Giorgos Seferis (1900-1971), born Georgios Seferiadis and writing under the pen name Seferis, was a Greek poet, essayist and career diplomat. He was the first Greek to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1963. He wrote in demotic Greek, the everyday language of the people, and his work, which joins Mediterranean tradition with modern European poetry, is regarded as central to twentieth-century literature.
He was born in Smyrna, then part of the Ottoman Empire and today Izmir in Turkey. His father, a lawyer and university professor, was a respected translator of Byron and championed demotic Greek over the formal official language. In 1914 the family settled in Athens, and from 1918 to 1925 Seferis studied law at the Sorbonne in Paris. In 1922, while he was there, the Turkish army took Smyrna and his family had to leave Anatolia. He did not return to the city until 1950, and that sense of exile runs through much of his poetry.
He joined the Greek foreign service and worked in London and Albania during the 1930s. His first book, Strophe, appeared in 1931, followed by The Cistern in 1932 and Mythistorema in 1935, a sequence of poems that revisits Homer's Odyssey to show how little human nature has changed over the centuries. During the Second World War he accompanied the Greek government in exile through Crete, Egypt, South Africa and Italy. Later he held ambassadorial posts in the Middle East and, from 1957 to 1962, in London, before retiring to Athens.
His poetry mixes sea, light and ruins with mythical references, and his restrained style owes much to T. S. Eliot, Cavafy and Ezra Pound. When he received the Nobel Prize in 1963, his speech stressed a broad humanism rather than narrow nationalism, recalling Oedipus's answer to the Sphinx. When the colonels seized power in 1967, he openly opposed the dictatorship, and in 1969 he read a statement on the BBC that made him popular with young Greeks. He died in Athens in 1971, and his funeral drew huge crowds who sang a poem of his set to music by Mikis Theodorakis.
His legacy endures in Athens, where his house in the Pangrati district still stands, and in later Greek literature, which counts him among its principal reference points. A line from Mythistorema was used at the opening ceremony of the 2004 Athens Olympics, a sign that his voice reached a general audience too.
Key works
- Strophe (1931), a first collection in which his mature voice begins to take shape.
- The Cistern (1932), a volume that confirms his search for a modern poetry in demotic Greek.
- Mythistorema (1935), a sequence of poems that rewrites the Odyssey to speak about the present and exile.
- The Thrush (1947), a collection of postwar poems on memory and loss.
Curiosities
A poem with another title
His collection Imerologio Katastromatos III was inspired by Cyprus and written largely there. Its original title quoted Euripides, and Seferis changed it in the 1959 edition.
A Nobel speech
In his Stockholm speech he recalled Oedipus's answer to the Sphinx, the word man, which destroyed the monster, and argued that many monsters remain to be destroyed.
A statement on the BBC
In March 1969 he declared on the BBC that the political situation in Greece was an anomaly that must end. The stance made him a popular hero among young people.
Original Filopedia text based on Wikipedia (es) and Wikipedia (en) and Wikidata.