What do you think?
Rate this book


514 pages, Paperback
First published July 1, 1950
Λέω πολλά περισσότερα στην κριτική μου στα ελληνικά στις βιβλιοαλχημείες.
George Seferis (1900-1971) was the first Greek winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1963.
Like many other Nobel Prize winners he was also a poet diplomat.
Other poet-diplomats, also winners were:
Ivo Andrić (Yugoslavia), Gabriela Mistral (Chile), Saint-John Perse (France), Miguel Ángel Asturias (Guatemala), Pablo Neruda (Chile), Czesław Miłosz (Poland) and Octavio Paz (Mexico).
So as a diplomat he experienced historical events at first hand, something we can see in his poetry.
This is an edition of his Complete Poetry.
There is also an English translation by Edmund Keeley called Complete Poems.
We studied his poetry at school but unlike many other Greek poets he has a special place in my heart because one of his collections was written and inspired by his visit(s) in Cyprus, my own country.
Almost all of his poems from this collection «Cyprus, where it was ordained for me» take place in Cyprus either in the Ancient, Medieval, or Modern times.
As a diplomat he was also against the Treaty of Guarantee as a result of an independent Cyprus.
A treaty that proved tricky, trappy and deceitful.
First it was the Greek coup d'état and then the Turkish invasion. Of course the third Guarantor (Britain) was watching like a mad scientist above a Petri dish labelled Cyprus Dispute.
Unfortunately nobody paid any heed to Seferis. . .
His first poetry collection «Strophe / Turn» (1931) proved to be a Turning point for Greek poetry, with the arrival of blank verse, modernism, and surrealism in Greek poetry, and the beginning of the Generation of the 30's, a generation of poets and novelists who made their debuts in the 1930's
The second in importance Greek poet of the Generation of the 30's, is Odysseus Elytis who published his first poetry collection «Orientations» in 1935, and won the second Nobel Prize in Literature for Greece in 1979, 8 years after Seferis' death.
2019 was the year I read Seferis' complete poems. I feel that 2020 will be the year I will read Elytis' complete poems.