George's Seferis Biography

Giorgos Seferis
 

Biography

Giorgos Seferis was born in Smyrna, Asia Minor, in 13 March 1900. His original surname was Georgios Seferiades.
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.
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 end 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).
Seferis was once acclaimed as "the poet of the future" on the publication of the Turning Point (1931), his first collection of poems. It was followed by The Cistern, Mithistorima (Mythology), Gymnopaidia, Logbook I, Book of Exercises, Logbook II (1945), the long poem Thrush (1947), Logbook III (1955), and Secret Poems (1966)
In 1931 he published, at this own expense, a collection of poetry with the ambiguous title Strophe (meaning both part of a poem and "turning-point"). The collection contained thirteen short poems, most of them in traditional metre and rhythm, and a more extensive poem, the cryptic "Erotikos Logos", in 96 rhymed 15-syllable verses, which vividly brings to mind Erotokritos, the celebrated Cretan 17th century poem.
What became clear from the first appearance of this poet, who had already spent some years in Paris and in London studying law and English, was his desire to shed new light on the existing poetic landscape, overshadowed as it was both by the patriarchal figure of Palamas and by the ghost of Karyotakis.

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.

Today, most of the poems in Strophe (Turning-Point) retain their vigour. Some in fact are quite familiar to the public at large as they have been put to music, as have many of Seferis´ later poems. One such poem is "Denial", which, thanks to the music of Mikis Theodorakis, has probably become the best known poem in all of Modern Greek poetry.

In 1963 Seferis became the first Greek author to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. In his Three Secret Poems (1966) the poet, "the desolate mind [that] has been the end", sums up his work and his life, accepting the fact that "everything that has passed has fittingly passed".

On the subject of his being awarded the Nobel Prize, Seferis said that through its choice the Swedish Academy "wished to express its solidarity with Greece´s ever-vital intellect" and to honour a "language spoken for centuries but having at present a limited number of speakers". This viewpoint reflects Seferis´ deep-seated belief in the current dynamic interrelationship between the ancient and modern Greek language and literature, between the diachronic power of Greek civilization and its modern expression, and finally between tradition and innovation. It was, moreover, only through tradition that the demand for renewal of Greek poetry in the early 1930s was able to be realized, and Seferis´ modernism and innovations were in large part characterized by the revitalization and imaginative use of the Greek tradition.

Giorgos Seferis, the poet from Asia Minor, estranged from his homeland at a very early age, perpetually feeling like a refugee, died on 20 September 1971 in Athens during the Colonels´ Dictatorship, a government that only months before he had denounced internationally as tyrannical and dangerous. His funeral turned into one of the largest mass demonstrations against the military junta.

Selections of his poetry have been widely translated, the fullest English version being that by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard .

Sources:

1. Nobelprize.org (Literature 1901 – 1967, Editor Horst Frenz, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam.
2. Greece – Poetry International web
3. G. Wagner’s web site

Edited by K. K. Barbatsi