Books & Archaeology
Cart 0
Books & Archaeology
Cart 0
West of Sadness, preceded by The Elegies of Oxopetra.
ELYTIS Odysseas.

West of Sadness, preceded by The Elegies of Oxopetra.

Ones
€20,00 €0,00
N° d'inventaire 25354
Format 15 x 21
Détails 120 p., paperback.
Publication Nice, 2022.
Etat Nine
ISBN 9782877042406
This edition offers a bilingual version of the last two collections of Odysseas Elytis, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, The Oxopetra Elegies , published in 1991, and To the West of Sadness , published in 1995, a year before the Greek poet's death. Elytis deploys all the telluric force of the poem, in an incantatory language that submerges the world, reveals it in its solar dimension, in a profusion of elements customary to the poet: the waves of this "hungry sea", the summer light, the hard earth and all its interlacing, all the confusion of gulfs, archipelagos and horizons. If it is "past midnight in all my life," says Elytis, there remain nonetheless the gods, the dazzling sights, the loved ones rolled in the foam, a tragic nuance of existence, a legend in these elegies that transfigure death and suffering. The light covers everything in a play of reverberation between the images, and rebounds on the surface of things—scents of burnt grass, olive groves, church spires, ancient mountains—to reveal their power, clarity, smell, and vitality. Light that reveals darker strains too, both invoked and revoked in a savage struggle, abysses dissolved in the reflections of the sun on the sea, monsters transformed into birds. "The exterior is a mirror," and the language here, laden with history, lemons, and laurels, seeks outside the vastest and most dazzling of what is stirring within. Here we are, plunged into the web of destiny, plunged into ourselves in the world, for "it is in the body that nature dwells" and what other revelation is possible than that of our mortality, even solar, we who are passing through a land prey to an eternity quite different from ours? Never has twilight been so luminous as in these last texts, where Elytis seeks to capture an immortal youth, endowed with the duration of centuries, but also fragile and graceful - a childhood, in a movement that would like to make the sea itself dizzy, "everything passes less the weight of the soul", yes, and "Poetry alone is what remains."
This edition offers a bilingual version of the last two collections of Odysseas Elytis, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, The Oxopetra Elegies , published in 1991, and To the West of Sadness , published in 1995, a year before the Greek poet's death. Elytis deploys all the telluric force of the poem, in an incantatory language that submerges the world, reveals it in its solar dimension, in a profusion of elements customary to the poet: the waves of this "hungry sea", the summer light, the hard earth and all its interlacing, all the confusion of gulfs, archipelagos and horizons. If it is "past midnight in all my life," says Elytis, there remain nonetheless the gods, the dazzling sights, the loved ones rolled in the foam, a tragic nuance of existence, a legend in these elegies that transfigure death and suffering. The light covers everything in a play of reverberation between the images, and rebounds on the surface of things—scents of burnt grass, olive groves, church spires, ancient mountains—to reveal their power, clarity, smell, and vitality. Light that reveals darker strains too, both invoked and revoked in a savage struggle, abysses dissolved in the reflections of the sun on the sea, monsters transformed into birds. "The exterior is a mirror," and the language here, laden with history, lemons, and laurels, seeks outside the vastest and most dazzling of what is stirring within. Here we are, plunged into the web of destiny, plunged into ourselves in the world, for "it is in the body that nature dwells" and what other revelation is possible than that of our mortality, even solar, we who are passing through a land prey to an eternity quite different from ours? Never has twilight been so luminous as in these last texts, where Elytis seeks to capture an immortal youth, endowed with the duration of centuries, but also fragile and graceful - a childhood, in a movement that would like to make the sea itself dizzy, "everything passes less the weight of the soul", yes, and "Poetry alone is what remains."