Giorgos Seferis

Seferis wrote once this famous line: "once the boat fetches the tourists, the beach is given back to the wind."

Greece as the land of tourists or of those who love this land and feel all the pain in knowing fully well what has happening to it over centuries. There are layers of pain, layers of well known and not so known incidences which decry a landscape at times too beautiful to be put into words. That too is a part of the pain, a pain not to be answered by staying only silent.

Seferis, the diplomat who represented Greece throughout the world, would also frequently visit Cyprus. Christian Enzensberger in his comments to the collection of poems called simply 'Poesie' would say he representated a land which he was still searching for. Coming from Smyrni, today Izmir, it was a matter of showing as did Marie Iliou what happened to a city which did not know to where it belonged to until the tragedy in Minor Asia unfolded and the city was burned in 1921. It happened as so often due to instigations which prompted the Greek elite to make a false calculation and to venture forth into something which transformed a simple reality into a tragedy. There was no more a sense of adventure as this longing for new experiences on the threshold of the 21st century seems not as strong as the search for some stability, for something unchanging, for a continuity in a sea of discontinuity. It would mean also how to make something compatible in a world full of incompatible idioms to characterize a fixed knowledge, if only to uphold against the inner storm created by much pain. It was after all Seferis who would say wherever he goes Greece is with him as he feels this pain.

HF 11.8.2013

At the time when Seferis received the Nobel prize, a short biograpical note was compiled:

Giorgos Seferis - Biographical

Giorgos Seferis was born in Smyrna, Asia Minor, in 1900. He attended school in Smyrna and finished his studies at the Gymnasium in Athens. When his family moved to Paris in 1918, Seferis studied law at the University of Paris and became interested in literature. He returned to Athens in 1925 and was admitted to the Royal Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the following year. This was the beginning of a long and successful diplomatic career, during which he held posts in England (1931-1934) and Albania (1936-1938 ). During the Second World War, Seferis accompanied the Free Greek Government in exile to Crete, Egypt, South Africa, and Italy, and returned to liberated Athens in 1944. He continued to serve in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and held diplomatic posts in Ankara (1948-1950) and London (1951-1953). He was appointed minister to Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq (1953-1956), and was Royal Greek Ambassador to the United Kingdom from 1957 to 1961, the last post before his retirement in Athens. Seferis received many honours and prizes, among them honorary doctoral degrees from the universities of Cambridge (1960), Oxford (1964), Salonika (1964), and Princeton (1965).

His wide travels provide the backdrop and colour for much of Seferis's writing, which is filled with the themes of alienation, wandering, and death. Seferis's early poetry consists of Strophe (Turning Point), 1931, a group of rhymed Lyrics strongly influenced by the Symbolists, and E Sterna (The Cistern), 1932, conveying an image of man's most deeply felt being which lies hidden from, and ignored by, the everyday world. His mature poetry, in which one senses an awareness of the presence of the past and particularly of Greece's great past as related to her present, begins with Mythistorema (Mythistorema), 1935, a series of twenty-four short poems which translate the Odyssean myths into modern idiom. In Tetradio Gymnasmaton (Book of Exercises), 1940, Emerologio Katastromatos (Logbook I), 1940, Emerologio Katastromatos B (Logbook II), 1944, Kihle (Thrush), 1947, and Emerologio Katastromatos C (Logbook III), 1955, Seferis is preoccupied with the themes he developed in Mythistorema, using Homer's Odyssey as his symbolic source; however, in "The King of Asine" (in Logbook I), considered by many critics his finest poem, the source is a single reference in the Iliad to this all-but-forgotten king. The recent book of poetry, Tria Krypha Poiemata (Three Secret Poems), 1966, consists of twenty-eight short lyric pieces verging on the surrealistic.

In addition to poetry, Seferis has published a book of essays, Dokimes (Essays), 1962, translations of works by T.S. Eliot, and a collection of translations from American, English, and French poets entitled Antigrafes (Copies), 1965. Seferis's collected poems (1924-1955) have appeared both in a Greek edition (Athens, 1965) and in an American one with translations en face (Princeton, 1967)."

From: Nobel Lectures, Literature 1901-1967, Editor Horst Frenz, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1969

Source:

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1963/seferis-bio.html

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Giorgos Seferis

Giorgos Seferis - Biographical