What I Love: Selected Poems

by Odysseas Elytis, Olga Broumas

Elytis is a poet capable of seeing the Beautiful even in the face of enormous tragedy. He is a poet of complete engagement, one who sees the "other side" beyond the surface of things. Rather than speaking of answers to mysterious riddles, Elytis reveals the Mystery itself.
Odysseas Elytis's first book was published at the outset of World War II (1940). It showed the influence of French surrealist technique,but transformed surrealism into a distinctly personal voice and offered a vital personal mythology. Elytis, immersed in Greek historyand mythology, prefers the mechanism of mythology to the figures -moral awareness influenced by the Modernists Kavafis and Seferis,and like them, Elytis makes use of the old "pure" katharevousa anddemotic Greek, also evoking a powerful sense of place through carefuluse of regional dialect. He is among the most musical of contemporarypoets.
Olga Broumas has addressed her translations to that music as well, achieving such sonority that she often reads the poems in both languages, one after another, alternating lines, without interrupting thesteady movement of the music.

Genres: Poetry, Greece

96 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 1986

About the author

Greek poet Odysseas Alepoudellis Elytis received the Nobel Prize for literature.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odyssea...

Reviews

[Edita · Rating 5 out of 5]

Before becoming a taste of loneliness you wrap
the thyme shrubs in memories.

[Steven Godin · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's so lovely when the mind clouds — there heroes kill
make-believe like in the movies
you get your fill of blood; at the hour when the real thing
gurgles down the stairs
you touch a finger and wake the curse
the Queen with spiders
her eyes unbeaten and full of dark
shorn and ugly I pasture swine
eons now outside the walls
I wait for the message — the first cock in Hell
something like the saxophone with a heavenly gloss
like young girls running riding dragons of rubber
Earth only now revealed how great in reality.
Zeus thunders
blackness
Zeus thunders
neither defeat nor victory this.

Let's risk something else, we, the interred.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a good sampling of the Nobel Laureate's work in Greek and English. One of my favourite poems, Sun The First, starts the book. Written in 1943 during the Nazi Occupation, the beauty and hope rings true during a bleak time. It is followed by the beautiful The Hyacinth Symphony and covers an Ode to Picasso and Villa Natasha, which was published in 1973 with illustrations by Picasso and Matisse. The final poem is one of his last, Maria Nefele, written in exile during the military junta. There is a tidy essay on his work at the back of his collection and helps to clarify his "surrealist" style.

As noted in the essay, he was immensely popular in Greece but when it was pointed out that poetry doesn't sell in America, he responded, " It doesn't matter. A realmpoet needs an audience of three. And since any poet worth his salt has two intelligent friends, he spends his whole life searching for the third reader."

So poetic but true.

[Mills College Library]

889 E52w