The Sovereign Sun

Odysseus Elytis (1911-1996) was born on Crete. With Seferis and the 'Generation of the Thirties', he introduced French Surrealism into Greek poetry. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1979. The Sovereign Sun begins with his brilliantly sensuous early poems. It has large selections from his master work, Axion Esti (1959), and includes the whole of his Heroic and Elegiac Song for the Lost Second Lieutenant of the Albanian Campaign (1945). '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