Description
Odysseas Elytis
Step-Poems
Οδυσσέας Ελύτης
Τα Ετεροθαλή – Ta Eterothali
First Edition, First Printing one of Elytis’s masterpieces
Hand signed and dedicated by the Author in separate card with a 4 line poem!
Printed by IKAROS in Athens in 1974
8vo, Pages 59
Original soft binding
Frontispiece by Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Gikas
Text: Greek
Odysseas Elytis pen name of Odysseas Alepoudellis, 1911 – 1996) was a Greek poet, man of letters, essayist and translator, regarded as the definitive exponent of romantic modernism in Greece and the world. He is one of the most praised poets of the second half of the twentieth century, with his Axion Esti regarded as a monument of contemporary poetry. In 1979, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Source: Wikipedia
He has a romantic and lyrical mind, which deploys a metaphysic of complete intellectual sensuality-the rocks, the islands, the blue Greek sea, the winds; they are at once “real” and also “signatures” in the alchemical sense. He makes his magic with them, and it is peculiarly Greek magic that he makes. His poems are spells, and they conjure up that eternal Greek world which has haunted and continues to haunt the European consciousness with its hints of a perfection that always remains a possibility. The Greek poet aims his heart and his gift directly at the sublime – for nothing else will do. How lucky, too, that he has found in Kimon Friar a translator who can transplant his poetry into English, so that its freshness and spontaneity still shock and delight.’ – Lawrence Durrell