Birthdays: Elytis gazed upward and said, "Fantastic truths perish slower... Sappho's moon will survive the moon of Armstrong. Different computations are necessary."

Odysseas Elytis (1911-1996)

Poet, essayist

Recipient, The Nobel Prize for Literature, 1979

In an interview with Ivar Ivask for Books Abroad, Elytis summarized his life's work: "I consider poetry a source of innocence full of revolutionary forces. It is my mission to direct these forces against a world my conscience cannot accept, precisely so as to bring that world through continual metamorphoses more in harmony with my dreams. I am referring here to a contemporary kind of magic whose mechanism leads to the discovery of our true reality. It is for this reason that I believe, to the point of idealism, that I am moving in a direction which has never been attempted until now. In the hope of obtaining a freedom from all constraint and the justice which could be identified with absolute light, I am an idolater who, without wanting to do so, arrives at Christian sainthood."

He was born on Crete, and as an adult- having decided to be a poet- he changed his surname to avoid associations with his wealthy family. Elytis studied accountancy and wrote poems; his first collection, published when he was 25, won praise as a marker of a new style in Greek verse.

His work was interrupted by a call-up to military service. In World War II he fought the Italians in Albania, rising to the rank of second lieutenant. After the war he spent four years in Paris, studying at the Sorbonne and moving in the circles of the avant garde. His work picked up a whiff of surrealism along the way, and on his return to Greece he published regularly and became a figure in Greek arts and media administration.

Elytis returned for Paris for a number of years after the Greek military coup of 1967. In 1979 he was lifted from almost complete international obscurity by the Nobel Prize Academy, which awarded him its literature prize, “against the background of Greek tradition, depicts with sensuous strength and intellectual clear-sightedness modern man's struggle for freedom and creativeness". He accepted it in behalf of all of Greek poetry and culture:

Dear friends, it has been granted to me to write in a language that is spoken only by a few million people. But a language spoken without interruption, with very few differences, throughout more than two thousand five hundred years. This apparently surprising spatial-temporal distance is found in the cultural dimensions of my country. Its spatial area is one of the smallest; but its temporal extension is infinite. If I remind you of this, it is certainly not to derive some kind of pride from it, but to show the difficulties a poet faces when he must make use, to name the things dearest to him, of the same words as did Sappho, for example, or Pindar, while being deprived of the audience they had and which then extended to all of human civilization.

If language were not such a simple means of communication there would not be any problem. But it happens, at times, that it is also an instrument of "magic". In addition, in the course of centuries, language acquires a certain way of being. It becomes a lofty speech. And this way of being entails obligations.

Let us not forget either that in each of these twenty-five centuries and without any interruption, poetry has been written in Greek. It is this collection of given facts which makes the great weight of tradition that this instrument lifts. Modern Greek poetry gives an expressive image of this.

Elytis died, at 84, in 1996. Here’s his “Gift Silver Poem”

I know that all this is worthless  and that the language
I speak doesn't have an alphabet

Since the sun and the waves are a syllabic script
which can be deciphered only in the years of sorrow and exile

And the motherland  a fresco with successive overlays
frankish or slavic which, should you try to restore,
you are immediately sent to prison and
held responsible

To a crowd of foreign Powers  always through
the intervention of your own

As it happens for the disasters

But  let's imagine that in an old days' threshing-floor
which might be in an apartment-complex children
are playing and  whoever loses

Should, according to the rules, tell the others
and give them a truth

Then everyone ends up  holding in his
hand a small

Gift, silver poem.