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Greek poet, essayist, and diplomat who won the Nobel
Prize for Literature in 1963. Seferis is considered to be the
most distinguished Greek poet of the pre-war generation. In his
work Seferis combines the language of everyday speech with traditional
poetic forms and rhythms. Seferis spent much of his life outside
Greece in diplomatic service. A Recurrent theme in his poetry is
exile and nostalgia for the Mediterranean and his birthplace, Smyrna.
"Your music is this life
you wasted.
You could regain it if you wish,
if you fasten to this indifferent thing
which casts you back
there where you set out."
(from Summer Solstice, 1966)
George Seferis (Georgios Seferiades) was born in Izmir (formerly
Smyrna), Turkey. His father was a lawyer and his mother the daughter
of a prosperous landowner. Smyrna, an ancient city on the Aegean
Sea, is one of the cities claiming to be birthplace of Homer. It
became a major source of inspiration for Seferis during his career
as a poet. Seferis started to compose poems at the age of 14. In
1914 the family moved to Athens, where he graduated from the First
Classical Gymnasium in 1917.
From 1918 Seferis reluctantly studied law at the Sorbonne in Paris,
completing his doctoral requirements in 1924. During these years
he continued to write verse and familiarized himself with contemporary
French poetry. When the Turks retook Smyrna in the early 1920s,
Seferis felt he was in exile and decided to enter the diplomatic
service. He travelled to London to perfect his English.
Upon graduating he obtained a post in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
He served in London as a vice-consul and as consul in Albania in
the 1930s. In London he discovered the poetry of T.S. Eliot, whose
style greatly influenced him. His first volume of poetry, STROFI
(The Turning Point), appeared in 1931 in a private edition. In it
Seferis turns his back on the dominating rhetorical tone and uses
sophisticated rhymes and imagery. In The Turning Point Seferis
shows his deep acquaintance with symbolism, as in his second collection,
I STERNA (1932).
In the following collections Seferis leaves lyricism behind and
assimilates what he had learned from Cavafy, Eliot, and Ezra Pound.
In MYTHISTORIMA (1935) Seferis attained a style that greatly influenced
the development of Greek verse, but he also bridged the gap between
tradition and modern expression. Seferis uses the vernacular, the
language spoken by literate Greeks, and combines his own experiences
with history. Most of the characters are taken from Homer's Odyssey.
Mythistorima's twenty-four sections are narrated by travellers
who are at once present-day exiles and ancient, Homeric figures.
"We were searching to rediscover the first seed so that the
ancient drama could begin again."
(from Mythistorima, 1935)
In 1941 Seferis married Maria Zannou, whom he had met on vacation
in 1936. During WW II Seferis accompanied Greek government officials
into exile, living in Crete, Egypt, South Africa, and Italy. After
the war he held diplomatic posts in Lebanon (1953-57), Syria, Jordan,
and Iraq, and served as the Greek ambassador in London from 1957
to 1962. "Wherever I travel, Greece wounds me." (1936) Seferis's
first publication in English, The King of Assine and Other Poems,
appeared in 1948. During the Cyprus crisis in the 1950s, he contributed
to the negotiations that resulted in the London Agreement (1959),
making Cyprus independent of British rule.
Seferis's years as a diplomat in several countries made him a modern
Odysseus. The theme of the wandering was further developed in the
persona of Stratis Thalassinos in three collections, Logbooks,
written in Albania, South Africa and in Italy (1940-65). The last
collection, Logbook 3, is dedicated to the people of Cyprus.
Seferis retired from governmental service in 1962 and settled in
Athens. In 1969 he declared his opposition to the Papadopoulos dictatorship
after the military coup of 1967, and became popular with the younger
generation in Greece. Seferis also expressed his fears about the
triumph of commercial culture and once recalled his dream in which
the Parthenon was auctioned off to become an advertisement, "every
column a gigantic tube of toothpaste." Seferis died on September
20, 1971. Thousands of young people escorted his coffin, to honour
him as a spokesman for freedom. His widow cut off her hair and flung
it into his grave. "I am fully conscious that we do not live
in a time when the poet can believe that fame awaits him, but in
a time of oblivion. This doesn't make me less dedicated to my beliefs,
I am more so."
For further reading: The Marble Threshing Floor by P.
Sherrard (1956); Modern Greek Poetry by K. Friar (1973); Love
and the Symbolic Journey in the Poetry of Cavafy, Eliot and Seferis
by C. Capri-Karka (1982); My Brother George Seferis by J. Tsatsos
(1982), Form,Cycle, Infinity: Landscape Imagery in the Poetry
of Robert Frost and George Seferis by Rachel Hadas (1985); War
in the Poetry of George Seferis by K. Kapre-Karka (1986); George
Seferis by R. Beaton (1991) - Note: Seferis translated
T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land into Greek and introduced also Ezra
Pound to his countrymen. As Odysseus Elytis (Nobel Prize in 1970)
he published poems in the 1930s in the literary review Ta Nea
Grammata.
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