brilliantly rendering into English the Greek poet's lyrical voice and the richness of his diction
A collection of eleven essays provides an assessment of the influence the Aegean world has exerted upon Greek art and civilization throughout the ages. The eleven authors, all leading experts in their fields of history, literature and art, highlight important aspects of the Aegean world in texts that combine up-to-date scholarship with a lively re-evaluation of philosophy, architecture, sculpture painting, etc. The book's most engaging quality, however, is the manner in which it attempts to convey a vivid image of the Aegean Sea and the civilization that flourished on its islands. Illustrated throughout with unique, often full page aerial photographs and drawings, the volume brilliantly captures the essence of Greek civilization and constitutes a lively introduction to the history of the Aegean world. It also provides a comprehensive study and evaluation of its many aspects and succeeds in establishing it as a point of reference for Western culture.
A selection from the work of one of modern Greece's poets. It is drawn from various periods of his career and traces his development from early surrealism, in which he transforms French influence into a distinct personal voice and mythology, through the dramatic style of The Axion Esti with its blend of spirituality and earthiness.
Collected here are the two speeches Elytis gave on his acceptance of the 1979 Nobel Prize for Literature, which are still strikingly relevant today. He addresses a hypertrophic and atrophic Europe in moral chaos, with as many coexisting values as languages.
Odysseas Elytis' Werk ist im deutschen Sprachraum vor allem durch die Suhrkamp-Bände bekannt. Der fünfte Band "Ox petra" (1991) gilt als Höhepunkt seines Schaffens und thematisiert einen positiven Tod, der mit Unendlichkeit verbunden ist. Zudem enthält er Elegien, die sich mit der Übersetzung des Nicht-Sagbaren beschäftigen.
