REVIEW BOOK
INSIGHTS OF A NEW ODYSSEUS

Author: By Christina Robb Globe Staff

Date: Friday, December 18, 1981
Page: ?????
Section: LIVING

SELECTED POEMS, by Odysseus Elytis, translated by Edmund Keeley, Philip Sherard and various other hands. Viking (Penguin). 114 pp. $12.95 ($6.95 paper)

Odysseus Elytis published his first book of poems in 1940. The contrast between the soft surrealism of these early lyrics ("Dream after dream arrived/ For the jasmine's birthday . . .") and the bloody world war in which he was serving as an officer has taken him a lifetime to take in and express.

In 1979, the Greek poet won the Nobel Prize for Literature for his new poem, an epic dialogue for the age of disco and anxiety. Finally, in this poem, "Maria Nephele" (which means Mary Cloud), all the beauty, destruction, holiness, tackiness, abstraction and sensuality that Elytis has experienced find ways to live together.

His experience is not so much integrated as safely housed in this carefully structured arrangement of 45 lyrics. The poem has two voices, Maria and "the antiphonist" (Anagnostopoulos) or "other speaker" (Keeley-Sherrard).

Maria is a vision, almost a goddess. She grew, Elytis has written, from a meeting with a real young woman, who came to represent to younger generation to him. And we hear her become the goddess of the young in the first few verses that she is made to speak:

"He understood nothing," she begins by saying of her meeting with the antiphonist. "All the time he kept saying to me, Do you remember?' Remember what? Only dreams I remember, because I see them at night. But in the daylight I feel bad - how shall I say it? - unprepared." And she continues in a later poem, "My God where does one go when one has no destiny / where does one go when one has no star / empty the sky empty the body . . ."

The other speaker answers these agonies. He recalls a dream in which an old man in an old field tells him "I am. Do not fear what you are destined to suffer." And throughout the rest of the poem - in the first and third
sections, when he is replying to Maria, and in the second section, when he speaks and she replies - the antiphonist's role is essentially to assert the coherence of life when it is lived as an introduction to eternity.

In this pairing, innocence belongs to the old antiphonist, who speaks for tradition, and cynicism belongs to the young nymph.

"Man is attracted to God as the shark to blood," Maria sneers." She says she feels as if she's lived her whole life in 24 hours. "Each era with its Trojan War," she says. "Each era with its Stalin, too."

The other speaker encourages people "once and for all to gaze into the light" and live totally in a single moment of insight. "Each era with its Helen," the antiphonist says. "Each era with its Hungarian Uprising."

Keeley and Sherrard do not include most of the parts of this poem that I think are crucial for understanding it. They exerpt it, including some of the most lyrical and colloquial parts as the final selection in their culling from all of Elytis's work.

It's easier to see in their collection this fine poet's growth from a polite and sometimes insipid abstract idealism to the passion and tender affection for ideas that communicate real mystical knowledge in his later work. He compares his relationship with the sea to statutory rape ("Little Green Sea"). He calls sorrow by a courtly nickname.

I'd start with Anagnostopoulos' translation of the whole of "Maria Nephele" and then turn to the Viking selection to meet this new Odysseus, who in a modern lifetime has come home from war to hope, beautifully and with increasing honesty and love of life.

ROBB ;12/16,13:54 FEENE;12/18,12: B07847672