Odysseas Elytis

His real name was Odysseas Alepoudelis, and he was born in 1911 in Heraklion, Crete, though his family hailed from Lesbos. In 1914, the Alepoudelis family moved to Athens, where young Odysseas completed his general education before beginning university studies at the Law School, which he abandoned in 1936 to serve his military duty at the Reserve Officers' School in Corfu. Elytis made his literary debut in 1935, publishing his poems in the magazine "Nea Grammata," which gathered most of the writers of the so-called "Generation of the '30s." His acquaintance with Andreas Embirikos in the same year strengthened his revolutionary surrealistic views. During the Italian invasion of Greece in 1940, he enlisted in the army and fought on the Albanian front. In occupied Athens, he wrote "To Axion Esti" and his first significant prose works. From 1948 to 1951, he traveled across Western Europe, based in Paris, where, amidst the existentialist climate, he solidified his own beliefs, as declared in "To Axion Esti." In 1969, he settled in Paris, where, between the slogan "Imagination in Power" proclaimed by the May Revolution and his discontent with the April dictatorship in Greece, he wrote the poems "The Tree of Light," "The Monogram," "The Sun the Conqueror," and "The R of Love." He returned to Athens in 1971. During this period, until his Nobel Prize award in 1979 by the Swedish Academy, he wrote prose texts about Theophilos ("The Painter Theophilos," 1973), Papadiamantis ("The Magic of Papadiamantis," 1974), Embirikos ("Report to Andreas Embirikos," 1979), and the "stage poem" "Maria Nefeli" (1978). Before and after the international award, he was honored with honorary doctorates from various universities, including Thessaloniki (1975), Paris (Sorbonne, 1980), and London (1981). Other works include "Heroic and Elegiac Song for the Lost Second Lieutenant of Albania" (1945), "Kindness in the Wolf's Den" (1947), "Albania" (1962), "Half-Brothers" (1974), "Signology" (1977), "Three Poems with a Flag of Convenience" (1982), "Diary of an Invisible April" (1984), a composition-translation of the surviving fragments of Sappho titled "Sappho, Reconstruction and Rendering" (1984), "Revelation of John" (1985), and "The Little Mariner" (1985). His poems have been set to music by M. Hadjidakis, M. Theodorakis, G. Markopoulos, among others. His works have been translated into French, English, Italian, German, Spanish, and other languages. He passed away in 1996 at the age of 85.