| Product Summary | | Format: Paperback | | ISBN: 9780822953180 | | Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press | | Publish Date: 5/7/2007 | | Buy.com Sku: 36286578 | | Item#: BJULW6 | | Dimensions (in Inches) 9.25H x 6.25L x 0.25T |
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| | | "The Axion Esti" is probably the most widely read volume of verse to have appeared in Greece since World War II and remains a classic today. Those who follow the music of Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis have been especially drawn to Odysseus Elytis's work, his prose is widely considered a mirror to the revolutionary music of Theodorakis. The "autobiographical" elements are constantly colored by allusion to the history of Greece, thus, the poems express a contemporary consciousness fully resonant with those echoes of the past that have served most to shape the modern Greek experience.
Annotation:
The reputation of Nobel laureate Odysseus Elytis rests largely on his most ambitious work, AXION ESTI, a grand symphony in verse. Broken into three main sections, "The Genesis," "The Passion," and "The Gloria," the poem is at once an autobiography, a reflection on Greek history, and a mythopoeic meditation on spirituality. "The Genesis," with its loose poetic structure and incantatory refrains, conflates the dawning of the narrator's consciousness with the advent of creation. Darkening clouds appear in "The Passion"--the longest section of the poem--in the form of Elytis's experiences during World War II. The chaos of warfare is reflected in this section's ever-shifting prosody, which veers from rigid formal structures to prose poetry. Rich with allusions to Homer and Greek Orthodox teaching, this surreal experience leads the narrator back to tranquility in "The Gloria," a hymn of peace and redemption that echoes the prelapsarian tones of "The Genesis."
| Author Bio| Odysseus Elytis | | Saddled from birth with the name of Homer's most famous hero, it is only right that, when searching for a suitable pseudonym for his writing life, he landed on "Elytis," a fusion of the Greek words for freedom, hope, and Hellas--his incessant optimism and his fundamentally Grecian worldview are two of the characteristics which define his poetry. A robust, athletic Greek youth, Elytis fell in love with French surrealists, such as Eluard and Breton, who offered him a vocabulary and a technique for capturing the awesome sensuality of the life and landscape of Greece. Indeed, his early collections, such as ORIENTATIONS and SUN THE FIRST, read like a sun-drenched, Aegean-sea variation on the bleaker Freudian associations of the French poets. His intensely erotic and elemental outlook darkened considerably he was compelled to join in the Greek resistance against Mussolini's forces, as his HEROIC AND ELEGIAC SONG FOR THE LOST SECOND LIEUTENANT OF THE ALBANIAN CAMPAIGN-a song of himself--testifies. Following this work, his output was uncharacteristically slim for about a decade, until THE AXION ESTI arrived in 1959. This ambitious long poem is his crowning achievement, a poetic work comparable to Pound's CANTOS, Eliot's FOUR QUARTETS, and Williams's PATERSON in its indelible imagery and structural complexity. Divided into three parts, the poem is at once an autobiography, a summing up and a fusion of Greek literary styles, and a quasi-religious history of Greece--its sources range from Homeric myth to the famed memoirs of the Greek General Makriyannis, not to mention the cadences of the Greek Orthodox Liturgy. The success of this work earned Elytis the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1979, and far from hindering him, sparked the wildly prolific decades of the 1960s and 1970s, when he created such masterpieces as THE SOVREIGN SUN, SIX PLUS ONE REMORSES FOR THE SKY, and MARIA NEFELI. Along with George Seferis, he is the premier Greek poet of the 20th Century, and one of the most original voices in modern poetry. |
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